Irreal

A while ago, Bob Weiner asked me to take a look at Hyperbole and maybe write a post about it. It’s been in my queue to do that ever since but Hyperbole is a large and complex system and every time I tried, figuring it out seemed too daunting so I kept putting it off. Then Weiner gave a talk about Hyperbole to the NYC Emacs Meetup and I thought the video would be a good introduction and help me figure things out.

The video did help but the system is much like Org-mode in that it does so many things it’s hard to write a short explanation. Indeed, the video is over and hour and ten minutes and still didn’t cover everything. The basic idea—as I understand it—is to provide a mode that manages the display, retrieval, and linking of text across all of Emacs.

The primary active object in Hyperbole is the button. These can link to a piece of text in the same or another file, a Web site, an Info file or many other similarly things. They can also initiate actions. You can, in fact, tie a button to a piece of Elisp and have it perform any arbitrary action. The capabilities are very rich and can be invoked from anywhere within Emacs.

As far as Irreal is concerned, any future posts about Hyperbole will be like those about Org: they will focus on one particular aspect of the system and how it solves some problem or another. Before that happens, though, I’m going to have to read the manual and actually use the system. There’s a lot to learn.

It’s really handy to have a thesaurus handy when you’re writing, and of course if you’re writing in Emacs, you want to have that thesaurus available and easily accessible from Emacs. I’ve been using power thesaurus and its Emacs interface, powerthesaurus.el. It’s nice and works well but merely provides a list of synonyms from which you can choose a replacement for the word you’re looking up.

Recently, I saw a pointer to Ag Ibragimov’s mw-thesaurus. It’s an interface to the Merriam-Webster Thesaurus and is also quite nice. It’s strong point is that rather than a just list of synonyms, it provides a copy of the thesaurus page in Org format. That provides a lot of context and helps you zero in on the best substitute. On the downside, there’s no way to automatically substitute your choice in your text. That might seem like an odd omission but given the way it displays its results, it’s not clear how such a substitution would work.

In any event, I have them both installed at the moment. It’s not really much of an inconvenience to replace the word with its synonym manually. It’s certainly no harder than navigating to the proper synonym on the thesaurus page. On the other hand, it is convenient to be able to simply choose the word you want from a list with something like Ivy and have it automatically replace the word you’re looking up.

I’ll use them both until I decide which I like better. Or perhaps I’ll keep both installed and use the one that makes the most sense in a given situation.

Alain M. Lafon has an interesting post on spellchecking in Emacs. Lafon is Swiss and therefore has to deal with four official languages as well as German and English in his day-to-day life. The Swiss with their usual efficiency handle that just fine but their polyglot ways means that a single document may contain text in two or more languages. The question is: what’s a good way of handling spellchecking in Emacs?

Well, it is Emacs so of course you can do that but it’s a bit trickier than you might expect. Lafon’s post gives step-by-step instructions for setting up spelling checking using multiple dictionaries.

The only potential wrinkle is that you have to use Hunspell if you want to have dictionaries for more than one language. If you’re on macOS (or Linux), you can install hunspell with Homebrew so it’s not much of a problem. Lafon gives the magic spell for apt users. If you use Homebrew, you’ll have to download the dictionaries separately but they’re available from the OpenOffice Extensions page.

Most of you—at least if we’re not Swiss—probably won’t have to worry spellchecking in multiple languages in the same buffer, but if you do, Lafon’s post tells you how to handle it.

UPDATE [2020-08-24 Mon 17:10]: Added link to Lafon’s post.

Just a quickie today. Those of you who read yesterday’s post but are running on Linux might find this Reddit post by catsol_v2 on compiling gccemacs on Linux useful. It’s not quite as detailed as Ramírez’s post but has enough information to get gccemacs compiled and running.

Again, this is for people who don’t mind living on the edge or who want to build a separate instance of Emacs to play around with native compilation. The rest of us are going to have to wait for Emacs 28 (at least).

If you’re like me, you’re probably excited about native compilation coming to Emacs. In case you don’t know, the project, gccemacs (started and headed by Andrea Corallo), brings native compilation to Elisp. That means that not just will Elisp code—and hence Emacs—will run faster but also that some of the C code in Emacs can be replaced with Lisp.

Corallo gave a presentation to the European Lisp Symposium, which I’ve written about before, that discusses how things work and gives the results of some benchmarks. The work is ongoing but the system is already usable. As far as I can tell, the plan is to include it in Emacs 28 but if you can’t wait to try it out, the code is in the Emacs git repository.

If you’re on macOS, Álvaro Ramírez has step-by-step instructions for compiling Emacs with the native compilation enabled. You’ll need to load gcc with jit support if you don’t already have it. After that, it’s pretty simple. Ramírez provides a configure script to set everything the way you’ll need it so all you have to do is run the script and call make to build Emacs. See Ramírez’s post for the details.

This project is a great thing for Emacs and even for making Elisp a more general programming language. I’m already inclined to use Elisp when I can for small utilities and one-offs so improving Elisp is a win for me.