Irreal

It’s been a few days since I installed and starting using Emacs 27.1RC1 for all my day-to-day chores. If you follow the Emacs development list, all the items concerning 27.1 problems might lead you to think that it still wasn’t very stable but I haven’t found that to be the case at all.

By now, I’ve performed just about every one of the workflow operations that I do with Emacs and it’s performed flawlessly. The only difference I’ve seen is that Org-mode on large files is much speedier that it was before. It’s the same Org-mode so that probably means Emacs itself is faster.

I even tried EWW although I don’t usually use it much. It seemed about the same as before but I don’t have enough experience with it to say for sure. I’d really like to move as much browsing as possible into Emacs so perhaps I’ll try to use it more and get better familiar with it.

The TL;DR is that 27.1RC1 seems very stable to me, a very heavy user, and I have no hesitation in recommending that others upgrade to it. Doubtless the final version will be released soon so if you’re really wary just wait but as far as I can see there’s no reason not to start using it and help with the final testing. All you have to do if you find a problem is file a bug report, which, of course, you can do right from Emacs.

Emacs 27 is entering the home stretch. Nicolas Petton has pushed a commit bumping the version number from 27.0.91 to 27.1 and prepared tar and zip files for RC1.

If you can, download it and try it out. The testing will help sand off any remaining burrs on the release candidate and get Emacs 27.1 officially released as soon as possible.

As you all know, Emacs is the center of my computer workflow and I’m inclined to be very conservative about making changes. Nonetheless, I downloaded RC1, compiled, and installed it. I kept the 26.3 package in case of problems but I’m committed to using Emacs 27 for my daily work. If I can do it, you can too. It’s still early but so far thing are working wonderfully. Emacs seems snappier and I haven’t seen any problems.

Yesterday, I saw a tweet in which someone referred to Marcin Borkowski’s 2017 post on using the Webster 1923 dictionary in Emacs. Why would you want to do that? The answer to that is given in James Somers’ 2014 post, You’re Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary that I wrote about in 2015.

Since I wrote about it, I’ve been using the Webster dictionary to help me find just the right word. At first, I just used the Web site as Borkowski did but when that disappeared, I followed Borkowski’s simple instructions and installed it locally. Using sdcv-mode, it’s available directly from Emacs. If you write at all and would like to do a better job of it, you should consider installing it too. I can’t overemphasize what a great resource it is.

If this is the first time you’ve come across the Webster 1923 dictionary, do yourself a favor and read Somer’s post. It’s beautifully written and makes a strong case for using the dictionary. Integrating it into Emacs is easy and even if you’re not an Emacs user, you can still use it from the command line. If you’re a Mac user, you can install sdcv from Homebrew.

Manuel Uberti enjoys writing his journal entries with pen and paper. Lots of people do although I’m not one of them. The fact, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, that I have terrible handwriting no doubt has something to do with that. Still, I do understand the urge.

Uberti likes the pen and paper experience so much that he’s tried to recreate it for writing his blog entries. He’s got a post that describes his Emacs configuration to recapitulate the pen and paper experience. This means he uses the aggressively light theme Modus Operandi with a variable pitch font. As you’d expect, he uses Olivetti to further enhance the illusion of writing on a sheet of paper.

Finally, he uses freeze-it so that he can work only on the current paragraph. The idea is to inhibit the natural urge to edit what you’ve written before. I’m not sure what this has to do with recapitulating a bullet journal but I do know that it would drive me crazy. Perhaps that’s an indication I should be using it.

If this sort of thing appeals to you, you can get all the details from Uberti’s post. I’m perfectly happy to write in a normal Org-mode buffer but lots of folks like the feeling of working on a blank page when they write. As usual, Emacs has got you covered.

Yesterday, I wrote about fixing a small annoyance on my MacBook. Here’s a quickie from Bozhidar Batsov that fixes another small annoyance. This time the annoyance is with Emacs, although as Batsov explains, it’s particularly annoying on macOS.

The problem is that Emacs wants you to confirm that it’s okay to kill any running processes when you exit Emacs. Until Emacs 26 there was no way to prevent that but now, as Batsov explains, it’s simple. You merely set confirm-kill-processes to nil and Emacs will exit without worrying about any processes that are still running.

I can sort of see why asking about the processes before exiting is a good idea—you don’t want to interrupt some important long running process—but I can’t ever remember answering anything but y to the prompt so, at least for me, turning off the prompt makes sense. If you feel the same—particularly if you’re running macOS—you might want to consider turning it off too.