One Person’s Take on Dark Mode

Posted on 2020-05-03 by jcs

This doesn’t quite rise to the level of a Red Meat Friday item—at least I don’t think it does—but some folks do take the light-mode/dark-mode debate very seriously. Over at Gizmodo, Victoria Song reignites the debate with an article telling us to Stop Using Dark Mode.

Song’s article differs from the others that I’ve written about in that she doesn’t rely on scientific opinion for her conclusions, just her own observations. She loves dark mode and was overjoyed when iOS started supporting it systemwide. She switched all her apps to dark mode and felt that it was much easier on her eyes. But then she noticed that she was having difficulty reading her Slack channels. She found it hard to distinguish between channels and found herself having to reread some DMs.

The problems with Slack went away when she switched it back to light mode. Then she tried switching everything back to light mode and found that it was easier to read and retain her emails and other content. She also found that she didn’t miss the dark mode aesthetic as much as she thought she would.

Long before the light-mode/dark-mode squabble became a thing, I was firmly in the light mode camp. I could never understand why anyone would prefer a dismal dark theme. It wasn’t until later that I learned that I was holding a minority opinion. Of course, as I’ve said before, it doesn’t matter. It a matter of choice and there’s no correct answer. Except mine.

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Five Underappreciated Reasons to Appreciate Emacs

Posted on 2020-05-02 by jcs

John Cook is a Mathematician and an Emacs user. He recently posted some thoughts on Emacs that serve as a nice coda to my previous post on the usefulness of Emacs for scientists. If you read that post you know that many of the commenters were mathematicians so Cook’s thoughts fit right in—sort of.

I say “sort of” because his reasons for appreciating Emacs are not what you usually see. His post consists almost entirely of a short list of reasons he appreciates Emacs so I don’t want to step on his post by listing them all but the first is “It doesn’t track me” and the last is “It doesn’t stop working if my internet connection stops working.” They’re all like that. A good summary is that Emacs runs locally and is completely under your control.

That’s a recurring theme here at Irreal. I’m usually ranting about control of your data when I take up that theme but control of your tools and environment is also important and helps with controlling your data.

Cook’s list are not the usual reasons we think of for using Emacs but they are advantages and shouldn’t be underestimated. They’re another example of how Emacs works for you instead of the other way around.

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Comments on the Usefulness of Emacs for Scientists

Posted on 2020-05-01 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subredit, gmu_nu says he’s a graduate student in Physics and wonders about the usefulness of Emacs for scientists who aren’t in CS. The resulting comments are an interesting compendium of the ways that scientists make use of Emacs’ capabilities. Most of the replies are from mathematicians and physicists but Biology and Mechanical Engineering are also represented.

One theme that’s mentioned in many of the answers is that the usefulness of Emacs really took off for the respondent when they discovered Org mode. That’s something that almost every Emacs user who doesn’t restrict their Emacs use to coding has found to be true. Another often repeated theme is that Emacs is a single tool that can be used for many different jobs and that’s beneficial because you have only one tool to master rather than many.

If, like me, you enjoy reading about how others use Emacs, take a look at the answers to gmu_nu’s question. I’m sure you’ll find them interesting.

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Degoogling

Posted on 2020-04-30 by jcs

Aaron Ogle has a couple of interesting posts on how and why he is degoogling his life. The why is just what you’d expect. He’s tired of having Google vacuum up all the data on his online activities. Like many of us, he understands the bargain you’re making when you adopt those “free” apps and like many of us he’s decided that the price isn’t worth it.

He’s also concerned about committing his workflow to software that may not be there tomorrow. That holds especially—as Irreal is always saying—to his data. As Ogle points out, a company could go out of business and take your data with it. For that reason, he tries use self-hosted services as much as possible and diversify among vendors for those services he can’t self-host.

Like most people trying to reduce their reliance on Google, Ogle replaced Google search with DuckDuckGo. At first, it didn’t seem as good as Google but he soon realized that that was because Google knew so much about him that it could guess what he was looking for better that DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t collect any data about your browsing. He also noticed that DuckDuckGo almost always had the result he was looking for on the first page.

Also like most people fleeing from Google, Ogle chose FireFox to replace Chrome. Unless you’re an Apple user and like Safari, that’s probably the best choice.

His choice to replace Gmail was the most unusual. He considered ProtonMail but decided to run his own server by running Mail-in-a-Box on a \(\$5\) a month DigitalOcean droplet. That’s a really attractive option—at least for me—because you’re running your own mail server and don’t have to depend on a third party who might not have your best interests at heart or who might collect and sell your data.

He’s replaced many other services as well so take a look at his posts to see what he used. Like the rest of us, he found YouTube really hard to replace and still hasn’t chosen an alternative. It’s not clear whether Ogle wants to replace YouTube as a consumer, a content provider, or both. Regardless, it’s a hard service to replace.

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GNU Global

Posted on 2020-04-29 by jcs

As I’ve said before, I’m not a big fan of TAGS systems for navigating source files They never seemed to do what I needed and I worried about having to keep the TAGS files up to date. All that ceased to be an issue when I found dumb-jump. It works perfectly for me and finds references instantaneously. Of course, I’m not working with large repositories but those who do may find a TAGS system worthwhile.

Marco Avelar has a nice video that demonstrates the use of GNU Global. Naturally, Global works with Emacs and Avelar recommends the use of the ggtags package which, according to the Emacs Wiki, “provides an intuitive UI for navigating between multiple matches along with many other features.” He’s got links to the GNU Global home page and the ggtags GitHub repository so you can get additional information.

One of the great things about Global is that it’s editor agnostic. It works with several editors and you can even use it from the shell. That particularly important when several developers are working on the same source base. Each developer can use their preferred editor and still share the TAGS files. Those files can be huge so that’s a significant advantage.

Finally, the Emacs Wiki tell Emacs users how to automatically update the TAGS files when they make changes to the source files. It’s just a matter of setting an after-safe-hook as you’d expect. Global has an update mode that will do a quick TAGS files update without needing to go through the entire source base.

The video is only 6 minutes, 49 seconds so you can easily watch during a coffee break. If you’re working on a large project and looking for an easy way to navigate among the files, take a look at Avelar’s video. Perhaps Global will work for you.

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Microsoft Stirs the Pot on Spaces After a Period

Posted on 2020-04-28 by jcs

Recently, Microsoft reignited the long standing debate on the proper number of spaces after a period by having Word flag two spaces as an error and offering to fix it. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball is not impressed. He says that the one space versus two spaces argument is a debate only in the sense that “the world is round” or “man landed on the moon” is a debate. One side has all the experts in its camp and the other is wrong.

It’s a long standing holy war that I’ve written about more than once. The TL;DR is that the two spaces rule was taught to those learning to type on a typewriter but that with modern proportional fonts, typographers agree that one space is the only correct answer. It’s mostly a useless argument because almost all software that deals with producing printed output will replace the two spaces with one anyway. Given that fact, a case could be made that using two spaces in the input has the advantages that it may be easier to read and that it makes determining the end of sentences easier for scripts and other software.

Some commentators are suggesting that Microsoft has settled the question once and for all. That’s just silly. Since when has Microsoft been an authority on good style? Indeed, it wasn’t very long ago that Word’s printed output was regularly mocked for its poor typography. If you’re one of those folks who refuses to be pushed around by Microsoft, Lifehacker has a short article that tells you how to turn off Word’s flagging two spaces as an error.

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Using Elfeed

Posted on 2020-04-27 by jcs

Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of Elfeed for reading my RSS feeds from the comfort of Emacs. It has great searching and filtering capabilities so I can even find old, already read entries if I need to. It is by far the best RSS reader I’ve used.

Noonker is also an Elfeed enthusiast and has an interesting post on how he uses Elfeed. He’s made some interesting extensions that allows him to do things like download music or videos, choose the browser he uses to read an entry, or send himself an email reminding him to read an entry later.

It’s an interesting post for anyone who uses an RSS feed. If you believe that most worthwhile ideas can’t be expressed in 120 characters or don’t want Facebook prying into every aspect of your life, you should consider getting a least some of your news from RSS feeds. And if you’re an Emacser using RSS, I know of no better way to do so than with Elfeed. It’s a really great piece of software. Give it a try; it’s easy to set up and use and you can simply delete it in the unlikely event that you don’t like it. If you’d like to see it in action, Mike Zamansky has three excellent videos on it: 1, 2, 3.

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The Org Code Edit Buffer

Posted on 2020-04-26 by jcs

I use the Org-mode code editing buffer all the time either for adding some code to a post or for embedding a tweet or video. When I’m writing a blog post, I always have two windows displayed. On the left is my blog queue file with past/current/future blog post ideas and notes. On the right is the actual post I’m writing.

It used to be that when I toggled into the code editing buffer, the right buffer would replace the left and the code editing buffer would be on the right. When I toggled out of the code editing buffer, things would be restored. That always worked perfectly for me but apparently caused problems with other window configurations so recently Org was changed so that after exiting the code editing buffer, the post (right) buffer would be the only one displayed. I could sort of fix this with winner-mode but it left the point on the blog queue (left) window in the wrong place. I grumbled a bit but made do.

Then I saw this tweet:

I had no idea what org-src-window-setup was for so just out of curiosity I queried Emacs about its function. It turns out it controls what happens to the currently displayed windows when you invoke the Org code editing buffer. There are a several possible options for the variable but I tried current-window as suggested by KDr2 and suddenly my problem with the using the code edit buffer was resolved. What happens is that the editing buffer window replaces the Org buffer window I was working in and then restores it when I exit the editing buffer.

I do lose the ability to look at the Org buffer I was working on but, at least for me, that isn’t a problem and even if it was I could simply toggle out of the editing buffer to check what I needed to and then toggle back in.

This is a really great solution to the problem I was having with using the code editing buffer and I wish I’d learned about it sooner. Thanks to KDr2 for enlightening me.

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The Corona Virus and Digital Wallets

Posted on 2020-04-25 by jcs

In a nice coda to my post on The Corona Virus and the Cashless Society, C/net has an interesting article speculating that COVID-19 will advance the uptake of digital wallets from companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon. The article is a little breathless, suggesting, for example, that “Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook, Amazon and many others are in the midst of a pitched effort to take over our finances.”

I doubt that these companies have a grand conspiracy to seize control of our money and regulate our buying habits. It’s certainly true, though, that our payment data is valuable and that many companies are willing to pay for it. Apple, for its part, makes a point of emphasizing its commitment to their users’ privacy but most of us would be less sanguine with respect to Google, let alone Facebook.

Still, I think the thrust of the article is correct. Our newfound reluctance to come into direct contact with others or handle things others have touched recently will doubtlessly recede but some of that reluctance will remain and make touchless payment methods more popular. Stores, for their part, will be under increasing pressure to implement them. Even my local super market, after years of stubbornly refusing to enable them, has caved and is now accepting Apple Pay and other touchless pay methods.

The age of digital wallets is definitely coming but the c/net article does point to the need to be careful about privacy concerns. I don’t mind that Apple is trying to make their ecosystem so attractive that I’ll keep buying their kit but I would definitely mind it if they started harvesting and selling my personal data and habits. One thing for sure: the future will be interesting.

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Red Meat Friday: The Best Editor

Posted on 2020-04-24 by jcs

Today’s Red Meat Friday offering is from Steve Purcell. It’s his pinned tweet:

To some of us, this is completely obvious but others may find it a bit controversial.

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