Irreal

Arialdo Martini is back with a very informative post about using registers to store buffer locations and other data. He starts with positing the need to store buffer locations by name rather than storing them in a ring buffer as he discussed in his post on the mark ring and then gives two possible implementations.

Of course, that’s not necessary because Emacs already has functions to do this. I generally use registers to store other information such as window configurations and text I need to insert repeatedly into a document but storing buffer locations can be useful.

It turns out that the Emacs implementation is much more robust than you might imagine. For example, if you close a buffer that is stored in a register and is displaying a file, Emacs will update the register to a file-query that will reload the buffer if you jump to the register containing the reference.

But it gets better. Martini shows how you can make registers persist across Emacs sessions. All of this is builtin to Emacs and available simply by invoking the requisite functions.

The only thing that Martini doesn’t mention is that the register keys aren’t stored as a single character but as a symbol reference.That means that you can name a register as a symbol (in Elisp), which makes it easy to store, say, window configurations without risking having it overwritten interactively. I use this all the time to run certain functions in full screen and then restore the previous window configuration when I’m done.

The thing about registers, as Martini says, is that they’re implemented using normal Elisp data structures that are available to end users to use in any way they see fit. It’s another example of how configurable Emacs is.

This post is about another of my browsers tabs that I’ve had open seemingly forever. It’s a curated list of resources for writing with Emacs. As such, it’s a nice coda to my previous post on Emacs writing workflows.

It’s mostly a list of tips and how-tos rather than links to tools. Many of the links point to things that Irreal has covered before but there are plenty that are new to Irreal.

There are sublists for writing blogs, technical documents, screen plays, and books. There are also links for writing workflows and Emacs modes and configurations for writers. If you’re a writer, there’s a lot of good material on this site worth perusing and you should probably bookmark it for easy reference.

This site is a good demonstration of the fact that Emacs, as an editor, is useful for much more than just writing code. Lots of people, me included, use it for virtually everything we write. The same things that make it so good for editing text also make it ideal for writing prose or text of any kind. As I’ve said before, every time I write in something other than Emacs, I feel like I’m in Bizarro World where nothing works as it should.

I’ve written before about Peter Prevos and his Emacs Writing Studio but here’s a bit more. I’ve had this article about the Emacs writing workflow up in my browser for a long while and decided the time had come to either write about it or delete the tab.

Prevos views writing as a five step process:

Ingestion

Reading, listening to, or watching content as a source of ideas. Emacs, of course, has extensive support for this.

Ideation

This stage involves taking notes about the content from the ingestion step. Emacs has exceptionally strong support for this with the Org package as well as other packages, such as Denote and Org Roam, to help you organize your notes. Prevos uses five types of notes that you can read about in his article.

Production

This is the step where you write your post, article, book, or whatever. It is, I think, the most enjoyable part of the process. Again, Emacs has our backs for this step. Unless you have special requirements, you almost certainly want to write your text in Org mode. The Org markup makes it easy to apply almost any formatting you’re apt to need for a writing project and the export system lets you deliver the final product in almost any format.

Publication

This is where you produce the final product. It could be a simple post, a longer magazine or journal article, or a even book. If you wrote in Org mode, you can produce a product suitable for any or all of these with the push of a button.

Communication

In this step, you tell the world about your product. Emacs has support for email, IRC, social media and other ways of communicating from inside the editor.

If you produce written output, you’ll probably recognize most of these steps even if you don’t follow Prevos’ workflow exactly. I use something vaguely resembling the first four steps but don’t do anything about communicating my daily Irreal output.

Prevos notes that his workflow is his workflow and others most likely do something different. Still, there’s some good ideas in his article that any writer can adapt for their own use.

I just came across a really interesting post from Tory Anderson. Like me, Anderson lives in Emacs. In fact, since he’s a Linux user and runs exwm, he lives in Emacs even more than I do. Anderson notes that sometime Emacs crashes or freezes and has to be restarted. We’ve probably all experienced this. It doesn’t happen very often to me but it does happen. I’m pretty conservative about Emacs and don’t run unreleased versions. Lots of people do, though, and they probably have more crashes and hangs than I do.

In any event, the question is what do you do about recovering files that were open and unsaved when the editor died? Emacs, of course, has us covered. The recover-file command lets you recover (most of) what was in the buffer when Emacs died. It gets that information from the auto save file for that buffer, which is why it may not have everything.

The problem is, you have to remember which files to recover. Anderson says he did this by going through his error log. It turns out, though, that Emacs has us covered here too. You can run the command recover-session and it will present you with a list of every session’s saved data that it knows about. You pick the one you’re interested—usually the most recent one—and then run recover-session-finish (bound to Ctrl+c Ctrl+c) and Emacs will query you for each file it knows about in that session and ask you if you want to recover it.

Anderson describes a slightly different process involving only recover-session-final that didn’t work for me so be sure to read the documentation too.