Irreal

The other day, I wrote about John Kitchin’s experiment with bringing f-strings to Elisp. In the comments, Noonian Atall pointed to Alphapapa’s format$ macro that does the same sort of thing. I just saw a reddit post from alphapappa announcing that he had enhanced format$ to include interpolated sequences just like f-strings.

The format$ macro is part of alphapappa’s elexandria library that brings some of the features of Common Lisp’s Alexandria library to Elisp. If you’re interested in f-strings, you should take a look.

Most everyone knows that you should read the NEWS file when you install a new version of Emacs. There is always a lot of new functionality and other changes that you almost certainly don’t know about. If you’re like me, though, most of it is dry and some of it you might not understand so I often don’t read it.

Fortunately, for Emacs at least, there’s a good alternative. You can read Mickey Petersen’s What’s New in Emacs 26.1. It’s really just an annotated copy of the NEWS file but it seems much easier to read and his comments provide context when it discusses unfamiliar areas.

Everyone knows about the introduction of threading by now but what other changes can you name? There’s a lot of them and you’ll probably find many of them very useful. You really should read through Mickey’s post; it’s a lot easier than trying to discover this stuff on your own.

One of the changes that is not backward compatible is apt to bite many of us. When specifying a path to a remote machine when invoking TRAMP, you now have to specify the method (/ssh:, etc.). It was optional before. Mickey gives you the workaround if you really prefer the old behavior so for that reason alone, it’s worth reading his post.

As I’ve said before, engineers may switch between Emacs and Vim but they seldom switch from Emacs or Vim to another editor. Sure, you see folks try out the newest shiny thing—VS Code is the latest example—but somehow they always come home like the prodigal son repenting their errors. I don’t know of an easy way to move from Emacs to Vim but Evil mode, Spacemacs, and Doom make moving in the other direction pretty easy.

Mark Dawson from the Swansea Academy of Advanced Computing has a nice video that documents his transition from Vim to Emacs via Spacemacs. Like me, he was a long time Vim user and had a large investment in the muscle memory and techniques of a Vim user. By using Spacemacs, his investment in Vim is largely preserved while gaining the advantages of Emacs at the same time.

Dawson’s account is a balanced one. He notes the pros and cons of both Vim and Emacs and shows how the Vim user can almost transparently move to Emacs. Dawson cites things like extensibility to justify his switch but I think it mainly depends on what you want. If you want an editor that prioritizes text editing in the fastest, most efficient way possible and leaves unrelated tasks to other applications, then Vim is probably your best bet. If you want an almost infinitely malleable environment that integrates editing with other functions—a light-weight Lisp Machine as I like to think of it—then Emacs is for you.

If you’re currently a Vim user and think you’d like the environment that Emacs offers but are loath to abandon your investment in Vim, Dawson’s video shows you a way forward. Take a look at his video. It’s an informal presentation to his colleagues and may help you decide whether or not you want to switch.

If you do your writing with Emacs rather than a “word processor,” you may have found yourself wanting an easy-to-use thesaurus that is integrated with Emacs. Even if you subscribe to John McPhee’s Draft #4 advice and mostly use a dictionary for finding just the right word, sometimes a thesaurus can be really handy.

Today, I saw an announcement by Valeriy Savchenko about his new Emacs package that provides an interface to the Power Thesaurus Website. The Power Thesaurus site is a crowd sourced thesaurus that appears to be pretty comprehensive. If you give it a word, it returns a list of synonyms. Savchenko’s package provides an easy way to query the site from within Emacs. If there is an active region, the package will use that word. If there is no region, it asks you for the word. In either case, it inserts the word at point, replacing the region if there is one. Savchenko has an animated gif that demonstrates its use.

Some of the comments to Savchenko’s announcement complained that the package depends on a third party site but that also has some advantages such as not requiring storage on your system and, being crowd sourced, always undergoing improvement. In any event, the situation is the same as with abo-abo’s define-word, which depends on Wordnik and which I use many times a day without any problems.

I’ve installed it and bound it to Hyper+p. Obviously, I don’t have much experience with it yet but it seems work as advertised.