Irreal

Oleh Krehel (abo-abo) is the author of many outstanding packages including the essential Ivy/Swiper/Counsel suite that revolutionizes searching. A few years ago, I wrote that when I get tired of blogging I was going to gin up some Elisp to make a post everyday that says, “Abo-abo has a great post today. Go read it.” I meant that as a tribute to his prodigious productivity but it was really a whimsical remark.

Maybe it wasn’t all that whimsical. Today, Boxingshmoxing notes that Abo-abo hasn’t gone a day without committing to GitHub in over 3 years. That’s astounding and an indicator of how much abo-abo has contributed to the Emacs community. It turns out that abo-abo has a Patreon Page and is trying to get sufficient backing to allow him to dedicate one day a week to his open source projects. This is very worthwhile and I encourage anyone who can—or can strong-arm their employer—to support his efforts. He’s more than earned it.

Mike Zamansky has the latest video in his Using Emacs series up. This time it’s about using Emacs with Chrome via Atomic Chrome. Guys like Zamansky and me like to stay in Emacs as much as possible and—at least in my case—resent having to edit text without it.

If you’re a Chrome user, Atomic Chrome is a nice solution. When you’re in a browser text area, you can hot-key (or push a button) to bring up an Emacs buffer to write and edit your text. That’s very nice because then you have access to all your Emacs shortcuts and completions.

Sadly, there’s nothing similar for Safari, my browser of choice. I think this has to do with the Safari architecture but perhaps it’s just that no one has bothered writing one. Life on macOS is made a little easier by being able to use Emacs keybindings across the entire system but it’s not the same because you’re not really in Emacs and don’t have access to all those shortcuts and optimizations you have in Emacs.

If you use Chrome and Emacs, you should definitely take a look at Zamansky’s video. It’s just over 6 and a half minutes so it should be easy to find the time.

Responding to yesterday’s post, Sacha asks if I could post the code for jcs-insert-url for others to use. I thought I’d already done that but apparently not. That’s probably because except for the part identical to jcs-get-link, which I did write about, it’s pretty trivial. In any event, here it is:

(defun jcs-insert-url ()
  "Insert URL of current browser page into Emacs buffer."
  (interactive)
  (insert (jcs-retrieve-url)))

The jcs-retrieve-url function does all the work, of course, and is just the code that I abstracted out of jcs-get-link to actually retrieve the URL from Safari:

(defun jcs-retrieve-url ()
  "Retrieve the URL of the current Safari page as a string."
  (org-trim (shell-command-to-string
    "osascript -e 'tell application \"Safari\" to return URL of document 1'")))

One obvious problem with all this is that it works only for macOS. Not to despair, though, because in the comments to the original post, Brad Collins suggests a solution that uses grab-x-link to do the same thing for FireFox and Chrome on other systems. Be sure to read Brad’s comment because there is—or at least was—an issue with the MELPA version.

Finally, Sacha took the part about looking for ways to make your workflow easier seriously and came up with a bit of Elisp to insert a function definition at the point, regardless of where it’s defined. That’s very handy and I immediately stole her code and used it to insert the two functions above. My old method was to switch to init.el, find the function, copy it to the kill ring, switch back to the original buffer, add the source block fences, and insert the code between them. Sacha’s code did all of that for me and I didn’t even have to leave my current buffer. That’s splendid. If you find yourself having to add function definitions to your text, be sure to read Sacha’s post. It will save you a lot of time.

A family member and I were having an argument a discussion about the relative ease of using a MacBook Pro with macOS and a Lenovo laptop with Linux. A lot of you guys are thinking, “Yeah, I’m with the Linux guy!” but before you choose sides you should know that he has been seduced by the dark side and is a Vim user¹.

Anyway, the discussion evolved into how you would put a link to a Web page open in your browser into an email. My family member said he would double click on the URL bar of the browser, switch to his email, and middle click to insert the link. I replied that I don’t even have a middle button but that I don’t need one because I’m an Emacs user and had written a bit of Elisp to automatically insert the URL of the browser’s currently active page. Thus I merely started writing my email and when I got to the place that needed the link, I just called my Elisp.

That bit of Elisp is a function called jcs-insert-url but I said that the most I ever had to type was Meta+x j i u and often I only needed part of it depending on how autocompletion was feeling at the time. I added that I could, of course, add a key binding like Hyper+u to call the function and make the whole process even easier. Then I started wondering why I hadn’t done that. I keep on typing Meta+x j i u whenever I want to insert a URL. That’s crazy. So I added the binding and now my life is even easier.

The point of this post—finally—is a reminder to myself and to you to occasionally think about your workflow and ask if there’s some adjustment that would make things easier. It’s amazing how often the answer is yes.

Yiming Chen has an interesting post that compares Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, and vanilla (i.e out-of-the-box GNU-) Emacs. Chen approaches the subject from the point of view of a Vim immigrant who is heavily invested in the Vim keystrokes and mindset.

Until very recently, I hadn’t even heard of Doom Emacs but it looks to be an excellent configuration for someone who wants to live in the Vim environment as much as possible while still using Emacs. The other choices offer similar functionality to the Vim user. You might wonder why anyone would bother. If you’re most comfortable in the Vim environment, then use Vim. The most common reason you see is to get access to Org mode and that’s certainly a good enough one. Doubtless there are others.

Those who want the Vim experience in Emacs have at least the three choices that Chen explores. If you, too, want a Vim experience from Emacs, take a look at Chen’s post. He gives the pros and cons of each choice as he sees it. You’ll have to follow the link to see which one he chose but it’s worth the read in any event. Even if you aren’t looking to bring Vim with you.