Irreal

As I’ve written many times before, the Irreal bunker strives to be Google free. We mainly succeed in that endeavor with the single exception of YouTube. It’s far and away the best in class service of its type and more importantly it has no viable alternatives.

It turns out, though, that you can lessen the pain a bit. Michał Sapka has a nice blog post reporting on Yeetube, an Emacs wrapper around YouTube that lets you play YouTube videos (via MPV). It does away with the ads, has less tracking, and allows you to download and save videos for later viewing.

In addition to doing away with the worst aspects of YouTube, it lets you deal with the videos from within Emacs. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet and I don’t know what the video quality is like versus native YouTube but it seems like a worthwhile project. Take a look at Sapka’s post for the details.

Last Friday, I offered up a Red Meat Friday post that discussed the silly but depressingly widely held idea that Emacs is dying. As I said in that post, this is not an idea that’s held by anyone who actually uses Emacs but appears to be an article of faith held by those unwilling to spend the effort to learn Emacs at even a journeyman level.

Bozhidar Batsov also discussed this issue recently and dismissed it as the usual nonsense that should be ignored. He even says he didn’t bother reading the reddit post that occasioned Batsov’s and my subsequent posts. He does, however, provide a bit of evidence for one of my suppositions.

I speculated that Emacs usage as a percentage of the total possible user base has declined. Take a look at the chart he provides for the evidence. The TL;DR is that while VS Code holds 73.71% of that user base, Emacs is down at 4.69%. Notice that that figure says nothing about the total number of Emacs users. It may have increased, as Batsov suggests, or it may have declined. There’s probably no way of knowing.

One thing for sure, the Emacs editor is going strong, enjoying healthy development, and is probably growing, at least in total user terms. I’d be willing to bet that Emacs will still be going strong long after VS Code has faded into same obscurity being enjoyed by all the other would-be Emacs killers.

As of this writing, no one has bothered commenting on Irreal. That’s probably because Irreal readers are smarter than the average bear and consider everything I said obvious and not in need of further discussion. It was picked up by the Emacs subreddit, however, and there are plenty of comments there if you really want to know what others are saying.

I just came across this post from Bozhidar Batsov about describe-symbol. It’s a help command, bound to Ctrl+h o, that combines the results of describe-function and describe-variable. The putative advantage of this (newish) command is that a single key shortcut serves to get information on both functions and variables.

My first thought, when reading Batsov’s post was that the command was a real win but then I started wondering whether muscle memory would keep me using the bindings, Ctrl+h f and Ctrl+h v for describe-function and describe-variable instead. It turns out that we have an answer to that question.

As I was preparing this post, I discovered that I’d written about the describe-symbol command back in 2022. Back then, I also thought it was a good replacement but I don’t believe I’ve ever used it since. Indeed, I’d forgotten all about it. Still, if you’re new to Emacs and haven’t developed muscle memory for the old commands, it could be a win. If you’re a new user or not as set in your ways as I am, this single command is only one thing to remember instead of two.

Bozhidar Batsov over at Emacs Redux has a short post on the new(ish) Emacs command line option, init-dir. It does just what it sounds like: it allows you to specify where to find the init.el file and other configuration information. I remember seeing it in the release notes for Emacs 29 but didn’t think a whole lot about it.

Batsov, of course, zeroes in on an important use case: enabling you to try (or use) different configurations while keeping your main init.el intact. He uses the example of having one init file for the Prelude distribution and another for Spacemacs.

Using the option for trying different distributions makes a lot of sense because the init files and required packages differ substantially. Even those of us who happily use vanilla Emacs will find it useful for trying out experimental configurations or for refactoring our configurations.

As Bastov remarks, you can do the same thing with symlinks and, indeed, that’s just what he and I used to do but using init-dir makes things simpler and easier and is another way of sanding down your workflow. Where before I may have hesitated to go through all the steps to set up an alternative configuration, now it’s simply a matter of copying my init.el, making the necessary edits, plopping it in some directory, and pointing Emacs at it with init-dir.

It’s nice to see Batsov blogging more again. I almost always learn something new when he posts.

It seems like only yesterday that Magnar Sveen introduced his Dash library for working with lists. It provided macros and functions for dealing with lists that weren’t covered by the standard Elisp library. Dash gained immediate traction and became a mainstay for Elisp developers. It’s one of those things that you use without even realizing it. So many packages install it that it’s present in almost every user’s Emacs so it’s easy to use its functions without realizing they’re from Dash.

Dash was so successful that its functions or their clones have made their way into the standard Elisp libraries. Now, Bozhidar Batsov writes that Dash has been essentially replaced by seq.el and subr-x.el and is no longer necessary.

No longer necessary except for the huge number of applications that use it. Batsov recently took over maintaining Flycheck and decided to eliminate the Dash dependencies. That turned out to be easy—almost trivial—to do. It was pretty much a one-for-one replacement of the function name.

It’s a tribute to Sveen’s vision and work that his library was so successful that the Emacs maintainers felt obligated to import its functionality into Emacs core. As a practical matter, Dash will live on if only because many of the applications that use it won’t have a Batsov to refactor them. It’s a nice library and I wouldn’t feel bad about using one of its functions today.