Irreal

After 3 years, Magnar Sveen has smiled upon us with a new episode of Emacs Rocks! For newcomers, Emacs Rocks! episodes are short videos of 2 or 3 minutes that explore some aspect of working with Emacs. If you haven’t already, be sure to spend some time watching them all. There’s a lot to learn.

The newest episode is about Dired. First Sveen shows how to make Dired show less information. This can be handy when you’re working with limited screen space and want to fit everything necessary into the Dired window. Sveen uses the dired-details package for this but you can get almost the same thing by toggling between short and long listings with (.

Next Sveen demonstrates how to easily copy files between directories by setting dired-dwim-target to t and opening another Dired for the target directory in another window. That’s very nice and it reminded me about using o to open a directory in another window.

Finally, Sveen demonstrates what is surely one of the nicest features of Dired: the ability to make the Dired buffer writable. Once made writable, you can make changes to the file names and/or attributes and those changes are reflected in file system when the buffer is saved. I use this all the time and it makes dealing with file changes so easy it would be reason enough by itself to use Dired.

This episode is only 1 minute 35 seconds long so there is no reason not to watch it now. Just follow the link.

If you’re a Vim or Emacs user, you’ve seen a lot of jokes like this one from XKCD:

They usually end the chain with cat but sometimes, like the above, they go all the way to butterflies.

All that’s good fun if a bit whimsical, but you sometimes see serious assertions that “real programmers” use ed. If you’ve never used ed, as most of today’s programmers probably haven’t, it’s no doubt hard to understand how silly that argument is. If you’re working on a teletype, ed is just the thing. If not, it’s just masochism.

Or so I thought. Others disagree:

Ode to ed (#Unix standard text editor): https://t.co/RyXckzpwO4 #posix #ed #editorwars #vi #emacs

— Dominic v.d. Zypen (@dominiczypen) September 12, 2017

Dominic van der Zypen makes the case that ed is great for everyday use. I’m not convinced but you can read it and judge for yourself. I will say, though, that just because a lot of Unix development was done with ed doesn’t mean much because that development was also done on, you know, teletypes. It’s like saying that just because Sun Tzu fought with swords, today’s armies should use them too.

Regardless, it’s fun, if a bit surprising, to see someone champion ed for everyday use. If you’re running on some sort of Unix/Linux system, including macOS, you’ve almost certainly got ed installed so fire it up and see what you think.

Next step: #emacs as a service in the cloud

— ▶️️ (@davidradkowski) September 10, 2017

Yeah, this is probably a joke but if there is one thing I don’t want
from Emacs, this is it.

Jeez! A guy can’t be away from the Internet for a couple of days without everything changing. One of those changes is that a new version of Emacs, version 25.3, has been released. This is an emergency release to fix a security issue with Enriched Text mode.

You can read the details in the announcement but it’s probably a good idea to upgrade even if, like me, you aren’t using the X support. I did my usual compile-from-source dance without any problems.

I’m writing this Monday night after Irma came visiting. First off, thanks to the many people who wrote—either directly or through Disqus—to send their well wishes. I appreciate your concern and good thoughts.

At the last moment, Irma shifted east onto the mainland and went up the middle of the Florida peninsula rather than up the west coast. For those of you not as intimately familiar with hurricanes as we in Florida are, that’s important because hurricanes are basically heat pumps (technically a Carnot heat engine) and once over land they lose access to the warm coastal waters that are their source of energy. The result for Tampa was a routine Category 1 or 2 hurricane rather than the devastating monster storm that Irma was promising to be.

We did lose power Sunday night and it still hasn’t been restored. Once it is, I will publish this post. I could, I suppose, connect to WordPress with my iPad and write the post directly into the control panel but once you’ve experienced the joy of writing and publishing your blog posts from Emacs, you never want to do that.

Florida officialdom is actually pretty good at dealing with these things so I expect you’ll be seeing this post soon.