Irreal

In yet another win for moving your digital life into Emacs, wasamasa has released nov.el, a package for reading EPUBs in Emacs. Until now, I have always opted to get digital content as PDFs rather than EPUBs or MOBIs because of the great tools in Emacs for reading and annotating PDFs.

Now, thanks to wasamasa, we have the ability to read EPUBs in Emacs too. This would be even better, of course, if publishers would give up DRM. Until that happy day, we’ll have to continue using proprietary apps for reading most books but wasamasa’s package is a great start.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, ambrevar has an interesting post in which he makes the case for Eshell. One of the frequent complaints about Eshell is that it doesn’t work like a “normal” Unix shell. Ambrevar acknowledges that but says it’s a good thing. As he points out, even today we have terminal emulators that duplicate the behavior of ancient physical terminals and the standard shells are designed to work with them.

His post is interesting because he approaches the subject as one who has moved as much as possible into Emacs. He even uses Emacs as his window manager. What struck me was that I kept thinking, “Sure, that’s how I do it.” as he explained how he does tasks that are difficult in a Unix shell very easily in Eshell. I never really thought much about it because those ways of working are natural—being the standard Emacs way of doing things—in Eshell.

As ambrevar admits, Eshell is not perfect but it is improving as more folks adopt it as their standard shell and bug and feature requests filter back to the maintainers. I try to use Eshell exclusively although sometimes years of habit having me bringing up bash in the same old terminal emulator. Eshell is just another way of not having to leave Emacs and the comfort of working in the familiar Emacs way.

Yesterday, I mentioned that the 1913 + 1828 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary that used to be hosted by the University of Chicago appears to be permanently offline. Back in January, I wrote that I had emailed the site asking whether they were planning on putting the dictionary up again. Sadly, I never heard back and the dictionary is still off-line so, as I said yesterday, we have to assume it’s gone for good.

Happily, as I also mentioned, Marcin Borkowski has a nice post on how to get a copy of the dictionary and make it accessible from Emacs. That was always the end goal for me anyway so I spent about 5 minutes following Borkowski’s steps and installed a local copy. I had hesitated before because I didn’t have all the build tools to compile sdcv but since I stopped being stubborn and embraced homebrew, that was no longer a problem.

If you liked McPhee’s method for improving his prose and you want your very own copy of the dictionary that you can access right from Emacs, it’s really easy to get it. Just follow the steps in Borkowski’s post. Even if you’re not an Emacs user, sdcv and the dictionary source will get you a local copy that you can query from the command line. Perhaps there’s a plugin for whatever editor you’re using that can integrate it for you.