Irreal

I’ve been happily Windows free for more than 20 years but it’s a sad fact that some of our brethren are forced, for reasons beyond their control, to work in the Windows environment. That’s hard on any Unix-head but especially so for Emacs users. It’s a sad fact that Emacs just doesn’t run very well on Windows and setting up the environment is harder than it should be.

Adrien Brochard recently gave a talk to the New York Emacs Meetup on his solution to this problem. He’s a Linux guy whose current job requires he work on a Windows machine. His answer is to Virtualize Emacs. What that means is that he runs Emacs on Arch Linux that in turn runs in a VirtualBox instance. As Brochard points out, this works even on locked down machines to which the developer doesn’t have administrative rights.

One of the nice things about this solution is how easy it is. Brochard has some scripts he uses to automate the installation of Linux and Emacs. During the presentation, he builds the entire environment, including VirtualBox, from scratch. It takes about 25 minutes but most of it is automated so that once he starts it, he can go on with his presentation. He says that even if you get something wrong you can simply blow away the VirtualBox instance and start over.

There is, of course, some overhead and Brochard does a good job on discussing that aspect too. All things considered, though, he believes that it’s the best solution for running Emacs on Windows.

The video is about 33 minutes so plan accordingly. It’s an excellent presentation and interesting even if you aren’t faced with running Emacs on Windows.

As a final note, I’ve discovered that I’m more partisan about editors than I thought. Back in 2016 I was outraged when someone did something similar to run Notepad++ under Ubuntu. In retrospect, it seems that it was the idea of using Notepad++ that outraged me not the use of a virtual environment to run it in.

If you’re like me, you automatically think of the Org mode table editor (or Orgtbl minor mode) when you think of tables in Emacs. It’s hard to beat that functionality and Orgtbl mode makes it available everywhere in Emacs, even if you’re not in an Org buffer. Sometimes, though, you’d like to have special formatting for some or all of the table. That’s where delim-col comes in.

Delim-col is built-in Emacs functionality that allows you to do things like adjust what string separates the columns, add a beginning or ending string to each item, add an ending string for each row, and adjust the padding in the table. It can be really handy for copying and pasting and then reformatting tables from an external source.

I didn’t know about delim-col until I read about it over at Emacs Notes, where you’ll find a good explanation of the facility and what it can do. The Emacs Notes post also offers at bit of Elisp to make choosing the strings and delimiters a bit easier. By default you have to set them using a series of setq statements if you want something different from the built-in choices. The Emacs Notes codes arranges for you to be prompted for the values.

You probably won’t need the delim-col functionality very often but when you do it’s much easier than using something like a keyboard macro. Take a look at the post and see if you don’t agree.

I’ve long since moved all my writing—at least all my new writing—to Org mode. It does everything I need and let’s me stay in Emacs. Different folks favor different strokes, of course, so it’s always interesting to see what they are and especially how they use Emacs to scratch their itches.

Azer Koçulu recently moved to Linux from macOS and wanted to bring his writing protocol with him. He was using iA Writer on his Mac but it wasn’t available on Linux. Koçulu decided to see if he could recreate the iA Writer experience in Emacs. He was happy with the result and documented what he did in a blog post. It turns out that it’s pretty easy to set up an iA Writer environment in Emacs. I’m not an iA Writer user so I can’t say how well it recreates the experience but Koçulu is happy with it.

There’s probably a larger lesson here. If you really like some writing tool but need to move to an environment that doesn’t support it or want to move to Emacs for your writing for some other reason, Emacs probably has you covered. Koçulu shows you how to do it for iA Writer and here’s a video showing how to do it for Scrivener. Doubtless solutions exist for other tools too.

I saw this tweet:

I am experimenting with using #Emacs as my main programming environment. The last time I used emacs extensively was in college. Yes it is a bit old school but if you have to edit many files scattered in many directories, emacs is unbeatable.

— Hsin-Hao Yu (@HsinHaoYu) October 6, 2018

and my first reaction was that it made me feel old. But then I started wondering: in what sense, exactly, is Emacs “old school?”

Certainly not in the sense that it’s a relic. Emacs development is on-going and vigorous. And not in the sense that it’s underpowered and lacking features, either. Emacs is famously the “kitchen sink” editor, containing every possible feature. At one point, a kitchen sink was even used—at least informally—as its logo.

Perhaps it’s old school in the sense that it’s mostly used by gray beards. But no, younger users are constantly adopting Emacs as you can see by their questions and comments on the various forums. Maybe it’s that Emacs is not up to some modern tasks. Again no. Emacs is so extensible that you can configure it to do any possible editing task. You can even understand it as an editor construction kit. As I wrote the other day, no editor can claim to be more powerful because whatever feature they base that claim on can be added to Emacs, probably relatively easily.

So what’s the answer? Bling. Emacs doesn’t have any. I suppose if you really wanted it, you could add some chrome to Emacs but it’s beside the point and most Emacs users don’t see the need for it. To reuse my previous analogy, you don’t want a sports car for working the farm.

So I’ll embrace the “old school” label and wear it proudly as I use the most powerful editor possible even if it is a plain Jane.