Irreal

Over at the Emacs subreddit, attrigh asks if there is some way of refreshing the results of an occur when the underlying buffer changes. I’ve never run into a use case where that would be helpful but it’s easy to see how it could in many workflows. I didn’t know the answer off the top of my head but I probably would have stumbled on the answer just by doing the expected thing if I had needed an occur refresh.

In any event, the answer is to type g just as you do in similar situations to rebuild the results buffer of some command. I doubt this tip is going to save anyone hours of time but it is a handy thing to know for when your underlying buffer changes and you really don’t want to retype that long, nasty regex.

As most of you know, I do almost all my writing in Org mode so I’m used to being able to follow a URL by typing return on it or with Ctrl+c Ctrl+o. I use this all the time and, occasionally, when I’m in some other type of buffer I’ll try to follow the link and it won’t work. I end up copying the link and pasting it into my browser. That’s a real cache miss for me.

I just had another of those “how did I not know this” moments when I saw Álvaro Ramírez’s post about enabling the exact functionality I wanted. It’s been there all along. I’m not sure when it was integrated into Emacs core but the creation date on the source file is 1995.

Don’t let Ramírez’s use of use-package mislead you. It’s not a third-party package; it’s built into Emacs. On the other hand, Ramírez’s use-package invocation is useful because it shows you how to set it up. For most buffer types, you’ll want to use goto-address-mode but for code you’ll probably want goto-address-prog-mode which behaves the same as goto-address-mode but only for strings and comments. If you use Org buffers much of the time, you may want to bind Ctrl+c Ctrl+o instead of or in addition to Return.

This is a great find for me. I don’t need it that often but it was really annoying when I did and I didn’t know the easy way of doing it. Thanks to Ramírez for the tip. Perhaps you’ll find it useful too.

James Gill has a nice tweet about the community of Emacs users:

I’ve never encountered a community like that of #Emacs users. So many with 10, 20, 30+ years using the tool, endless resources and helpful people. And so delightfully ‘old school’ and modern at the same time.

An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.

— James Gill (@IamJamesGill) August 21, 2018

Like most of you, I belong to several tech communities. Not all of them have as nice a reputation. The Lisp community, for example, can be notoriously hostile to n00bs. A lot of that is residual grumpiness about the fact that the first thing many n00bs do when they arrive is suggest some scheme for doing away with parentheses. If you heard that as often as the typical Lisper, you’d be grumpy too.

Still, there’s no denying that the Emacs community is exceptionally welcoming to n00bs and that, as Gill says, we have a lot of people with extensive experience who are willing to help n00bs as well as more seasoned users. We also have folks like Mike Zamansky, Sacha Chua, and Rainer König who spend hours of their own time making instructional videos and doing other chores that benefit us all.

I think Gill has it exactly right: We’re old school and modern at the same time. Old school because we’re employing an editor that’s older than many of its users and modern because that same tool is more powerful and adaptable than its more “modern” competitors. In any event, it’s a great community and I’m proud to be a member.

Ayrat Badykov has a short post on Why Emacs is a great text editor. The post is really about why he switched to Emacs and why he’s sticking with it. Although you won’t find anything in the post to convince a n00b, there are a couple of interesting points worth commenting on.

First, Badykov says that he was convinced to move from Sublime to Emacs when he pair programmed with a Vim user. He was, he says, blown away by how much more productive the Vim user was in his editing compared to his. The Vim user never used the touch pad; he did everything with shortcuts and had shortcuts for everything. He chose Emacs instead of Vim because Emacs was “popular” in his community and there were lots of videos and blogs about using it.

This really resonated with me. Most of you know that I’m strictly laissez-faire about what editor people use. It’s not that I don’t have strong feelings about the matter, it’s just that I wouldn’t think of imposing my views on others. I’m happy to let people use whatever editor they find is best for them. All that said, I have to admit to a bit of annoyance when people who have never used Emacs or Vim or, in fact, have never used any editor other then some menu/mouse driven abomination complain that Emacs/Vim are “old technology” and don’t look as nice as whatever it is they’re using. Badykov provides the perfect rejoinder: those Emacs/Vim users with their old editors are much more efficient than you are. They save a second or two on each operation and that can add up to hours a day. Whether or not Emacs/Vim users can actually save hours every day, there’s no doubt that we are a lot more efficient.

The second thing I found interesting about the post is that under “disadvantages of Emacs,” Badykov notes that there’s a steep learning curve and that it might take you a couple of weeks to become proficient with it. I’m as much in favor of instant gratification as the next guy but it would never occur to me that I could install Emacs and instantly become proficient. After 10 years I’m still learning and it’s not unusual for me to think, “How did I not know that?” after learning some new feature or trick.

Like anything else worthwhile, Emacs requires a commitment to become even reasonably adept at its use. If you aren’t prepared to make that commitment, there’s always nano or whatever mouse/driven editor you’re using now. Just don’t expect to be as efficient as those of us using those “outdated editors.”

Harking back to my old post on Using Emacs, I expect that Badykov is or is going to become a first rate developer. Not because he uses Emacs but because he cares about his tools and is willing to put in the effort to master them.

Update [2018-08-19 Sun 09:56]: Batsov → Badykov