Irreal

Bill over at ATMakers has a short video on Why I Use Emacs. He’s a long term user and the reasons are many, he says, but the video is just one example showing how Emacs can make repetitive tasks easier.

The problem is that he has a list of two columns that he wants to mark up with HTML. The video shows how to do this using keyboard macros. It’s a natural solution and the video shows how easy it is. To be sure, it’s an elementary application of keyboard macros so the video is most suited for someone asking “Why do you use Emacs?” Still, even more experienced folks may enjoy it.

The video is only 6 minutes and 15 seconds so it should be easy to find time to view it if you’re interested.

Over at the Emacs reddit, shackra asks if people use or used Emacs at school. By “school” he appears to mean “at college or university” so this isn’t about whether we should teach 8^th graders to use Emacs. So far, there have been only a few (eight as of this writing) answers but the discussion is already interesting.

The thing that struck (and delighted) me the most was that all but one of the commenters were from disciplines other than computer science. The one developer was Mickey from Matering Emacs so, of course, his answer is interesting too. There was also a physics major and a civil engineer representing the technical fields.

The other respondents were from History and English. It’s not news that people from the liberal arts use Emacs too, of course, but even though I know better I’m always surprised. Of course, I shouldn’t be. Folks in fields like English and History do a lot of writing and probably wrangle just as much or more text than we engineers do. Why wouldn’t they want to use the best possible tool to do that? There are plenty of people in those fields—just as there are in ours—who are too lazy or unconscious of the possibilities to look beyond the default answer of Microsoft Word but the wiser of them invest a bit of their time in learning a tool that will pay dividends throughout their career rather than frustrate them at every turn.

The nice thing about using a tool like Emacs is that although the gatekeepers at journals and professional organizations insist of Word documents, you can still use a decent editor and export to the desired format with Pandoc. Of course Pandoc doesn’t convert between every possible format but it does accept Org Markup, Markdown, and LaTeX and will happily output docx formatted documents, which is probably the only target that non-STEM people need to worry about.

So the answer to shackra’s question is: Yes, Emacs is used by people at school all the time and some of their uses may surprise you.

I try to use Eshell for all my shell work. I’m not 100% successful but I mostly am so Eshell is an important part of my workflow. One of the things that makes using Eshell easier is aliases, just as it is in, say, a Bash shell. The thing is, I can never remember how to get them set up.

That turns out to be pretty simple. Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a short post that makes me wonder why I even had a problem with it. It’s as simple as set it and forget it. Once you set an alias, Emacs will remember it for you. There’s a slight syntax variation between the Eshell alias command and the familiar Bash variant but once you’re aware of that, everything else is simple. Simpler, really, than in Bash where you have to set the aliases in a configuration file.

If you’re an Eshell user, be sure to take a look at mbork’s post. It really can make your life easier.