Irreal

Nathan Dawit Chane has an interesting post on his journey from Vim to Emacs. I can relate to it because his journey is eerily similar to mine. Like him, I spent many years as a Vim user and could be legitimately said to be an expert user.

Like him, I tried Emacs several times but it never stuck. Unlike Chane, I gave up for trivial reasons. I didn’t like the default scrolling and “yank” meant precisely the opposite of what I was used to. Like Chane, I finally moved to Emacs because I started doing all—or at least most—of my programming in Lisp. Emacs—Paul Graham notwithstanding—is simply a better fit for that type of programming. I’ve sacrificed billions of pixels explaining that concept so I won’t relitigate it here.

What finally worked for Chane was to start with a simple Emacs install—complete with the standard Emacs bindings—and become comfortable with that before adding packages. When I started, before ELPA, adding packages was a lot harder so I spent a lot of time just getting used to vanilla Emacs.

Like most of us, Chane came to realize that Emacs was not just another editor but another way of working. It is, as I often say, a light weight Lisp machine that provides an operating environment complete with its own Lisp based programming language. It also happens to have a pretty good editor built in. The thing about that “pretty good” editor is that like everything in Emacs it can be tweaked to make it perfect for you and your workflow.

My sense is that Chane has not yet completely embraced the Emacs way but that he is well on his way. As I often say, Vim is a great editor but it exemplifies another way of working. You may like the Vim way better, which is fine, but if you’re looking for something that recapitulates the Lisp Machine way of working, Emacs is worth learning.

UPDATE [2024-07-27 Sat 17:07]: Added link.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a very interesting post on something I didn’t know about: dedicated windows. The TL;DR is that dedicated windows are restricted—more or less—to the single buffer that they were displaying when they were set to dedicated.

Mbork’s use case is reading a technical book in one window while taking notes and trying code snippets from the book in another. He notes that if there’s an error when executing those code snippets Emacs will open an error window over your book. By marking the window as dedicated, you can avoid that and force Emacs to open a third window so you can see all the pertinent information.

Although dedicated windows have been in Emacs for some time, there’s never been an easy way of invoking them. That changed in Emacs 30. Now’s there a convenient key sequence to mark a window as dedicated (Ctrl+x w d).

To be honest, my workflow doesn’t have much use for this feature but, of course, that can change without warning so it’s nice to know that there’s a way of pinning a window to a particular buffer. If you think that you have a use for such a feature, be sure to take a look at Mbork’s post for the details. The easy UI won’t be available until Emacs 30.1 but you still set a window dedicated by calling the appropriate function. See the documentation for the details.

I just got a notice from Mickey that the latest version of Mastering Emacs is out. It is, when you think about it, a modern miracle. You buy a really great book on Emacs once and keep getting the new editions for free.

This version brings the book up to date as of Emacs version 29. The two megafeatures of version 29 are Tree Sitter for finally rationalizing syntax highlighting and Eglot to provide smart completion and other “modern” IDE-like functionality. But as Mickey says, there are a “million” other, smaller improvements.

Speaking of buying Mastering Emacs, Mickey is having his usual new edition sale on the book. For a little more than the next day, you can get the book for 29% off. If you have any interest at all in Emacs, you really should have this book and now is the perfect time to get it. By the time you read this, the sale will be almost over so act now if you’re interested.

A couple of week ago I wrote about Álvaro Ramírez’s ready player mode. The idea is to be able to take a quick peek at a media file from within Emacs. At the time, the app was still beta quality and not yet on MELPA.

Now, Ramírez has announced that the app is on MELPA and ready for general use. Take a look at Ramírez’s original post to see what it can do and why you might want it. Now that it’s on MELPA, it’s easy to install.

I recently wrote about Casual RE Builder, one of Charles Choi’s Casual Suite apps. As I wrote then, it goes a long ways towards making RE-builder usable for those of us who can’t remember all the commands necessary to export the resulting regex to a useful place.

While he was working on Casual RE-builder, Choi discovered that sometimes—usually in the Dired subsystem—Emacs expects “grep-like” regular expressions rather than the Emacs style. This is undoubtedly because Emacs outsources certain tasks to external grep routines. The fact that the particular regexp subset used depends on what flavor of grep you have installed makes things even more complicated. If you’re like me, all of this is news to you. Somehow, I’ve managed to stumble through using Dired without realizing that it was pulling a bait-and-switch on me.

Regardless, Choi has come to the rescue. He’s changed Casual RE-builder to add an option to export the regexps from RE-builder in grep format. It’s a small thing but it makes Casual RE-builder even more useful.

I’ve already installed Casual RE-builder and presumably I’ll get Choi’s latest changes with my next update. This is, I say again, a really useful package and if you use regexps at all in Emacs, you should take a look at it.