Irreal

Over at the Emacs reddit, g00eykabl00ey shares a “swiper trick.” He gives an example of the trick where he wants to check the spelling of “Dostoyevsky,” which appears elsewhere in the buffer. To find the previous use—and its correct spelling—he starts a Swiper search with “dos.” That will bring up every occurrence of “dos” in the minibuffer. You can move up in down in the minibuffer (scrolling if necessary) and as each line is highlighted, the buffer being searched scrolls to that instance of the search term. If you type Return, the point is moved to the instance that is highlighted in the minibuffer. But if you quit Swiper (with Ctrl+g, say) the buffer is unchanged but you’ve seen the correct spelling. Notice that this same trick is useful anytime you want to see some term in context, a variable definition say.

I would have thought that this was pretty obvious but judging from the comments maybe not. I don’t keep track but I wouldn’t be surprised if half of my uses of Swiper are like this. I quit out of it as often as I complete the search by moving to the target. Tricks like this are why I say that Swiper and the associated Ivy library are my most useful package.

By way of background, I need to remind you that I use ace-window for switching between windows. I think of it like ibuffer: it’s so much better than the default command that everyone should configure it automatically when setting up their Emacs. I have it mapped to Ctrl+x o which is convenient because it acts identically to other-window when there are only two windows.

I was getting ready to write something else for today’s post when I noticed that my two side-by-side windows were not in the usual blog writing order. My OCD immediately kicked in and I decided to swap them. The other day I was reading that you can change the default ace-window action before selecting the window to change to. By pressing m you can swap the current window with one of the others. Of course, that only works when there are three or more windows. When there are two windows it simply changes window focus immediately.

I wondered if there was a way to force one of the alternate actions so I typed Ctrl+u Ctrl+x o as an experiment. It immediately swapped the windows. I checked the documentation and discovered that if you type Ctrl+u twice before calling ace-window it will delete the current window. I’m not sure why you’d want that instead of the easier Ctrl+x k but that’s what happens.

Afterwards, I vaguely remembered knowing all this but I’d completely forgotten it. In case you’ve forgotten it too or didn’t know it, consider this a PSA. If you’re interested in what other actions you can perform when you have three or more windows, see here.

If you liked my previous post on PDF-tools tips from Ben Maughan and Marcin Borkowski, you should take a look at Maughan’s followup post that includes a few more tips.

If you work with PDFs a lot, it’s definitely worthwhile spending a bit of time honing your workflow. It will pay dividends in reduced friction. As I wrote in that previous post, the more I use PDF-tools, the more I like them.

Today I learned that a capability I’ve often wished for already exists. As I’ve written many times, I use the Ivy/Counsel/Swiper package for my searching and selection needs. Although it took me a day or two to get used to it, I’ve come to really like the default matching algorithm which essentially turns a space into “.*”. Now I consider it a cache miss if I have to actually enter regex notation.

Ivy supports several matching algorithms and you can choose the one you want to use with each application, such as Swiper. One such algorithm is to search for a target that contains two or more terms without regard to the order they occur in. My use case for that is searching for an old blog post. I’d sometimes like to search for several words without regard to their order. That’s useful when I can remember two or three terms in the post but not the order they appeared in.

Sadly, though, there was no way to choose an algorithm on-the-fly and I normally want to use the default algorithm. Happily abo-abo fixed that problem back in July. You can now cycle through the various matching algorithms. The details are in this Emacs Stack Exchange question. This is a real win for me and makes Swiper and Ivy even more useful for my workflow.

If you aren’t already using Ivy/Counsel/Swiper, you’re missing out and really should give it a try. As I’ve said before, it’s my most useful package.

Xah Lee has a nice post on obtaining Long Term Emacs Productivity. It’s 7 tips to help you be more productive with Emacs. Doubtless anyone who is not a complete n00b will disagree with some of his suggestions. I disagree with some of them. The thing is, we probably disagree on different things so the post is a useful thought provoker even if you ultimately dismiss some of its suggestions.

For example, Lee is very interested in ergonomics and has extensively investigated the (for him) optimal key bindings. I, on the other hand, generally avoid remapping keys to existing commands. That probably started when I was a n00b and, not understanding how Emacs eventually becomes an editor customized for each user, avoided remapping commands so that the experience would be the same no matter whose Emacs I was using. Several years on I no longer suffer under that delusion and—even though I still don’t remap existing command’s key sequences—I would find it painful if not impossible to use someone else’s Emacs productively.

Lee likes and recommends ido-mode while I vastly prefer the ivy, swiper, counsel package. Again, this is simply a matter of preference; there is no “correct” answer. I was an ido user before I switched to ivy and liked it a lot but for me the ivy package is probably my biggest productivity booster.

Those are my two quibbles with Lee’s tips. Yours will probably differ. Regardless, the post is worth reading for the ideas it presents. My only addition would be the idea of navigation by searching. That starts with Steve Yegge’s suggestion to use incremental search for navigation but also includes using the excellent avy library (the successor to ace-jump) for finer grained and quicker navigation.

If you haven’t already, be sure to take a look at Bin Chen’s EACL package. The idea is that if you have some boilerplate in a project, you can type the first few characters and EACL will grep the project looking for matches. It presents the candidates in the usual Ivy way and will insert the candidate of your choice.

The project is available on Melpa. You can see an automated gif of it in action at Chen’s post or the project’s GitHub page.