Irreal

I stumbled across a link to this post in the Emacs reddit and ignored it but curiosity go the better of me so I went back to it. Like most Irreal readers (I assume) the label nerd or geek can appropriately be applied to me so the question, “Is anybody using emacs in the humanities or divinity?” wouldn’t normally interest me. Except for the Emacs part.

In any event, I did follow the link and found a pretty interesting discussion from folks in the humanities on how they are using Emacs—and often AUCTeX and Org mode—for their work and writing. It’s a tribute to the power and usefulness of Emacs that people so far removed from the technical world that most of us live in nevertheless find it useful and worth the pain of learning it.

These folks deserve our admiration not only for taking the trouble to learn Emacs but also for enduring the friction it adds to their everyday work. Remember that Word stands supreme in the humanities and if you’re using Emacs you have to worry about converting your work to a form that your colleagues can read and work with. As for writing \(\LaTeX\) with Word: shudder.

I installed PDF-tools a few months ago and really like it. Their site has warnings about using it with macOS but the installation on a Mac is easy and it works perfectly. Recently, I have seen two posts that address PDF-tools. The first, by Ben Maughan over at Pragmatic Emacs, discusses setting it up on the Mac and a couple of tricks for making annotations to a PDF. If you’re an Ivy user, pay particular attention to his advice about mapping Ctrl+s back to isearch-forward when in pdf-view-mode because Swiper doesn’t work with PDFs.

Whereas Maughan’s post gives some hints for adding annotations to a PDF, Marcin Borkowski over at mbork.pl talks about ways to review and follow annotations already in a PDF. As Borkowski points out, that’s perfect for blending in changes to a paper from an editor or a reviewer but also useful anytime you’re working with collaborators and using PDFs as your lingua franca.

If you work with PDFs and are an Emacs user, you definitely should check out these two posts. They’re full of good ideas and are sure to improve your workflow.

Howard Abrams has another excellent video up. This one, given to The London Emacs User’s Group, is on eshell. Like me, Abrams has moved as much shell work as possible into eshell. Unlike me, he’s learned how to take maximum advantage of it. One example of that is learning to make effective use of the Zshell-like glob filters that are built in to eshell. Every time I see them used, I think to myself that I really need to start using them myself but I never followup. Perhaps this video will provide me with a tipping point.

About half the video is a demonstration of eshell’s capabilities and some of the ways it differs from a “regular” Unix shell such as Bash or Zshell. One of the major differences is that eshell effectively has two command parsers. One parses “normal” shell input and the other parses lisp. Interestingly, you can combine the two syntaxes in one input string in useful ways. This part of the video is really interesting and if you’re new to eshell, it’s probably the most important part. Watching it a couple of times will help jump start your eshell use and mastery. Abrams has provided a complete transcript of the talk (including the output of the commands he demonstrates) so you don’t have to worry about copying them down from the video.

The second half of the video considers ways of hacking on and extending eshell. He shows how to do things like writing your own glob filters and leveraging the way pipes are implemented in eshell. This part is a bit more advanced but necessary if you really want to master eshell.

The video is 42 minutes so you’ll have to schedule some time. My only complaint is that the international connection made it difficult to hear to audience’s questions at the end but it’s otherwise a great video and very much worth your time.