Irreal

Over at the Emacs reddit, ambrevar has a nice essay entitled Emacs Everywhere. This essay is a followup to his previous essay on Eshell that I wrote about previously. In it, he describes why he moved almost all his computing tasks into Emacs and why he resisted doing so for a long time.

Ambrevar is an adherent to the Unix philosophy that programs should do one thing well. Given that, he reasoned, why would he want to do everything with one program? Over time, though, he came to realize that one could view Emacs as providing a user interface for “back end” programs that adhere to the Unix philosophy. This makes even more sense if you consider back end programs to include Emacs packages written in Elisp. From this point of view, handling your email from within Emacs with something like mu4e is not a matter of Emacs doing too many tasks but rather of Emacs providing a consistent user interface that allows one to work more efficiently.

The bulk of the essay discusses the advantages of moving as much as possible into Emacs and lists some of the standalone apps that he’s replaced with something equivalent in Emacs. He even uses EXWM to make Emacs his system window manager. As a Mac user, that option isn’t open to me but I don’t really need it: I spend almost all my tube time in either Emacs or Safari. Both run in full-screen mode and I have function keys to switch between them easily from the keyboard.

Whether or not you’re an Emacs user or have advanced to moving as much as possible into it, you will probably find ambrevar’s essay interesting. Definitely worth a read.

Lee Hinman over at writequit.org has an excellent post on working with log files in Emacs. By “log file” he really means “structured text” so, for example, most of his techniques work for things like JSON as well.

The post is fairly long so I won’t try to summarize the whole thing but it’s interesting how many built-in Emacs functions can be brought to bear on the problem. Everyday things like keep-lines, occur, and narrowing can make a big difference.

Hinman also talks about 3^rd party packages that can help. One such package is View Large Files (vlf) that allows Emacs to gracefully handle huge files. That’s especially important for log files that can be multiple gigabytes in size. Read Hinman’s post for other useful packages and ideas for dealing with log files. It’s a very useful post.

I’ve written about this before but it was a few years ago so it’s worth repeating for new Emacs and/or Mac users. One problem with Emacs is that it’s hard to find enough shortcut keys. Having Hyper and Super keys helps a lot but, of course, modern keyboards don’t have them. Fortunately, modern keyboards do have keys that are otherwise unused in Emacs and they can be drafted as substitutes for Hyper and Super.

Xah Lee has has a page that shows how to set Hyper and Super keys for Linux, Windows, and macOS. For the Mac, he recommends setting the ⌘ Cmd key as Meta and the ⌥ Opt key as Super. That’s common advice but I’ve never understood it. Emacs already considers the ⌘ Cmd key to be Super and, at least on my Mac keyboards the ⌥ Opt key has a sublabel of Alt so it makes sense to me to use the ⌥ Opt key as Meta and the ⌘ Cmd key as Super.

That leaves the Hyper key which, following Magnar Sveen’s advice, I map onto the fn key. It seem like begging for trouble to use fn and ⌘ Cmd this way since they have important OS functions that you might want to access from within Emacs but it turns out that they still perform those functions despite the mapping. For example, fn+F8 still pauses/restarts music even when fn is mapped to Hyper.

It’s really useful to have these extra modifier keys to use with 3^rd party packages or even obscure standard Emacs functions. Take a look at Lee’s page to see ways of getting them on your platform.

Magnar Sveen is back with another Emacs Rocks!. This time he discusses Magit. He starts by saying how Magit gives you all the information you need without having to invoke several git commands on the command line. Then he suggests that rather than doing a pull to update the local repository, you should fetch the data instead. That allows you the opportunity to check out the changes and stay up with the code base.

Sveen goes on to demonstrate some of features of git/Magit such as committing chunks instead of whole files, spinning off changes to a new branch, and editing a commit. He goes through that material fairly quickly so it’s a bit harder to follow. Part of the problem is that he has highly customized key sequences so it doesn’t make sense to show his keystrokes as he did in his earlier videos.

Still, it’s a great video and if, for some reason, you’re not already a Magit user, this video may convince you to give it a try. The running time is just 2 minutes 39 seconds so you watch it whenever you like.