Irreal

Hideo tweeted out a link

Prelude Emacs https://t.co/Xw3ieNGvX2 #emacs #prelude

— hideo (@hideo_is) November 16, 2016

to this nice configuration by Shanthakumar. It’s a blog post written in Org mode that can be tangled to his init.el. It has some good ideas and is worth taking a look at.

One of the things in the configuration is a standard Emacs binding that I didn’t know about. You can scroll a window left or right with Ctrl+x < and Ctrl+x >. If you’re like me, you don’t often need to do that but I have one use case that comes up often: when I paste in the code for an embedded Tweet (like the above) it’s a long line. Sometimes I want to look at something in the middle of that line. I’ve been doing that by moving forward by word to get to the point I want to see. Moving by window length is much more efficient.

One thing to be wary of is that moving the screen left moves toward the right side of the screen—you’re moving the window not the cursor. Similarly for moving the screen right. I don’t know why I didn’t already know this but I’m glad to learn it.

The excellent Mastering Emacs is 50% off.

If you've been holding off buying Mastering #Emacs then grab a bargain! It's 50% off – just $20.https://t.co/Fg618KEiOA

— Mickey Petersen (@mickeynp) November 25, 2016

If you use Emacs, you really want this book. It’s been updated for Emacs 25 and is only $20 dollars while on sale.

UPDATE [2016-11-26 Sat 19:49]: matering → mastering

One of the most powerful tricks I’ve learned about using Emacs is from Steve Yegge’s famous post on effective Emacs use in which he recommended using incremental search for navigation. That gave me a huge increase in efficiency. I got an even bigger increase when I started using ace-jump-mode and its later generalization, avy, by abo-abo.

The avy library has many ways of selecting a jump point but they all involve building a jump tree. One of those methods is avy-goto-char-timer. I’ve read its description a few times as I’ve added to my Avy configuration but its usefulness never hit me until I read this tweet from Wilfred Hughes:

Nifty Emacs command of the day: avy-goto-char-timer: https://t.co/EEZO2B6JCP . It combines avy-goto-char with an isearch style search.

— Wilfred Hughes (@_wilfredh) November 2, 2016

It solves a problem that I sometimes have with avy-goto-word-1 (the successor to ace-jump-mode): If you want to jump to a word beginning with a common letter you may have many selections to choose from and the selection labels cover up the beginning of the word. One way to solve this is with avy-goto-char-timer, which allows you to enter a sequence of characters—much like isearch—and it then gives you selections that begin with that sequence.

The “timer” in the command’s name comes from the fact that it considers your entering of the sequence complete when you stop typing for the timer’s value (0.5 seconds by default). I mostly still use avy-goto-word-1 but sometimes avy-goto-char-timer is more efficient and I’ll use that instead. If you don’t like the timer aspect, there’s also avy-goto-char-2, which allows you to enter two characters and build a search tree for those two characters. Its functionality is subsumed under avy-goto-char-timer so I haven’t bothered mapping it to a key sequence.

If you aren’t using one of the Avy functions to navigate, you’re really shortchanging yourself and you should check them out. Avy is available from MELPA so it’s easy to install.

Mike Zamansky has another video in his Using Emacs series up. This time it’s about emacsclient. All Emacs users tend to obsess over the editor’s load time. We are always looking for ways to speed it up or to avoid having to load it in the first place.

For many of us that means leaving Emacs running all the time. Some folks even arrange for it to be loaded by systemd as part of the boot process. Leaving Emacs up all the time has the downside of accumulating buffers. I used to fret about that myself but I finally realized that Emacs can handle hundreds of buffers without difficulty so I stopped worrying about it. I restart Emacs often enough—due to things like updating packages such as yasnippet that really want to be restarted when they’re updated—that I never accumulate more than a couple hundred buffers anyway.

One nice way of handling this strategy is to run Emacs in server mode and pop up a new frame when needed with emacsclient. The way to do that is to call it as

emacsclient -a "" -c

The -a "" will try to start the Emacs server if it’s not already running. If you want to start it in a terminal, the spell for that is

emacsclient -a "" -t

The terminal version is really useful for when you ssh into a remote machine and need to bring up Emacs on the remote. I have this captured in a bash script named et so that I can call it easily.

Zamansky demonstrates all this and shows how he binds the magic spells to keyboard shortcuts so that he can instantly launch an Emacs frame in the desktop or in a terminal window when he needs it. This weeks video is really short—less than 5 minutes—so you can watch it while you’re waiting for your coffee to cool enough to sip.