Irreal

This

#emacs tip of the week: M-x eshell then type ls -lh >> #<foo> and see the command output be appended to the "foo" buffer!

— Stathis Sideris (@stathissideris) October 18, 2016

is kind of cute but, of course, there are more direct ways of getting an external command’s output into an Emacs buffer. Still, one can imagine where something like this might be useful. It shows, once again, how powerful the Emacs environment is and serves as an another example of why many of us never want to leave Emacs.

Here’s a nice quickie from Grant Rettke. You probably won’t need this often but when you do, it’s just what you need.

One of the things John Wiegley said he’d like to do when he took over leadership of Emacs development was to have more frequent releases. It looks as if things are on track:

Eli Zaretskii: "I plan to release Emacs 25.2 very soon, like in a few weeks." https://t.co/f8Gtyq4mEY #emacs

— /r/Emacs (@EmacsReddit) October 16, 2016

Thanks to John and Eli and the other developers for making it happen.

A few days ago I wrote about Artur Malabarba’s comment-line. That’s now in Emacs core and very useful. Xah Lee has an excellent post that compares comment-line and comment-dwim. That’s useful because the commands are very similar and it’s nice to have an exposition of how they differ.

Lee also offers a bit of Elisp that merges the two commands so that the resulting command will do what you probably want based on the context. You may or may not want to add his code to your configuration but his comparison is worth reading even if you don’t.

Last month I wrote about using cd to ssh into a remote machine. Today, I came across this animated Gif from Bodil that shows the process in action

Yeah, so when vim users are all "sshing to a remote and
running vim there is so easy" Emacs users are liek "lol
ok" pic.twitter.com/LAW3bpDmDk

—
Bodil (@bodil) September
5, 2016

Notice how easy it is to log out: just type cd and you’re back in your home directory on the local machine. Also notice how easy it is to use Magit remotely.

A really nice and informative animation and it takes less than two minutes to watch.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a nice bit of Elisp from Artur Malabarba that deals with commenting and uncommenting whole line(s). It’s sort of like comment-dwim except that it deals with whole lines. Recently, Malabarba resumed blogging at Endless Parentheses and mentioned that the code in question is part of Emacs 25.

Malabarba describes the code here but you should note that it is now bound to Ctrl+x Ctrl+; instead of Ctrl+;.

Charles-H. Schulz is not a developer—although he is technically proficient. He describes himself as specializing in literature, history and philosophy. He’s also an Emacs user. I find that interesting because I’m always fascinated with how people who aren’t writing code use Emacs and how they took the unlikely step of getting started.

Schulz has a post in which he describes how he uses Emacs. It’s easy to see him as a power user because he performs many—or even most—of his daily tasks in Emacs. That includes mu4e for email, blogging, IRC, file management, terminal, and, of course, Org mode. Like most of us he prefers to browse with a dedicated browser rather than, say, eww, and he doesn’t like the available Emacs packages for RSS or Twitter. Still, he does an impressive number of his daily chores from within Emacs.

If this sort of thing interests you too, head on over to and take a look at his write-up.