Irreal

If you have lynx installed, here’s a handy tip from Mike Sample:

#Emacs #Orgmode is awesome for research notes. Pull text-ified webpages into the buffer with #nomouse C-u M-! lynx –dump <URL-to-good-page>

— Mike Sample (@mikesample) September 28, 2015

Emacs has a new maintainer. Thanks to John Wiegley for taking on a hard, and often thankless, job.

Wiegley has been very active in Emacs development—including authoring the wonderful use-package and eshell packages—and has lots of good ideas. If you’re not familiar with his work, take a look at his chat with Sacha about Emacs or his chat with Sacha on Elisp development. There’s also a video with Sacha about organizing your Emacs configuration with use-package that I didn’t get a chance to write about.

I was excited when Wiegley expressed interest in the job and hoped he would be chosen. For his part, Wiegley is promising to make Emacs development a better place:

To all wishing to improve #emacs: Join me on the emacs-devel ML. We will make it a fun place again. Calling back all those who left!

— John Wiegley (@jwiegley) November 4, 2015

The other day I came across an old post by Vivek Haldar on what we want in an editor. I may have written about it before but it’s worth revisiting. He notes that for many people what they want includes “looks nice” but that’s crazy. “Good looking” for an editor means the font is readable, renders at a comfortable size, and the syntax highlighting makes sense. Anything else is irrelevant.

He makes a couple of other points worth mentioning. People often say that they have to use an editor for a while so they can adjust to it. Haldar says that’s backwards. Your editor should adjust to you, not the other way around.

Finally he says that editors are like fine wine: the older the better. If you want a good editor, choose one that’s been around long enough that all the quirks have been worked out and that every conceivable way of manipulating text has been considered and reified into workable code.

Tu Do (tuhdo) has an excellent series of primers on Emacs. The first one is the Emacs Mini Manual (PART 1) – THE BASICS. It’s about 40 pages when printed as a PDF so it’s much more than an extended cheat sheet. There are two more mini manuals covering Elisp and extending Emacs. There are also other articles on various Emacs subjects.

Part 1 of the mini manual is the best introduction to Emacs that I’ve seen. It covers everything you need to know to be an effective Emacs user. This includes topics like Dired, Macros, Registers, Ido, Version Control, and Shells as well as well as the usual navigation, search, and dealing with windows and frames subjects.

The mini manual reminds me of the Org Mode compact guide. It’s a shorter version of the complete Emacs manual optimized for getting up to speed as quickly as possible without drowning in all the details that the complete manual provides.

Even if you’re an experienced Emacs user, there’s probably a few details that will be new to you so it’s worth taking a look at it. I learned a couple of features about Dired that I didn’t know so it was very worthwhile for me.

At the end of the tutorial, tuhdo quotes a post, The Ghost in the Machine, by José Antonio Ortega Ruiz that captures my feelings about Emacs perfectly. He says that Emacs fills our yearning for a Lisp Machine. I’ve often written similar sentiments so I can relate. Those of us who try to do as much as possible in Emacs tend to think of it as a light weight Lisp Machine.

I haven’t read the rest of the manuals yet but I intend to. If they’re as good as Part 1, I’m sure to learn some new and useful things. If you’ve already read them, feel free to leave a comment.