Irreal

Here’s a Stack Exchange post that tells you how.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork), who’s an occasional commenter here on Irreal, has an interesting post on his info workflow. He likes to have multiple info buffers open at the same time. That may seem a little odd but as Borkowski explains, he is often working on something in Org mode, say, and needs to check something in the Elisp manual.

It is possible, of course—it’s Emacs, to have multiple info buffers but it’s a bit clumsy. Borkowski wanted to be able to pop up an info buffer immediately whenever he needed it. To do that, he wrote a bit of Elisp to open an additional info buffer (or switch to an existing one) for any info manual. Then he wrote some additional code to call his function for his most often used manuals and bound them to quick key sequences.

A nice solution and another great example of how Emacs makes it easy to adjust it to accommodate your workflow. Head on over and take a look at his code. It may be something that you can use too.

Via Sacha I found this really interesting post by John Kitchin, whose work Irreal has mentioned many times. In this post, Kitchin writes about how he used Emacs to run a graduate course in Chemical Engineering. Emacs was used to handle everything in the course.

When I say “everything,” I mean everything. As Kitchin says

Every lecture was given from Emacs, every assignment completed in Emacs, turned in from Emacs, graded in Emacs, returned in Emacs.

Kitchin provided each student with a custom Emacs environment that included all the tools he uses for interfacing with Python and for making engineering calculations. In addition, he included a package he calls techela that interfaces with git and handles student assignment submission, quiz and exam taking, retrieval of grades, and other similar chores.

Course administration generally takes a significant amount of a professor’s time. Kitchin’s set up eliminates much of the busy work. Read the post to get an idea of how pervasive Emacs was in the course. As usual, Kitchin exploits Emacs in novel ways that makes his work much easier.

Over at the Emacs Reddit, tending asks how to fall back to a known good Emacs configuration when initialization gets an error. His complaint is that if there’s an error early in his .emacs file, the initialization is aborted and he’s dumped into a default Emacs that doesn’t have his usual environment. We’ve all been there.

Last time I looked, no one had a solution for falling back to a known good configuration but Renan Ranelli pointed to his solution for the problem. Ranelli’s approach is to divide his configuration into several files—as many Emacs users do—and then have a small “bootloader” that loads each file but within a condition-case that captures any errors and records them. The rest of the files (assuming no further errors) are loaded normally. At the end of the loading, any errors are reported but most of his environment is available.

It’s a very nice solution and, if you already have your configuration divided into separate files, very easy to implement. Take a look at his init-bootstrap.el file. You may find you want to do something similar. You could even use the same idea to implement the solution tending was seeking.