Irreal

Here’s a very nice tip from Johan Lindstrom:

#emacs tip: C-s (incremental-search), now C-w (pick up words), and then the real tip: M-% to query-replace the searched-for text. *BOOM*

— Johan Lindstrom (@jplindstrom) October 1, 2015

Artur Malabarba has an excellent Emacs tip on how to get the minibuffer to make an informed guess as to what who want to enter at the prompt. This is a really nice tip and something I didn’t know. Be sure to give it a read.

Daniel Gopar has started a series of Emacs interview podcasts called Emacs.el. His first subject, fittingly, is Sacha Chua. Gopar and Chua have a far ranging discussion on Emacs. Gopar starts off by asking the obligatory “How did you get started with Emacs?” question. As part of her response, Chua mentions how she leveraged Emacs Speak and ERC to tell her when someone mentions her on the IRC Emacs channel.

From there the discussion moved to how to learn Emacs. As we’ve all found out, that’s a never ending process and Chua says she learns things a little at time. I think it’s that way for most of us. We want to add something to our workflow or we see how someone else is doing things and we learn the bit of Emacs that makes that possible.

For me, the most interesting part of the interview was their discussion of Emacs Chats and Emacs Hangouts. Chua explains her rationale for the videos and how they differ. Many people will be surprised that Chua mentions her anxieties about the videos: that she won’t have a question to ask or that there will be awkward silences. She always seems so engaged and on top of things during the videos that it’s easy to miss the fact that, like most of us, she worries about her public performances.

It’s a nice chat. It lasts just shy of 42 minutes so you’ll have to schedule some time to watch it but it’s very worthwhile.

At Emacsconf 2015, Erik Hetzner gave a very interesting talk on Making Emacs a Better Tool for Scholars. Hetzner works for the Public Library of Science, which publishes about 30,000 papers every year. He notes that about 90% of those papers are submitted in Microsoft Word. Word is OK, he says, but not really a very good tools for scholars. In his quest to provide better tools he is looking at ways that Emacs can better meet scholars’ needs.

Hetzner makes an observation I hadn’t thought about before: the needs of scholars and programmers are remarkably similar. Where programmers talk about refactoring their code, scholars talk about revising/editing their papers but they are both concerned with adding, deleting, moving, and changing text.

There are more similarities. For example, scholars need to version control their papers. The publication cycle can be years long and perhaps changes specific to one or more journals will need to be made. Version control makes this easy as well as helping with collaboration.

An even less obvious similarity is the need to compile the results of the editing. In the case of scholars this may involve integrating citations; generating and adding graphs, figures, and charts; handling cross references; and dealing with one or more output format for the paper (HTML, PDF, ePub, etc.).

As Hetzner says, Org mode is Emacs’ secret weapon. Along with Babel, it gives researchers everything they need to do their calculations, graphs, and other processing right in the paper’s source file. Or, of course, to make reproducible research easy and natural. When it comes time to generate output, Org can generate a PDF, HTML, or, for those poor souls whose publishers require it, DOC.

The talk is a little over 30 and a half minutes so plan accordingly. You can see the slides from the talk on Hetzner’s Web site.

UPDATE: Fixed link to slides.

Yesterday I wrote about Emacs for Social Scientists so it’s only fair to mention how creative writers can benefit from Emacs too. I written about this before, of course, more than once but Balle over at I Love Emacs, has a post with some useful pointers for creative writers. He mentions Randall Wood’s guide and cheat sheet that I mentioned in the above post as well as a video on how to export your Org mode to the doc file that your publisher will surely insist upon.

It’s a nice post and worth a read if you make your living writing words and would like to do it in Emacs.