Irreal

Oleh Krehel has a nifty new package that brings ace-jump-mode functionality to links in help and info buffers. The package, ace-link, makes following links easy by putting letters in front of each link. You follow the link by picking the appropriate letter.

It’s available through MELPA so installing it is easy. The only thing you need to do is initialize the binding (‘o’ by default) by adding

(ace-link-setup-default)

to your .emacs or init.el file. Alternatively, you could set the key map manually and use some other key.

I just loaded ace-link and while I’ve played around with it, I haven’t used it “for real” yet. So far, though, I like it a lot. Just as ace-jump-mode gives you an easy way to jump around in your buffer, ace-link makes it easy to follow links.

Bruce Connor has an interesting new package up at GitHub. It’s the fancy-narrow package that, as he puts it, imitates narrow-to-region with more eye candy. At first I hated the idea. Being crotchety and grumpy, I’m inclined to treat “eye-candy” with disdain. After all, didn’t I rail against those who wanted Emacs to be prettier?

After a nice nap, though, I had second thoughts. What fancy-narrow does is identical to narrow-to-region except that instead of blanking the text outside of the narrowed region, it grays it out. The grayed out text is readonly and unreachable. The advantage of fancy-narrow is that the surrounding text is still there for context.

The disadvantage is that the surrounding text is still there. To me, the main reason for using one of the narrowing commands¹ is that you see only the text you’re interested in and nothing else is there to distract you. Graying out the other text makes it less intrusive but it’s still there.

I still can’t decide if I like it enough to install but I can see how it might be helpful. What do the rest of you think? Is this something you’d find useful?

When I want to draw structural directed graphs and network diagrams my first choice is always dot from the graphviz suite. The syntax is reasonably simple and the documentation has lots of examples to serve as go-bys.

The other day, Grant Rettke, whose blog you should definitely follow, had a post on configuring cask. That’s something I’ve been meaning to investigate so I was happy to see his post. But more interesting to me was the example he gave on configuring cask for graphviz-dot-mode, a mode for editing dot files.

If you like syntax highlighting—and who doesn’t—and write dot files, this package seems like a useful addition to your Emacs resources. Once again, Emacs shows that it can adapt to whatever task is at hand. Having syntax highlighting and formatting for dot files is probably not life changing but it does reduce friction a bit in your work flow. And that’s always a win.

A long time ago, I wrote about a way to prettify JSON. It had the advantage that it didn’t require you to load a heavyweight package such as js2-mode when all you wanted was to reformat some JSON in a reasonable way. The downside was that it called a Python module, json.tool, to do the work. That’s OK unless you don’t have Python installed or don’t want to shell out to an external process.

Now Wataru Miyaguni has an Elisp solution that doesn’t require you to shell out to an external process. The json-reformat package reformats JSON into a standard format. If, like me, you don’t write in JSON enough to justify use of one of the heavyweight JSON packages but nevertheless occasionally want to reformat JSON into a publishable format, this could be just what you need.