Irreal

Rejoice Emacsers. Stefan Kangas writes that as promised earlier this week, Emacs 30.1 has been released. You can check out the NEWS file if you want to know what’s new in this release.

I’m writing this on Sunday evening and have not yet had time to compile and install the new version but I have every confidence that this will be a stable release. I’ll install it in the next day or two and let you know if there are any problems.

In the meantime, thanks to everyone who worked so hard to get this release out. You guys really are heroes.

James Dyer is continuing his quest to remove as many third party packages as possible from his configuration. This time he’s replacing Magit with vc-mode.

As I’ve said before, I don’t understand this urge to replace more or less proven and debugged code with a homegrown version. Sure, you understand exactly what’s going on and you can make it do precisely what you want but you’re undoubtedly going to introduce bugs that the package has probably already resolved. It’s not as if you’re reducing the Emacs footprint by any significant amount so why bother?

In this case, though, Dyer has a point. Dyer uses Git at home but Subversion at work. Magit, of course, is for Git so rather than negotiate two different interfaces, he’s settled on one. That makes perfect sense to me. Emacs is, after all, all about making editing easier.

Happily, I use Git exclusively so I don’t have to deal with this issue but if I did, I’d probably do just what Dyer is doing. It makes sense to avoid context switches whenever you can and using more than one interface for version control is definitely a context switch.

I still don’t understand the urge to purge packages—except in special circumstances—but sometimes, as in Dyer’s case, it makes sense. To be clear, as I’ve said before, I don’t begrudge Dyer or anyone else the ability to configure Emacs the way they like. I’m only saying I don’t always understand the urge and it’s better to understand things than not. Or so I’ve been told.

Stefan Kangas writes that the Emacs 30.1 release candidate 1 is available for download. This is one of, possibly the last, steps before the release of Emacs 30.1. There’s also a Windows binary available.

Kangas says that if there are no problems, Emacs 30.1 will be released on Sunday. Even if problems are found, the release of Emacs 30.1 is imminent.

As I always say at this stage of the development process, thanks to all the developers who volunteer their time and effort on the Emacs project. They really are heroes who don’t get nearly enough credit for their work on our behalf.

As I also always say at this juncture, it once again puts the lie to the claim that Emacs is an old, moribund technology that has been superseded by blingtastic editors like VS Code. Our editor’s development is ongoing and robust despite what the naysayers claim.

If you have the time and inclination, please download and test this release candidate.

Lars Ingebrigtsen has an interesting post that discusses writing WordPress blog posts in HTML. Why would you want to do that? Ingebrigtsen’s answer is that the alternatives are harder to use. In particular he says that markup languages are as hard, or harder, to use than raw HTML.

Even though he’s an Emacs user, he frames the discussion in terms of Markdown instead of the much more capable Org mode. Ingebrigtsen makes the point that writing a Markdown link is pretty much the same as writing an HTML link but Emacs/Org-mode makes all this easy.

First of all, you can simply ask Org to insert a link and it will query you for the link and associated text and then format and insert the Org actual link for you. I can’t remember the last time I actually hand-formulated an Org link. But it gets better. In most cases I want to link to a Web page and I have a function that extracts the link and queries me for the associated text. That’s much easier than doing the same thing with raw HTML.

A lot of his post discusses the problems of dealing with images in posts. He uses ewp to deal with this and other matters of dealing with HTML. The Org mode solution is org2blog which seamlessly handles images and the formatting of an Org buffer into to a WordPress blog entry.

I don’t begrudge anyone the ability to write in raw HTML but I don’t think it’s true that it’s easier than writing in Org. On the other hand, one nice thing about ewp is that it can take a screenshot of everything that’s linked to so that it’s easy to see it by just hovering over the link. That helps deal with linkrot.

In any event, it’s an interesting post and worth taking a look at if you feel that you’d like to write in raw HTML.

I have family visiting so this is another short post. Charles Choi has an interesting tip for Emacs emoji users on macOS. I rarely use emojis anywhere but in texts so I wasn’t aware of Emacs facilities for choosing emojis. It turns out that emoji-list will work on any Emacs installation but that there’s a better system on macOS. That’s ns-do-show-character-palette, which pops up the usual macOS emoji picker.

If you use it a lot, it makes sense to bind it to a key sequence shortcut. Choi prefers to do this sort of thing from the menu system but, sadly, ns-do-show-character-palette is not in the Edit menu by default. It is, however, easy to add it and Choi’s post shows us how to do that.

If you like to add emojis to your emails, say, you use something like Mu4e or one of the other Emacs Emacs clients, and you’re on macOS you will probably find Choi’s post useful.

Just a quick post about a short note from Marcin Borkowski (mbork) concerning searching for the thing at point. Despite using Emacs for over 18 years I didn’t know about isearch-forward-thing-at-point.

As mbork says, it does just what it says. You invoke it with Meta+s Meta+. and it searches forward for whatever the point is on. This is something I want to do all the time and I was vaguely aware that it was possible but didn’t know exactly how to do it, so I’m really glad to see mbork’s post.

Finding out about this now serves to emphasize that learning Emacs really is a lifelong journey.

Everyday I see several articles from—usually—younger developers opining that Emacs is too old-fashioned, non-intuitive, and, really, just too hard to bother learning. And, it doesn’t look nice like VS Code and other modern editors.

Okay, they’re young and don’t know any better. Maybe they’ll learn as they go along. But there are also older developers who have been using Emacs for years who say they’ve been seduced by the bling, and lately, AI integration. They too are choosing to use editors other than Emacs.

One would think, from reading all those posts, that there’s a one way current flowing from Emacs towards those lesser other editors. But that’s not true. There are still people who get a hint of Emacs’ power and make the effort to learn it. Ivan Prikaznov is a case in point.

He came into an IntelliJ shop as a green engineer so, of course, he used the IntelliJ IDEA editor like all his colleagues. But then he stumbled on Vim and learned about efficient editing. Eventually, he changed jobs and found himself editing a large configuration file. He realized that he was “essentially executing an algorithm by hand”. At that point he grasped that what he needed was a programmable editor and he turned to Emacs.

He hasn’t looked back. Now he does everything in Emacs and the Borg has assimilated a new member. Or something. In any event, it’s nice to know that Emacs is also gaining converts. It may not be a rapidly as the “in” editors but we’ve always known that Emacs is for the discerning.

Continuing with our “Emacs for all things” theme of the last couple of days, here’s another post that speaks to how Emacs can be used for many things and how seemingly difficult or even impossible tasks can be done by using the right packages.

The topic of the post is using Emacs for taking research notes. S4h4rJ says that he loves Emacs but that he finds it hard to use for taking research notes because it’s so hard to deal with figures (jpegs, etc.). They are, he says, hard to size and hard to place within the file.

That didn’t seem right to me and other researchers chimed in explaining how they handled the problems that S4h4rJ was complaining about. It’s surprising how often the answer is simply installing and using an existing Emacs package.

The TL;DR is that there are many researchers who use Emacs to take and organize their notes. They use things like org-download and org-roam to deal with problems specific to their workflows. Take a look at the comments to S4h4rJ’s post for the details.

The takeaway is lots of serious researchers are using Emacs everyday for taking and organizing their research notes. If you’re a researcher and want to use Emacs, there’s no reason you can’t. You just need to be aware of a few packages and techniques that ease the process. Read the comments to S4h4rJ’s post to get an idea of what’s available. Even if you’re not a researcher, you may find those packages useful for your own workflow.