Irreal

For those of you who like using your mouse with Emacs, Charles Choi has a post you may find helpful. In it, he lists some keybindings that are helpful when using a mouse in Emacs. I famously eschew the use of the mouse wherever possible—not just in Emacs—so I have no worthwhile opinions about matter and I’m not going to comment on his bindings. In any event, I long ago mapped F10 to Calc so none of it applies to me anyway.

Still, I recognize that many of you do like using the mouse so I thought I’d point out Choi’s post for you.

James Cherti has an excellent post describing how to set up a universal folding system. Folding is one of those things that I’m equivocal about. I use it all the time in Org files and couldn’t live without it. On the other hand, I’ve never seen the need for folding in code files. Sometimes it is convenient to focus on a single function but in those cases I simply narrow to the function.

Perhaps my problem is that every type of file seems to have its own folding engine with different commands and bindings. Regardless, Cherti definitely does like folding in his code buffers and like me with Org files, couldn’t live without it.

His post explains his system with dealing with folding in various types of buffers. The TL;DR is that he uses kirigami as a front end to provide a uniform interface to the myriad of folding engines. That’s pretty nice but you have to tie it to the back end engines.

That’s where Cherti’s post really shines. He provides the hooks for a large selection of file types. It’s not always obvious which engine you should use for a given file type and Cherti explains why he thinks each of his choices is the correct one.

The nice thing is that once you’ve set up and learned kirigami, you can add folding for whatever files you need simply by setting a hook. Kirigami allows you to set your own bindings for the commands so even learning Kirigami is simple.

If you’re more like Cherti than like me, and want folding for as many of your files as possible, take a look at his post. It’s really easy to set up and gives you all the folding power you’re apt to need.

As I’ve written many times, only my browner keeps me from doing almost everything in Emacs. Sure, there are some other apps that can’t be brought under the Emacs umbrella, but in many cases, emacs-everywhere allows me to handle text input and editing in Emacs.

Still, I spend a lot of time in Safari and it would be nice to whittle that time down. Joshua Blais claims that Emacs is his browser. His key for doing that is, of course, eww. He says, that like most of us, he believed it was far from capable of being an everyday browser but after using it for a while, he’s found that it’s usable for 85–90 percent of his use cases.

What many consider its shortcomings—it’s lack of hyper-interactivity and busy graphical display—Blais considers an advantage. He’s tired of the modern web with all its flashing lights and finds eww perfect for reading blogs and other serious writing that requires concentration and in-depth thought.

He’s made some nominal changes to the key bindings and a few other items. In particular, he’s made eww his default browser so even if he needs to go to a full-fledged browser, he has to go through eww first. His post has his configuration so you can see how he’s doing things.

Some day, I’ll get up enough nerve to try something similar. I don’t take part in social media or most of the other flashier parts of the Web and I use the excellent Magic Lasso to filter most of the junk that the modern Web insists on shoveling into our computers so my motivation is different from Bais’: I just want to stay in Emacs as much as I can.

Earlier this week I wrote about Bozhidar Batsov’s post on short Emacs configuration hacks. As I mentioned then, my favorite was a simple configuration variable that causes the Help buffer to get focus when you open it.

It’s easy to take the position of “who cares” but, as I said, I almost always want to interact with the Help buffer if only to dismiss it. Often though, I also want to scroll the buffer—yes I know about scroll-other-window and its siblings—or follow one of the links in the buffer.

After I wrote that post, one of the first things I did was enable the option to give the Help buffer focus. I can’t tell you how much I love the change. It turns out I use the help command more than I thought I did and every time I wanted the focus to be in that buffer. Not once since I made the change have I wished the focus remained in the original buffer.

It’s pretty easy to imagine a case where it would be more convenient to have the original buffer retain focus but in those cases one can simply change windows back to it. One thing for sure, I’ll be doing that a lot less than staying in the Help buffer and dismissing it when I’m done.

You really should try it out. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. As I said, it’s simply a matter of setting help-window-select to t so you can try it out in your current session without involving your init.el.