Irreal

As a dweller in the Apple ecosystem (or walled garden if you prefer) I enjoy a shared and automatically synced contacts list across my Macs, iPhone and iPad. Therefore I don’t bother with Google contacts. Many people do, though, and for the Emacs users among them Julien Danjou has put together a nice Emacs extension that allows you to access your Google contacts from within Emacs. The package also integrates with Gnus so you can use it instead of the Big Brother Database.

Danjou says that it probably needs Emacs 24 because of its use of oauth2 but as I wrote on Monday and before, Emacs 24 is now in pretest and several readers have reported that it is very stable and solid. If you were looking for an excuse to jump into Emacs 24 and you use Google Contacts, this could be your opportunity.

Update Updated link.

Chong Yidong is reporting that Emacs 24.0.90, the first Emacs 24 pretest, is available for download at ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-24.0.90.tar.gz. As usual, the changes are listed in etc/NEWS.

In the comments to my post about Emacs 24 features, several of the commenters said that they were using the development version of Emacs 24 and that it was “rock solid.” Thus there’s no reason not to give this pretest a try if you’ve been waiting for any of the new features in Emacs 24. If you don’t know what those features are and want a nice summary, take a look at this post by Bozhidar Batsov.

Xah Lee has another Emacs challenge. This time, it’s to replace entries of the form

<tr><td>pound</td><td>&#163;</td><td>pound sign, U+00A3</td></tr>

with entries like this:

<tr><td>pound</td>£<td>pound sign, U+00A3</td></tr>

This is, presumably, a small tweaking of Lee’s very useful page on HTML/XML Entities that I’ve written about before.

It would be reasonably easy to do this by writing some Emacs Lisp but I wanted to see if I could do it interactively. It turns out to be pretty simple using query-replace-regexp. The secret is to use \, expr as the replacement string in query-replace-regexp. With that replacement string, when the regular expression is matched expr is called to provide the replacement. I used

&#\([0-9]+\);

as the regular expression and

\,(format "%c" \#1)

as the replace string. The \#1 takes the first subgroup and converts it to a number. Then the rest of the format statement delivers that unicode character as the replacement text.

The careful reader will note that this doesn’t give quite what Lee asked for because the <td>...</td> tags are still there. I’m guessing that Lee really wanted them there but if not, it’s easy to get rid of them by using

<td>&#\([0-9]+\);</td>

as the regular expression.

As you move vertically from line-to-line, Emacs tries to keep the point in the same column position or as near to it as it can. Normally, that’s what you want to have happen but sometimes it’s convenient to have the point move to some other column on the next or previous line. You can do that with the set-goal-column command, which is bound to 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+n】.

For example, suppose you have some columnar data such as

aaa bbb ccc
ddd eee fff
ggg hhh iii
...

and you want to change the second column

aaa 111 ccc
ddd 222 fff
ggg 333 iii
...

The most direct way of doing that is to put the point on the first b, delete the bbb with 【Meta+d】, type the 111, and then move down to the next line. The problem is that the point will then be right after the last e so you have to move it to the first e, perhaps with a 【Meta+b】. An easier way is to put the point at the first b and then set the goal column with 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+n】. Then you can delete the bbb, type the 111, and move down to the next line. Now the point will be at the first e so you can just delete and type in the 222. When you’re finished, you can cancel the goal column with 【Ctrl+u Ctrl+x Ctrl+n】.

The set-goal-column command is disabled by default so you will need to enable it before its first use. You can let Emacs ask you and then set it permanently or temporarily or you can enable it in your .emacs or init.el file with

(put 'set-goal-column 'disabled nil)

As many Mac OS X/Emacs users know, OS X has many of the Emacs key bindings defined for the entire system. Thus, bindings like 【Ctrl+f】, 【Ctrl+b】, 【Ctrl+a】, 【Ctrl+e】, 【Ctrl+k】, 【Ctrl+y】, 【Ctrl+p】, 【Ctrl+n】, and a few others work across the whole system.

Less well known is that the Cocoa Text System is customizable and you can add other Emacs bindings to make a comfortable and familiar environment whether you’re in Emacs, Mail, Safari, or whatever. Even better is that Jacob Rus has already compiled the necessary bindings for you so all you need do is download the file and install it in the proper place on your system.

The full explanation is available here but the TL;DR is:

1. Download the bindings file.
2. Rename the file to DefaultKeyBinding.dict.
3. Stash the file into the ~/Library/KeyBindings folder.

There’s lot of information at the site, though, so it’s well worth a look. It has bindings with 【Esc】 rather than 【⌥ Opt】 as the 【Meta】 key, BBEdit key bindings for any heretics reading this, and many other tidbits as well. But if you just want Emacs key bindings where 【⌥ Opt】 is the 【Meta】 key, then just follow the 3 steps above.