Irreal

Andrea Corallo just announced that Emacs.30.0.92, the second pretest for Emacs 30.1, is now available from https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-30.0.92.tar.xz. The associated signature file is at https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-30.0.92.tar.xz.sig. If you can, the developers would like you to try it out and report any problems. You can view a summary of the changes by reading https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/etc/NEWS?h=emacs-30, an online version of the NEWS file.

It’s really important that the pretest get as much testing as possible so that we can move on to the release candidate(s) and finally Emacs 30.1 itself. Help out if you can.

Álvaro Ramírez has another tweak to his Dired display environment. This time it’s a patch to hide the absolute path of the current directory in Dired listings. Ramírez likes to display minimal information in his Dired listings because, as he says, the full listing is only a toggle away so why clutter up your display with a bunch of information.

I’ve never understood this. I always want to see as much information as possible and I don’t want to do anything extra to see it. The last time I ranted about this, commenters jumped in to say it was all about not having enough screen real estate but even with my flagging eyesight, I’ve always been able to fit the whole Dired file listing in a split window of my 13″ laptop. Even if that’s not the case, removing the line at the top of the listing with the absolute path does nothing to decrease the width of the display.

Still, lots of folks have other values and really do want to see only the information they absolutely need. As usual, Emacs lets us have it our way. You can display all the available information or you can opt for abreviated information and simply toggle the display if you need more.

If you’re in the abbreviated information camp, take a look at Ramírez’s post to see how to prune the display. If you’re in my “show me everything” camp, the good news is that you don’t have to do anything: Emacs will show it all to you¹.

(setq diredp-hide-details-initially-flag nil)

As many of you know, I’m fascinated by nontraditional users of Emacs. By “nontraditional users” I mean people outside of engineering and the sciences. I like to hear how novelists and people in the humanities leverage the power of Emacs in their work.

Almost all those nontraditional users learned to write their papers with—and are mostly still expected to use—the death traps that are Microsoft Word and Google Docs. It takes, therefore, an extraordinary commitment on their part to move to Emacs. Almost all who do, never look back.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, DevMahasen, who describes himself as a novelist and filmmaker, was already halfway there because he was a devoted NeoVim user. Still, he wanted to try Emacs but he couldn’t get his mind around it. Then he found the Emacs-kick repository, an kickstarter for Vim/NeoVim users. Once he tried that, everything clicked. Now he’s on his way to being another nontraditional Emacs user.

The Emacs-kick configuration is meant for Vim/NeoVim users and makes the transition as easy as possible. As you all know, I went through a similar transformation but I just took the plunge and started using vanilla Emacs. Honestly, it wasn’t that much of a problem but, of course, I’m not a nontraditional user and editors of various sorts seem natural to me so my experience may not be relevant to those who are.

Whatever type of user you are, if you’re considering transitioning from Vim/NeoVim to Emacs, you should give the Emacs-kick repository a look.

A month ago I opined that no true Scotsman Emacser would view anything but the Space Cadet Keyboard as the apotheosis of keyboards for Emacs users. I was promptly schooled that, to the contrary, most Emacs users today have no desire for a Space Cadet Keyboard. I remain firm in my desire for one but I bow to the prevailing view.

But if the Space Cadet Keyboard is not the pinnacle, what is? The TL;DR is that no one knows. Everyone, it seems, has their own idea of the ideal Emacs keyboard. Over at the Emacs subreddit, yibie asks what keyboards will people be using for Emacs in 2025. The striking thing is that there are almost as many answers as there are comments. Everyone appears to have their own preferred keyboard that they swear by.

I remained convinced that the most important thing in choosing an Emacs keyboard is mappings for Hyper and Super. Every modern keyboard has Ctrl and Meta (as Alt) covered but there is no standard way of mapping Meta and Super.

In any event, if you have your own views, feel free to jump in and share what you’re using.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a nice post on the Emacs substitute-command-keys command. The TL;DR is that it’s a way of mapping a command name to its keybinding. I’ve long been familiar with it but only in the context of Emacs Doc strings. For example, here’s the Doc string from one of my custom macros:

  "Convenience macro to generate a key sequence map entry
for \\[prettify-key-sequence]."

the \\[prettify-key-sequence] is mapped to whatever the current binding for prettify-key-sequence is. It’s nice because I can change the binding without having to worry about updating the documentation.

Mbork’s post tells us that my use above is really just a special case of a more general facility: substitute-command-keys. You can programmatically convert a function name to its binding by calling substitute-command-keys.

I’m not sure where you’d want to use this other than in a Doc string (or maybe an Org doc) but I’m ready to be educated on the matter. I can’t remember where I learned about using \\[...] in the Doc string. It was probably from seeing it in some function in Emacs core. One thing for sure, it’s not easy to discover without looking for it explicitly or stumbling across it like I probably did.

In any event, this is a useful thing to know. It’s a great example of how Emacs is self documenting.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, ismbks asks about drawing tools for Emacs. If you’re like me, the only thing that comes to mind is artist-mode with possible export through ditaa. That combination has always met my needs but it is pretty rudimentary and mostly confined to block diagrams.

The comments have some other solutions. On really nice example is AKIYAMA Kouhei’s Emacs Easy Draw. It’s very interactive and has nice line drawing capabilities. Take a look at the demo on its GitHub page to get an idea of what it can do.

Another commenter recommends PlantUML, which is good for flow diagrams and fancy block diagrams. It’s a markup application rather than interactive if you prefer that way of working.

Of course, all these applications are meant for engineers needing to draw engineering diagrams and not for artists who want to do serious digital art. Emacs is probably never going to support that sort of thing and why should it? After all, there are applications specialized for that and it’s hard to imagine a need for doing it from within Emacs.