Irreal

Once you discover the utility of having multiple windows in a single Emacs frame, the question of how to switch between those windows arises naturally. Emacs, of course, has you covered. You can use Ctrl+x o to cycle between windows. That’s great if you have only a couple of windows in a frame but it becomes tedious when there are multiple windows. That, of course, happens often once you get used to making maximum use of Emacs.

Marie K. Ekeberg over at TheMKat has a solution. It’s a nice solution in the sense that it’s built into Emacs so you can use it without adding anything extra. That solution is windmove. Ekeberg didn’t like the default bindings but, as she says, it’s easy to change them to whatever is comfortable for you.

I used windmove for a while but I have since moved to ace-window, a wonderful app from abo-abo that, when invoked, labels each visible window with a number that you can use to select that window you want to move to. I’ve bound it to Ctrl+x o so I didn’t have to learn a new binding. The nice thing is that if there are only two windows—my usual situation—ace-window will simply switch to the other without further ado.

When I brought up the ace-window repository while writing this post, I noticed that there are a bunch of possible actions available. I never use any of them except switching but you may find some of them useful.

The TL;DR is that if you routinely have more than two windows in a frame, ace-window is a must have app. I’ve been using it for years and wouldn’t want to live without it.

Four years ago I wrote about James Gill’s list of Emacs resources for writers. It was a curated list of resources that addressed writing prose of various sorts with Emacs. In April, I revisited the list. Judging from what I wrote, I had forgotten about my first post.

Now, I’m writing about it again because of Gill’s latest post about the list. In it, he says that surprisingly to him, that repository is the most popular of all his Github repositories. It’s not surprising to me because it’s a really great resource.

What was surprising to me, as I read down the his list, is how any are things that I have written about on Irreal. You may or may not think of that as an indication of quality but one thing for sure, it’s indicative of how interesting they are to me.

Regardless, if you use Emacs to write prose—for a blog, for reports, for articles, or even for books—you should take a look at this list. There’s sure to be something useful to you in it.

A frequent complaint we hear from n00bs is that Emacs out of the box is unusable, that it’s really hard to configure, and so you need something like Doom to get going. Generations of Emacs users have put the lie to that. Lots of us have been starting with vanilla Emacs and configuring it to our needs for 40 years.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, permetz suggests that it’s fine to have a simple configuration that builds on default Emacs. Permetz has been using Emacs since 1983 and considers himself a power user but he has a simple config file that mostly consists of setting a few variables to adjust things to his liking.

That’s how I started. Back then I was still writing in C so I spent a bit of time getting Emacs to indent C the way I liked. As I went along I added some packages and wrote some custom Elisp for bespoke operations that no one else would need. Even so, after 16 or 17 years my init.el is still pretty small and I could easily trim it down by getting rid of stuff I no longer need or use.

Permetz’s message is don’t be afraid of starting small from vanilla Emacs and having a simple configuration. You’ll be surprisingly productive and your init.el can grow organically as your needs change.