Irreal

It’s been a slow day on the Intertubes for Irreal material but I do have something that might interest those of you who have the misfortune to be running Emacs on Windows. Just the other day, we discussed the sad fact that Emacs on Windows can be slow. Despite the tone that my posts on Windows often take, I do want Windows users to be able to enjoy all the benefits that Emacs offers.

One of the problems with Window/Unix interaction is that they made slightly different decisions about file formats. That mostly manifests itself in Windows using CR LF for EOL while Unix uses LF. This isn’t just a matter of Microsoft’s contrariness. The choice of CR LF was reasonable at the time.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, BrainFuckPlusPlus talks about another problem with using Emacs on Windows. He’s an Emacs user working in a shop dominated by VSCode users. Apparently VSCode saves files with a BOM sequence starting the file and he was trying to get Emacs to ignore the BOM by setting the Emacs coding method. He found a solution but that solution caused problems in another area.

That brings up another remarkable aspect of this story. BrainFuckPlusPlus’s question was answered by Eli Zaretskii, the main Emacs maintainer. This was an obscure question on reddit, not the Emacs-Devel mailing list, and yet Zaretskii took notice and explained what BrainFuckPlusPlus should do to resolve it.

Zaretskii, like most FOSS maintainers, doubtlessly has a job and a family demanding first claim on his time but he still found a few minutes to help an Emacs user with an arcane problem. It’s yet another demonstration that Eli and the other devs don’t get nearly enough credit.

Chris Maiorana has another thought provoking post that advocates the use of one line sentences. The idea is that each sentence ends not just with a period but with a newline. That seems a little unnatural but has a lot to recommend it.

I don’t do that anymore but I used to. I wrote two books where every sentence was a separate line. This was before my Emacs days so I was using Vim but it worked pretty much like it would in Emacs. If the sentence was long, the line would wrap to fit on the screen but the wrap was virtual, much like Emacs’ visual-line-mode. Actually, using visual-line-mode means that paragraphs rather than sentences are the single lines but no one ever thinks of it that way.

I no longer remember why I used the one-line-per-sentence method for my books. It probably had something to do with the fact that they were written with Groff but as Maiorana says, there are lots of good reasons to recommend it. You can check his post for some of those reasons.

As with most things, Emacs—and in particular Org mode—has you covered. There are commands for moving between sentences and for moving those sentences up and down. That makes it easy to switch sentences around while you’re editing. None of that depends on one line per sentence, of course, but works seamlessly if you prefer that way of working.

My view is that Emacs and Org mode do away with a lot of the reasons to use one line per sentence but, of course, you like it for some of the reasons Maiorana offers or for others, Emacs has you covered. Even if you have to mix methods, Emacs will work the same way.

Charles Choi has made good on a promise he made in his post announcing a name change for some of his early Casual packages. In that post, he said he was going to bundle all the current and future Casual extensions into a single package.

He’s honored that pledge and the new Casual Suite is available for download on MELPA. It’s the best of both worlds. If you want all the current and future porcelains, you can install the Casual Suite package. If, like me, you prefer to load only some of them, you can do that too because the individual porcelains are available on MELPA too.

As I’ve said before, these packages are a real win. The only time you need to invoke them is when you want to use some aspect of the target UI that you seldom need and don’t remember the shortcut for. The menus are never shown unless you explicitly call them.

Eli Zaretskii has announced the start of the Emacs 30 release cycle. What that means is that Eli has created the emacs-30 release branch and restricted commits to it to bug fixes that don’t affect low level code. This is the start of the process where what will become Emacs 30 starts undergoing refinement and polish.

Eli says that he hopes to release the first pretest in about a month. After that, barring any show stoppers, the release of Emacs 30.1 won’t be far behind.

If you don’t mind living on the bleeding edge, download and install the emacs-30 branch and report any problems to the development team. You’ll be helping all of us get a better Emacs 30.1 faster by doing so.

I know I always say this but it can’t be said enough: thanks to Eli and the other devs who work so hard to benefit us all. I’d double their salary but it would stay the same.

I’ve been following the discussion on Emacs Devel about moving the excellent which-key app to Emacs core. Moving it to core was non-controversial. The only issue was whether they could get all the which-key contributors to assign their rights to the FSF before the Emacs 30 freeze. Happily, that appears to have happened and which-key will be part of Emacs version 30.

In a sense, it doesn’t really matter. As I’ve said before, the difference between core and third party packages is mostly political rather than practical. Still, there are some advantages to being in core. First, some users install Emacs on minimal systems or have to run old versions for one reason or another so they have to depend on whatever comes prepackaged with Emacs. Second, and more important to my mind, having a package in core aids in discoverability. It’s a lot easier to discover, say, which-key if it’s builtin and doesn’t have to be installed.

Regardless, if you aren’t already using which-key, you should start. It mostly stays out of the way but if you start a key sequence but don’t complete it within a preset time interval, which-key will pop up a menu in the minibuffer with the possible completions. It’s really great because you don’t have to worry about, say, all the rectangle commands. If you type Ctrl+x r and stop, which-key will tell you all the possible completions.

I’ve been using it for years and wouldn’t want to live without it. I’m happy to see it moved to core if only because a few more people will discover it.

Chris Maiorana has an interesting post on using Emacs for creative writing. The TL;DR was that a friend criticized his writing as being too “choppy” and speculated that it was because Emacs made it too easy to rearrange blocks of text. He took that criticism to heart and tried using Libreoffice Writer for his writing instead. The results were the same. It turns out that the problem was his and not his writing instrument. He solved the problem without reference to his editor and returned to Emacs.

It was an interesting story but it got me thinking about professional writers and the mechanics of their writing. Professional writers are notoriously fussy about their writing environment and have strongly held views on what’s right and works for them.

Some—Neal Stephensen and Tess Gerritsen, for example—write their stories in long hand and only later transcribe them with some sort of editor. Stephensen says he types so fast that he doesn’t have time to think carefully about what he’s writing. Gerritsen says she types faster than anyone she knows and that if she wrote on a word processor she would spend her time editing instead of writing.

Others, such as Vernor Vinge, Jerry Pournelle, and Charlie Stross use their editors exclusively. Pournelle, in particular, wrote several BYTE articles on the various editors he used for writing.

I don’t write novels but I do have strong opinions about the proper tools for writing. With all due respect to Stephensen and Gerritsen, two of my favorite writers, I could never write anything in longhand. First of all, my writing is terrible so I have to print, and that is so slow I’d get about 50 words a day done that way. I don’t do too much editing as I’m writing. Sometimes I’ll rewrite a sentence as I’m dong the initial draft but mostly editing happens on separate editing passes. Regardless, every bit of it happens in Emacs.

I’ve been fascinated by the writing process for as long as I can remember. Feel free to share your process.