Irreal

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Tsoding’s video on the annoying usefulness of Emacs. His conclusion was that you should stay away from Emacs because once you try it, you will never be able to break free.

Now Valigo has his own video up that reaches the same conclusion. For him, the main attraction of Emacs is it’s extensibility and customizability. The reason for that, of course, is that the Emacs executable is basically a Lisp image with the source code available from within that image. That means that you can, if needed, reach into the guts of Emacs and change just about any aspect of Emacs on the fly. The only exception is the small C core and even that has the source code available from within Emacs but you’d have to recompile Emacs to change it.

One telling example that Valigo gives is to ask Emacs for the definition of the j key. Because he has evil mode enabled, Emacs reports that j runs the command evil-next-line. Then he disables evil mode and repeats the experiment. This time Emacs reports that j runs the self-insert-command to add a j to the buffer. The point is that the help command adapts itself on the fly to reflect the current state of the system.

Because of all this customizability, Emacs use is addictive. Once you start, you can’t stop. Like Tsoding, Valigo says that Emacs is old and crufty but he can’t escape because nothing else is as useful.

I get that Tsoding an Valigo are probably writing tongue in cheek but really, if Emacs is so useful you can’t live without it, why are you complaining? You can, after all, change anything you don’t like.

I’m a long time user of Ctrl+x 8 Return for inserting arbitrary Unicode characters. I use it, for instance to insert the red meat character (🥩) for my Red Meat Friday posts.

For mundane accents like é, I use ivy-insert-org-entity that I stole from John Kitchin’s Scimax. It’s lighter weight and easier to use for spelling peoples’ names or using the occasional foreign accented word.

Even though I’ve been using Ctrl+x 8 Return for many years, I had no idea of how powerful the command is until I read this post from Rahul M. Juliato. It turns out that in addition to just using an existing Unicode character you can compose accented characters manually, combine multiple code points into a single glyph, and much more.

Juliato’s post is long and complicated so I won’t try summarize it here. You really need to take a look at the post itself. I had difficulty making some of his examples work but that was probably me doing something wrong or a shortcoming of my fonts. If you’re like me, you’ll probably never need all the power he describes but it’s nice to know it’s there if you do need it.

Any serious Emacs user is apt to have a lot of minor modes active at any given time. That’s certainly true in my case. What we don’t need, though, is to see lighters for each and every one of them. It wouldn’t matter so much if they didn’t fill up the mode line and obscure other indicators that you might actually want to see.

The current way of dealing with this is Diminish that prevents any of the minor modes listed from putting their lighters on the mode line. I’ve found them difficult to get configured correctly but they do the job and I haven’t thought about the problem in years.

In a new post, Bozhidar Batsov reports that a new feature in Emacs 31 is the mode-line-collapse-minor-modes command. It turns out that I’ve written about this before but Batsov has more details. The difference from Diminish is that you list all the minor modes that you don’t want to see on the mode line (or even all of them) and Emacs compresses them into a single symbol, “…” by default.

If you’re living on the edge and building Emacs from Master, you can try this out now. Otherwise you’ll have to wait for the release of Emacs 31.