Emacs excitement
While speaking to a rather large public gathering of folks a couple of decades ago, my wife announced that there were two times that she had seen me excited. I think she was being a bit hyperbolic, but it’s true that I tend to be rather, well, perhaps understated is the most gracious way to put it. I might say even-keeled. Some would say boring.
But I was sitting alone at my computer this morning when I found myself brimming with excitement — twice. I think I even chuckled out loud and shifted my weight in my chair. Simply put, I had a couple of those “wow” emacs moments. I don’t have as many of those moments now as I once did — not because I’m fully aware of everything that emacs can do, but rather because I’ve settled into a standard routine in which I can do what I think I need to be doing. If I were inclined to be a little hyperbolic, I might say that when I’m writing I am emacs and emacs is me. (But, then, I’m not hyperbolic, so I’m not likely to say that.)
But what brought the excitement to my desk this morning? Actually, the better way to ask that question is who brought the excitement to my desk this morning. And the answer to the question is Sacha Chua, whose weekly emacs newsletter showed up in my RSS feed. As usual, there were all sorts of gems here. Some of them, as usual, were beyond my tech abilities. Others, as usual, seemed interesting and maybe even achievable with my limited tech mojo, but I simply don’t have time to wrap my head around them just now. But there were a couple of discoveries that made me smile. More to the point, I’m already integrating them into my standard workflow.
One of them — misohena’s phscroll — eases a frustration that I often have when working with org tables. (I should say that Sacha brought this to my attention by way of Samuel Michaël Vanié’s youtube channel.) I use tables to store all sorts of data, and it’s not unusual for a table to have more columns than will fit comfortably on a screen. This is especially a problem when I take my laptop on the road and give up the luxury of the large display on my desk. As Vanié’s example makes clear, an org-table too wide for the screen shows up as a jumble. But org-phscroll prevents the truncating of a table row and instead allows me to scroll from one column to the next. Perhaps misohena is correct in saying that emacs should have a text property that controls line wrapping, but his code serves my purposes well.
The second one is a different sort of beast, helping me to solve a different problem. I’ve been trying for years to keep my hands on the keyboard rather than reaching for the mouse. I’ve had some success in this, but I still catch myself using the mouse to scroll a window, to change point location, or to click on a link. I was intrigued by jamescherti’s inhibit-mouse package. I loaded it, and I can already see that it will help me move away from the mouse. That’s good, but it’s not what made me smile. That came later, when I was reading through a denote note that had a link to another note. I wanted to read that other note. Of course I immediately reached for the mouse, but moving the mouse didn’t move point. Oh, right, I thought – I can get there without using the mouse. But how do I click on a link without using the mouse? Surely there’s a way to do that — I know, most of you reading this are already getting ready to tell me how to do that — and I pretty quickly discovered that <C-c C-o> will open a link at point. A simple discovery, but it made me smile.
It’s worth saying that the inhibit-mouse package reinforces my use of bbatsov’s guru-mode. I don’t remember where I learned about that, though it could well have been Sacha’s newsletter. Guru-mode disables the arrow and home (and other) keys so that I’m forced to use the standard emacs keybindings instead. I’ve been using it for months, and it has trained me to keep my fingers closer to the home keys. Not quite as exciting, but it definitely helps me to do what I want to be doing.
I can’t wait to tell my wife tonight that I was excited twice today in the space of just a few minutes. I wish that she had been here to see it.
