fomosapien

@fomosapien@emacs.ch

#emacs dweller. professional #commonlisp dev. jaded #freesoftware advocate. I've never driven a car and am an inveterate car hater (#fuckcars)

I think you're cool

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ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

HI! I'm stuck in a hotel lobby for a while! AMA

fomosapien,

@ZachWeinersmith What's the closest you ever got to missing a day with SMBC?

fomosapien, to emacs

does it better:

magit-rebase-interactive

a.k.a r i in the transient.

Complex multi-commit rebasing could hardly be simpler. Magit really is the Emacs "killer app".

fomosapien, to emacs

does it better:

elfeed

Hands down the single best reader I've ever used.

https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed

fomosapien, to emacs

Daily enjoyment:

custom-file

This one is a bit meta: but I like to keep my Emacs customizations (those made through customize) in a particular file, which resides in a location that is periodically backed up.

(setq custom-file "/my/real/custom.el")

I then load this at the top of my init.el file:

(load "/me/real/custom.el")

Sure, I could have just symlinked the default file location, but I prefer doing it this way b/c then its documented with the rest of the config.

fomosapien,

@dekkzz76 I don't have an answer

fomosapien,

@dekkzz76 A smooth-skinned, freshly shorn yak is a good in itself!

I think it's something like: I set the customize file at the top b/c subsequent config might make use of it; I load the customize file right after I set its location so that the two stay together; I think.

fomosapien, to emacs

Daily enjoyment:

asm-mode

Not like I find myself browsing assembly all that often (though, it isn't never).

No. Instead I mention asm-mode to point out something very general about emacs: it's the original "batteries included" programming tool. I appreciate that, no matter the file format I want to look at, I can be fairly confident that emacs will have a built-in way to make sense of that file. Assembly; C/C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, Lisp, Shell ...

so cool

louis, to mastodon
@louis@emacs.ch avatar

Our :emacs:​ Emacs.ch VM celebrates its first birthday in 5 days 🎂​ Without a single reboot. Zero downtime. And, as is proper for a well-managed instance, blocked by mART.

How did Mastodon change your life? 🍻​ It certainly had a great impact on mine.

https://liberapay.com/emacs-ch

fomosapien,

@louis first time I've used social media for more than a few days before shuttering my account.

Happy birthday, and many more.

fomosapien, to emacs

Daily enjoyment:

insert-char

You might know it better as

C-x 8 RET

Works with your completion system to search for unicode characters by their mnemonic.

For example:

C-x 8 RET then star typing rightwards arrow and I get out →

If writing about linear logic, I can search for ampersand and select turned ampersand from the completions, and boom! out comes ⅋

pretty sweet.

fomosapien,

@lapingvino I'm not sure; it probably depends on how emacs was compiled

fomosapien, to emacs

Daily enjoyment:

info

Browse your OS's installed info pages from the comfort of Emacs. I'm using it right now to browse the manual.

The info system is a hypertext mini-web available on most unixy OSes, and is primarily used to supplement man pages, often with more of a tutorial style.

Very handy when you want a refresher in some old hacker's ideas about how something should've worked 30 years ago. 😜​

See also https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/texinfo.html#Overview for more about the format.

fomosapien,

Hot take though: info pages become increasingly valuable as the web grows increasingly unusable.

fomosapien, to emacs

Daily enjoyment:

make-frame

Creates a new detached OS window (called a "frame" in Emacs parlance) running Emacs. That's right! You can have as many Emacs windows running at once as you like, all of them sharing the same Emacs session! I do this at work: a single Emacs session shared across three monitors - all fullscreened. I almost forget that I have to use MacOSX...

You can switch between frames using M-x other-frame. One for my agenda, one for the papers I'm reading, and another for my code projects. Never touch a mouse again!

Cheers!

fomosapien, to emacs

Daily enjoyment:

toggle-frame-fullscreen

I'm one of those emacs users who drops all the window chrome, all the menus, all the clicky baubles from my UI. I insert (toggle-frame-fullscreen) into my init file in order to fully saturate every pixel of my screen with emacs. Much recommended.

fomosapien, to voyager

just watched that episode of where the doctor's mobile emitter is infected with seven of nine's nanobots, resulting in One, a super advanced Borg drone with a 500 year technological edge. One turns out to be a peace loving hippie by borg standards and so, when the borg find out about him and pursue, he must sacrifice himself to save the crew.

The borg are so warm for One's form b/c he's got this hyper advanced future tech powering his uber drone self. But like... how is it even remotely possible that the borg don't know about and routinely use time travel? Crews of federation ships can hardly manage to avoid time travel for a two month stretch, and yet, the borg have some how never assimilated any time travel machines? sus

fomosapien,

@dekkzz76 challenge accepted 😝​

fomosapien, to emacs

Daily enjoyment:

erc

A full featured client built into Emacs. Back when IRC was the world's killer app, erc was my absolute favorite client. It remains so today. You can even use it as a kind of "bumper" system: just run emacs inside of a session on an always-on network host, fire up erc, and into that machine whenever you feel like chatting.

fomosapien, to emacs

Daily enjoyment:

apropos

The humble and tragically underappreciated apropos command. It matches a user-supplied string against every symbol emacs knows about and prints those that do match to a hyperlinked buffer. Each link leads to more detailed information about the symbol.

When in doubt, it is apropos to apropos.

fomosapien, to emacs

Daily enjoyment:

visual-line-mode

Enabling the minor mode visual-line-mode toggles on nice-to-look-at word wrapping in your buffer. I use it all the time when writing long documents. Some may protest, saying that there is always M-q aka fill-paragraph and friends, but sometimes you do not want to artificially insert newlines into your text. With visual line mode your newlines are placed just where you intend them to be.

Cheers

fomosapien, to emacs

Daily enjoyment:

(set-frame-parameter nil 'screen-gamma 2.2)

I use this snippit to create a faux light mode for whatever dark theme I'm using. It doesn't work on all systems (does nothing on my Mac at work, for example), but I've had other Linux users try it to firm results. So if you like the theme you're using but wish it had a "lighter" variant, this is a way to fake it!

Cheers

deleted_by_author

    •
    fomosapien,

    @eibhear @nyl

    Certainly knowing things will always be valuable - but the effect of assistants and LLMs may be to change what it is valuable to know by devaluing a great heap of current generation's programmers's stock and trade.

    As an addenda: by value in the above I mean "instrumental value" or more specifically, valuable to the rich who want to exploit the skills of others to become yet richer. There is always intrinsic value to knowing for the people who love to know.

    fomosapien, to emacs

    Daily enjoyment:

    balance-windows

    So you've been horizontally and vertically splitting your windows and now you've got a mess? No worries: M-x balance-windows has you covered. It tries to redistribute screen real estate equally among your frame's windows.

    I always knew emacs was commie.

    fomosapien, to emacs

    Daily enjoyment:

    align-regexp

    This one has a somewhat confusing docstring, but it lets you align lines of text into columns. You get to decide what the boundary of a column looks like and how to align it.

    E.g. this confusing monstrosity is what you want 99% of the time:

    (align-regexp (region-beginning) (region-end) "\\(\\s-*\\)\\s-" 1 1 t)

    It aligns text into columns at least 1 space apart.

    Private
    fomosapien,

    @Drew @cbontenbal @philippsteinkrueger @philosophy

    > if you redefine god arbitrarily, then yeah, I guess there won't be any atheists

    Spinoza, is that you?

    fomosapien, to emacs

    Daily enjoyment:

    kmacro-start-macro

    Bound to C-x (, all of your keystrokes will be recorded including: switching buffers or windows, calling commands, inserting text into a buffer, navigating the buffer, etc. Recording continues until either (a) an error occurs (b) you escape it by doing C-g or ESC ESC ESC etc or (c) you end the macro with C-x ).

    After C-x ) the keyboard macro is made available to run via C-x e.

    I use this ALL THE TIME for automating repetitive tasks that come up in such a way that devising a more-complete automation solution would not be worth it.

    For example: I was editing a yaml file the contents of which were extremely regular except for one word, which existed in a list in a different file. This is NO PROBLEM for macros. You record yourself jumping between the target buffer and the buffer with the list of words, copying, jumping back, typing out the yaml, and boom. You've got yourself a macro.

    Really decent of emacs to help me avoid boring typing.

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