Endless Parentheses
Artur Malabarba
Endless Parentheses is a blog. Originally, it exclusively featured posts about Emacs, mostly focused on improving your productivity and making Emacs life easier in general. Now, however, it has mutated into a blog about productivity in general. Emacs still permeates my life (and will still show up here a lot), but I feel I have more to talk about in other subjects and won’t be restricting myself to Emacs anymore.
Top Words
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- buffer
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- packages
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All posts (153)
One of my personal favorite new additions to Emacs 25 is, in fact, completely invisible to most users. The new macros if-let and when-let, although simple in purpose, are a delight to use and are frequently finding their way into my code. The other two additions, thread-first and thread-last, are a bit more...
Another library by the productive Nicolas Petton. map.el is a cousin to seq.el (remember?), but instead of manipulating plain sequences, it manipulates map-like collections (also known as dictionaries). The range of functions should include everything you expect, from map-values and map-keys to get a list of the...
In the upcoming version, EWW is getting a number of small improvements. This web browser, written by Lars Ingebrigtsen, is something of a new kid on the block, as it just came to life at the very end of the Emacs 24 cycle. Although it’s hard, if not impossible, to reliably render HTML inside an editor that’s 100%...
Since last week’s post was about Unicode characters, it makes sense to continue that trend today. This feature might go unnoticed by a lot of people who live in an ASCII world, but it will probably jump out at everyone else at one point or another. The name, if a bit odd, is “character-folding search”. In Emacs 25,...
Don’t be fooled by the apparent simplicity of this feature. Its implementation has been the most controversial addition to the upcoming Emacs release — to a comical degree. This post, however, is not about arguments or implementation, it’s about Emacs 25. And this little nugget is all set for the next release. The...
Isearch is one of Emacs’ most useful (and probably most used) features. Getting in the habit of quickly hitting C-s followed by 2–4 letters will forever change the way you navigate buffers, and adding it to your repertoire is a tremendous productivity improvement. What, then, could we possibly improve on such a...
My Emacs auto-correct is one of the oldest posts on this blog, and I still see it pop up here and there on occasion. Last week, Norman Ramsey asked about an improvement to that command and I figured it’s worth an update post. As of today, the code in the post will search backwards for a typo, instead of just...
What do you do if you want to override a key only in a certain context? Take this Quotation Marks post as an example. We want to change the " key in general, but retain the regular behaviour if we’re inside a code-block. In this case the solution was to just call the old behaviour manually, but what if you’re...
I’ve written before about what prettify-symbols-mode can do for your buffers, ranging from pure eye-candy to signficant readability improvements. Simply put, this minor-mode “disguises” some strings in your buffer to look like something else. For instance, in emacs-lisp-mode it makes lambda be displayed as λ, and...
Today’s tip is one I learned from Magnar. A lot of Emacsers don’t know this, but most commands that move point large distances (like isearch or end-of-buffer) push the old position to the mark-ring. The advantage is that you can easily jump back through this history of positions by hitting C-u C-SPC. This is a...
Although there’s a surprising number of packages offering alternative minibuffer selection systems, the default minibuffer completion in Emacs is nothing to be scoffed at. Hitting Tab in the minibuffer gives you a slightly beefed up version of the bash completion, and after all these years that is still my preferred...
I’m an occasional user of some of the Emacs chat clients. Erc and jabber are both powerful packages, and it’s great to be able to use Slack, Gitter, and Google Chat from the cosy comfort of my Emacs frame. If I have one complain, though, it’s that neither of them has a functionality for keeping track of what part of...
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