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Trying to move away from emacs


Author: Solène

Date: 03 July 2018

Tags: unix emacs


NILHello


Today I will write about my current process of trying to get rid of

emacs. I use it extensively with org-mode for taking notes and making

them into a agenda/todo-list, this helped me a lot to remember tasks

to do and what people told to me. I also use it for editing of

course, any kind of text or source code. This is usually the editor I

use for writing the blog articles that you can read here. This one is

written using **ed**. I also read my emails in emacs with mu4e (which

last version doesn't work anymore on powerpc due to a c++14 feature

used and no compiler available on powerpc to compile it...).


While I like Emacs, I never liked to use one big tool for everything.

My current quest is to look for a portable and efficient way to

replace differents emacs parts. I will not stop using Emacs if the

replacements are not good enough to do the job.


So, I identified my Emacs uses:


+ todo-list / agenda / taking notes

+ writing code (perl, C, php, Common LISP)

+ IRC

+ mails

+ writing texts

+ playing chess by mail

+ jabber client


I will try for each topic to identify alternatives and challenge them

to Emacs.


Todo-list / Agenda / Notes taking


This is the most important part of my emacs use and it is the one I

would really like to get out of Emacs. What I need is: writing

quickly a task, add a deadline to it, add explanations or a

description to it, be able to add sub-tasks for a task and be able to

display it correctly (like in order of deadline with days / hours

before deadline).


I am trying to convert my current todo-list to **taskwarrior**, the

learning curve is not easy but after spending one hour playing with it

while reading the man page, I have understood enough to replace

org-mode with it. I do not know if it will be as good as org-mode but

only time will let us know.


By the way, I found **vit**, a ncurses front-end for taskwarrior.


Writing code


Actually Emacs is a good editor. It supports syntax coloring, can

evaluates regions of code (depend of the language), the editor is

nice etc... I discovered **jed** which is a emacs-like editor written

in C+libslang, it's stable and light while providing more features

than mg editor (available in OpenBSD base installation).


While I am currently playing with **ed** for some reasons (I will

certainly write about it), I am not sure I could use it for

writing a software from scratch.


IRC


There are lots of differents IRC clients around, I just need to pick

up one.



Mails


I really enjoy using mu4e, I can find my mails easily with it, the

query system is very powerful and interesting. I don't know what I

could use to replace it. I have been using alpine some times ago, and

I tried mutt before mu4e and I did not like it. I have heard about

some tools to manage a maildir folder using unix commands, maybe I

should try this one. I did not any searches on this topic at the

moment.



Writing text


For writing plain text like my articles or for using $EDITOR for

differents tasks, I think that ed will do the job perfectly :-) There

is ONE feature I really like in Emacs but I think it's really easy to

recreate with a script, the function bind on M-q to wrap a text to

the correct column numbers!


Update: meanwhile I wrote a little perl script using Text::Wrap

module available in base Perl. It wraps to 70 columns. It could be

extended to fill blanks or add a character for the first line of a

paragraph.


perl

use strict;use warnings;

use Text::Wrap qw(wrap $columns);

open IN, '<'.$ARGV[0];

$columns = 70;

my @file = <IN>;

print wrap("","",@file);


This script does not modify the file itself though.


Some people pointed me that Perl was too much for this task. I have

been told about Groff or Par to format my files.


Finally, I found a very **BARE** way to handle this. As I write my

text with ed, I added an new alias named "ruled" with spawn ed with a

prompt of 70 characters #, so I have a rule each time ed displays its

prompt!!! :D


It looks like this for the last paragraph:


c

been told about Groff or Par to format my files.


Finally, I found a very **BARE** way to handle this. As I write my

text with ed, I added an new alias named "ruled" with spawn ed with a

prompt of 70 characters #, so I have a rule each time ed displays its

prompt!!! :D

.

w

Obviously, this way to proceed only works when writing the content at

first. If I need to edit a paragraph, I will need a tool to format

correctly my document again.



Jabber client


Using jabber inside Emacs is not a very good experience. I switched

to profanity (featured some times ago on this blog).



Playing Chess


Well, I stopped playing chess by mails, I am still waiting for my

recipient to play his turn since two years now. We were exchanging

the notation of the whole play in each mail, by adding our turn each

time, I was doing the rendering in Emacs, but I do not remember

exactly why but I had problems with this (replaying the string).

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