Emacs Features
This post is intended as a contribution to this month’s Emacs Carnival on the topic of “Discovery of Emacs Features.”
How often do you discover an Emacs feature?
I’ve been using Emacs for 34 years now, which doesn’t mean I know everything about it (honestly, who does?), but rather that I know enough to get by. So I feel like I rarely discover new features; more often than not, I’m learning how to use a specific feature that I knew existed but hadn’t needed until now.
Obviously, it all depends on what you mean by “feature” and by “discovering”… When I hear “feature,” I tend to think of built-in features rather than of extra packages—but of course this distinction is arbitrary.
What was the most recent feature that you adopted?
Here’s something that matches the above definition: just this morning I discovered that color in compilation buffers is a standard feature—you just have to say you want it:
;;; Color in compilation buffers
(add-hook 'compilation-filter-hook 'ansi-color-compilation-filter)Are you a “Set it and forget it” type of user?
I guess so. I do try new packages, but unless it really solves a problem for me, I quickly forget about it. I also sometimes discover that what I assumed to be a built-in feature was something I’d written myself…
Do you read Emacs-centric social media trolling for new things to try?
Despite what I wrote above, I am always interested in learning new things, but I don’t go searching for new things to try. I do follow the #emacs hashtag on the Fediverse and of course I read Sacha Chua’s excellent Emacs news.
What's the next feature that you'd like to try?
Nothing immediately comes to my mind, see above. There are a number of features that I think might be useful and that I tried to use, but that I just don’t seem to “get.” So I think I should try them again, but since it’s so frustrating, I’m not really motivated to do so. The list includes Xref, the Org agenda, Projects, Dired, and Calc. Yes, that’s quite a list; no, there’s no need to tell me that I’m “missing out on the best”; the great thing about Emacs is what you want it to be.
For example, what is probably my oldest code that I still use almost daily (from the mid-1990s, last touched in 2011) relies on an obscure package last updated in 1998. No, hold it: I just found it online, there’s a newer version—from 2000. Anyway, it should be easy to implement it using Calc instead, but you see…
If you're a Feature Creator, tell us about that!
If “feature creator” just means “writing Elisp code,” then yes. I’ve recently started to move functions from my .emacs into separate packages. I’m benefitting from my sabbatical to clean up some of my less idiosyncratic code and to put it at least on Codeberg (I just realize that some code is still on GitHub, e.g., mxp-mac-grab). I’d really like to contribute back more to the communitiy, but I’m hesitant putting it on MELPA. So far, I’ve only done it for edit-metadata, and while it went really smoothly, as a perfectionist, I was anxious not to make any errors, but I consider myself an amateur Elisp programmer at best.
Conclusion
Even though I’m not really actively looking to discover new features, I’d nevertheless say that it’s one of the joys of Emacs that there’s so much to discover—even if you don’t look for it!