I recently discovered a set of useful packages and commands that facilitate some common file and buffer handling scenarios. Despite being really simple, all provide a real improvement over the standard, built-in alternatives, at least for me.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an environment in which to see the
effect of a regular expression on a set of target strings?
Ideally such that changes in matching immediately reflected,
as one changes and experiments with the regular expression
itself? The re-builder functionality built into Emacs does
exactly that.
The default highlighting of the Emacs “region” (the part of a buffer between “point” and “mark” — selected text, if any, in other words) is, out of the box, barely visible, at least against a light background. An attempt to customize it runs into an interesting problem when used in a text- or terminal-based environment, rather than a GUI.
I wanted to explore some of the new features in Emacs 29 (in particular Eglot). The version of Emacs that ships with my version of Linux Mint is Emacs 27, so I decided to build Emacs 29 from scratch.
This turned out to be absolutely painless; but installing the new version seamlessly into the existing environment did cause some hang-ups.
As it turns out, Emacs actually allows for different cursor shapes. We can use this feature to change the cursor based on the current minor mode.
After seeing positive references to it on Linux Weekly News and elsewhere, I bought a copy of “Mastering Emacs” by Mickey Petersen.
Disclaimer: I use Emacs, but I am not deeply into various emacs cultish uses. I just write books and about everything else in it. (Except mail.)
That being said, I am currently dealing with Markdown and friends, and so I came across Org Mode.