I use EXWM and three monitors, so knowing my window numbers is crucial to my navigation. I used to use Ace Window to present a red digit at the corner of emacs screens with which number to press to get there. The two problems with this are that you can’t know your numbers until you invoke Ace Windows, and more damningly, you can’t get these numbers on exwm (non-emacs) windows, such as my ever-present browsers.

Part of the power of emacs is the navigation and paradigm: cursors zipping around, sophisticated kill-ring and undo support, interactive searching, frames and windows, etc. And all of this within a keyboard-driven interface. So when done right there are some exceptional wrappers/interfaces. Let’s focus on things that are actually just an emacs interface over facilitiers provided by other programs/apis – not just emacs replacements. Below are some superb examples that I find superb:

There has been recent discussion about emacs for text editing and it got me thinking; I use emacs for a lot of non-code text editing and here are some features I use all the time that lead me to consider emacs good at text-editing. I’ll separate them into built-in and external library categories. What would you add to this list for things that help with raw text-editing (not IDE-like programming features)?

The Problem I have text in Cyrillic and need to replace individual characters with their transliteration. I have a tiny json of the mappings: {"в": "v","а": "a","ф": "f","ё": "yo","д": "d","ж": "zh","ы": "y","э": "e","л": "l","щ": "shch","я": "ya","й": "j","у": "u","н": "n","г": "g","с": "s","п": "p","ч": "ch","б": "b","х": "kh","е": "ye","ъ": "\"","з": "z","ю": "yu","ь": "'","ш": "sh","о": "o","к": "k","и": "i","ц": "ts","м": "m","т": "t","р": "r"} And I have a number of files that contain lists with entries like

I now have a perfect use for the rarely-used numpad! Because I have three monitors connected and am an exwm/winum user to navigate all those screens from the keyboard, I have bound that rarely-used numpad to quickly allow for switching between screens, up to 9 (I am not sure my brain could handle more than 9 decisions on viewports, anyway…). The magic is that numpad numbers are a different keycodde than the normal numberline at the top of the keyboard.

I recently shuffled things with my office and found that I have hardware and ports for a third monitor to connect to my exwm setup. So, without further ado, how to get it going and registered with Linux/EXWM? Edit [2022-01-02 Sun] an easier way with arandr Downloading and installing arandr made this whole configuration much simpler than using the raw randr output. I finally made the jump when I was receiving an error at my attempts to load it manually: xrandr: Configure crtc 2 failed.

Emacs is really an endless world of commands, options, and use-cases, especially for dealing with text. Sorting text is a really common thing and often plain-old M-x sort-lines does the trick in one fell swoop. But what if you want something more sophisticated? It turns out my eyes have been opened and emacs has led me to think about sorting things in ways I never even thought about before.

What ghosts/anomalies do you encounter in the Chtulhu Mansion that is your emacs setup? Emacs is the closest thing now existing to the vaunted “lisp machines” that were originally prescribed to make lisp run effectively. This seems all the more true of exwm users like myself, who are taking the proposition of “emacs as operating system” somewhat literally (at least, to those who don’t consider the difference between a window manager and an operating system.

I love the advocacy for a custom-less setup given here. Mind you, I have no desire to go without the customization family of helper commands like customize-group and customize-variable: the ability to rapidly explore the options available for plugins, libraries, and styles feels like a “killer feature”. But as software engineering has grown over the decades we are in a place to better understand the values in locating those customization in the same place where they can be associated, shared, and simultaneously deleted/edited.

Previously I’ve talked about the inability to refer to my code screens from within exwm if I’m on a video call in my browser; it shows the option fo other browser windows, and the option of the whole screen, but not an emacs buffer. The solution is simple and beautifully recursive: run emacs within your exwm emacs. Do what? Run emacs within your main exwm emacs session. M-S & emacs.