My heavy emacs use was both the motivation and the obstacle to switching to a new keyboard layout. Motivation because my life is keyboard driven, so there are healh and efficiency reasons to want to make the best of my keyboard experience. Obstruction because so much of my emacs and typing proficiency is in my muscle memory, and this might be lost if I make a drastic change. Well, rather than Colemaks or QwertZ, which aim to maintain most of your muscle memory, I decided to go whole hog and do Dvorak.

For the past years I have had a little script that shuffles my ~/.profile file back and forth so that rebooting starts in exwm or not, since starting in my GUI is occasionally exactly what I need. Reviewing the exwm page1, though, I found a way of adding exwm (actually, “emacs”) to the list of “Start Session In…” options that are shown on the login screen, which bypasses the ~/.

I have a 3-monitor setup, using a USB3 dock. Plugging in to my windows machine just works; all monitors connect. However, plug in into my exwm machine sometimes fails, where the extra monitors will remain blank. Usually this is easily fixed when I see it; I press C-M- to open up a terminal outside exwm, and all monitors come alive; then C-M- back to exwm and it finds them, and all workspaces are where they should be.

I recently began having major problems with emacs, including my emacs freezing for significant amounts of time and my exwm windows requiring a repeated command to share focus: one for emacs to think it was focusing there, and another for exwm to move its focus. It never occurred to me that they were related, and efforts to sort them out went to a recent juncture in which I’d both performed a rolling-system upgrade (3000+ packages and Linux kernel upgraded) and also some major upgrades to my emacs config.

Using bufler1 and selectrum2 to navigate browser buffers concisely. Firefox plugin Because one of exwm greatest benefits is using emacs’ in-built buffer methods for navigation, it is handy to include the address of any website in its title so the buffer can be found by just searching, e.g., “slack”. For this reason the misleadingly named “KeePass Helper"3 is tremendously useful. Now I can easily select my buffers with a random-access method off a portion of the URL.

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.

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.

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.

Using exwm with emacs-in-emacs I sometimes make a mistake and start a shell-process going that I need to stop. However, C-c is grabbed by my parent exwm session and so doesn’t send anything to my shell. How can I do this manually? Answer C-c C-c is short for comint-interrupt-subjob Resources https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/ja97xs/weekly_tipstricketc_thread/g8xu647?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3