Title: Trying to move away from emacs
Author: Solène
Date: 03 July 2018
Tags: unix emacs
Description:
Hello
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.
#!/usr/bin/env 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.
dataswamp.org:70 /~solene/article-leave-emacs:120: port field too long