Return to the Essence of Text Editing
Not all those who wander are lost. – J.R.R. Tolkien Today I’m happy to announce Flycheck 38 - easily the biggest and most ambitious Flycheck release since I took over the stewardship of the project. It’s the release where Flycheck grows a proper story for language servers, gets the kind of inline diagnostics you’d expect from a modern editor, and learns to apply fixes - all without giving up the…
Embark is one of those packages that quietly rewires how you use Emacs. Think of it as a context-aware right-click: you invoke embark-act (I keep it on C-.) on whatever’s at point - a file name, a symbol, a URL - and Embark offers a menu of things you can do with it. The neat part is that it’s completely extensible, so you can teach it about new kinds of targets. Lately two of my projects, CIDER…
You’ve carefully arranged your windows just the way you want them - source code on the left, tests on the right, maybe a shell at the bottom. Then you run some command that calls display-buffer, and suddenly one of your carefully placed windows gets hijacked to show a *Help* buffer or a compilation log. We’ve all been there. The display-buffer machinery is one of Emacs’s most powerful features,…
Emacs users have long wanted the ability to push certain mode line elements to the right edge of the window. Think of it like having a left-aligned and right-aligned section in your mode line - buffer name on the left, maybe the time or some status info on the right. Before Emacs 30, achieving this required various hacks involving padding calculations and propertized strings. It was doable, but…
If you’ve used modern editors like VS Code, you’ve probably noticed how they display error and warning messages inline, right at the end of the offending line. It’s a nice touch - you don’t have to hover over a squiggly underline or check a separate diagnostics buffer to see what’s wrong. Emacs 30 brings this capability to Flymake with the new flymake-show-diagnostics-at-end-of-line option.
which-key is one of those packages I recommend to pretty much everyone - newcomers and grizzled Emacs veterans alike. You start a key sequence like C-x, pause for a moment, and it pops up a handy cheat sheet of every key that can follow. I’ve had it in my config for ages, and I suspect a lot of you have as well. Here’s the good news - as of Emacs 30 you don’t need to install it anymore. which-key…
When you write a tree-sitter major mode, it’s tempting to think the parser handles everything. It doesn’t. Tree-sitter drives font-lock, indentation, and structural navigation, but a whole layer of everyday Emacs behavior still runs on the humble syntax table: forward-sexp and friends, electric-pair-mode, delete-pair, forward-word, and anything built on syntax-ppss. (I wrote about that structural…
As part of the ongoing overhaul of my Emacs setup I’ve been trying to make the most of the built-in functionality that recent Emacs releases keep quietly shipping. My in-buffer completion setup is based on corfu and cape these days, but it turns out I had overlooked a nice Emacs 30 addition in the same area - completion-preview-mode. It gives you inline completion suggestions - the “ghost text” UI…
Yesterday I published a post about Jinx, where I mentioned in passing that dropping Flyspell freed up C-. and C-; for embark, and that this would be a topic for another article. Well, here it is! Embark has been around for quite a few years, and pretty much everyone in the vertico/consult crowd swears by it. Somehow I never got around to adopting it until my recent config overhaul, and now I keep…
I’ve been using corfu for in-buffer completion for a while now and I’m quite happy with it. There was one thing that kept bugging me, though - the completion popup would only ever show whatever the current major mode’s completion function had to offer. No plain word completion, no file name completion - if the major mode (or your LSP server) didn’t know about something, neither did the popup.…