Happiness is an emacs trifecta

Today was a good emacs day. Actually, any day I spend in emacs is good, but today was especially good, since I found three new little gems to stick in my init.el.

/* ---[ Show only one buffer on startup ]--- */

First, I wanted emacs to only open with a single buffer showing when I pass multiple files to it on the command line. A few minutes later, solution #1 found:

[Update 20-Aug-2012]: gist updated with shorter version based on feedback from Steven Purcell.

/* ---[ Override a paredit keybinding ]--- */

I've come to love paredit when working in Clojure and emacs-lisp. Except for one problem: for years I've used Cntl-<left> and Cntl-<right> a lot to quickly navigate around. Those keystrokes are deeply ingrained in my motor memory. The paredit author's way of working differs from mine though, since he bound those to "barf" and "slurp" (mmmmm), respectively. When you then try to zip quickly around the screen using Cntl-<left> and Cntl-<right> with paredit-mode enabled, your cursor goes nowhere and instead you make a holy mess of your parens and brackets in the file.

So I wanted to rebind barf and slurp to Meta-<left> and Meta-<right> and unbind the existing mappings with the Control key. For a while I've just been editing the paredit.el file, but now that we have a package system in emacs24, that will get overridden when I upgrade. Thus, I need a clean way to do this that works for any future upgrades. So, a few minutes later, solution #2 found:

I hadn't seen the eval-after-load function before. It is a particularly satisfying way to override bindings in another package.

/* ---[ Toggle between multiple windows and a single window ]--- */

I've been teaching emacs to an intern at my job and today after showing him macros, how to toggle comment blocks and ace-jump-mode (which is awesome!), he asked: currently, I've got 4 buffers showing, but what if I want to expand one window to fill the window, work on it and then restore emacs back to having the 4 buffers I had showing before?

My response: blink, blink.

Umm, that would awesome, why didn't I think of that? So a few minutes later, thanks to Ignacio Paz Posse (about the coolest name I've ever seen), beautiful solution #3:

This is my favorite emacs thing now.

That is, until I find the next shiny bit of emacs-lisp to make my day happier than usual.

[Update 20-Aug-2012]: Steve Purcell in the comments pointed out that there is another way to restore your window configuration that has been built into emacs since version 20: Winner Mode.

So if you have trouble with the toggle-windows-split or would rather use something built-in, try this instead. In your .emacs or init.el add:

(winner-mode 1)

Then when you have multiple buffers showing and you want to maximize one of them enter C-x 1 as usual to close all other windows except the one with cursor focus. To restore your previous window configuration enter C-c <left>. Sweetness.

Readability: Further improving your online reading experience

A while back I wrote a blog entry about how to overcome the lack of contrast and poor readability of many websites, even those that exist to provide content to be read online.

In that post I talked about some browser plugins (for Chrome and Firefox) where you can override those settings. In general these have improved my online reading experience, but they don't always work. There is also the problem of formatting. Some content sites clutter their web pages with too many advertisements, inserts and whirligigs so as to make reading downright unpleasant, even if they have good contrast for reading.

Case in point: http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/ssds-and-understanding-storage-performan/240004957

Or even worse from the same website: http://www.networkcomputing.com/920/920f1.html

This last one is so bad that I broke out my ruler: on my screen using Firefox, the text has occupies 29.167% of the screen width.

Maybe some people like that. It is reminiscent of an extremely busy old tyme newspaper layout.

If, like me, you don't like that style, then I have a suggestion: try readability.com. You sign up for a free account and install it as a browser plugin. It adds some buttons to your toolbar - I usually hate anything that does that, but in this case I've made an exception.

When you get to a page where you want to read the content, just click the "Read Now" button. It will extract just the content, including images that are part of the content, format it into a nice readable layout, copy it to their servers, generate a URL and redirect you to that URL. You can also choose between 5 themes. I picked the "inverse" theme which gives a dark background with light text. Here is that second article above using the "inverse" theme:

That contrast is still a little too faint for my taste - they should get some advice from Contrast Rebellion. So I go one further and use No Squint on firefox or or Change Colors on Chrome to make it an even darker background and lighter text:

---

One shortcoming: readability can't extract multipage articles, but you can choose the "print all" button on the website if they offer it and then press "Read Now".

Readability also offers a "Read Later" option. Click that puts the article on your reading list. You can also use Readability on Kindle, tablets and smart phones.

I'm sure there are many other services that do something similar. I haven't researched them since I've found Readability + No Squint (Firefox) or Change Colors (Chrome) works for me, but if you have one you like even better, let me know.