Emacs wishes for 2018

Posted on December 27, 2017
Tags: emacs

I like making New Year wishes. In 2018 I would like to do so many things, like finally learning Agda, finishing TAPL, reading a dozen of books on Medieval history. But most importantly I would like to improve my workflow by turning Emacs into platform-agnostic ultimate OS. Here’s what I’d do.

Getting rid of tmux

Don’t get me wrong. tmux is an exceptional tool. I used it for a while for the dual purpose: workspaces and session persisting. Tmux is not designed for neither, but hackery led me there.

From what I’m aware Emacs has built-in functionality for session persistance (desktop-save-mode), which works especially well with desktop+.

Also, there are good packages for providing workspace-like experience: eyebrowse, persp-mode, perspective to name some.

Mail and Calendar

I’m using Apple’s Mail and Calendar applications and it’s making me very Apple-dependent. I can’t imagine my life without these tools, yet there’s still hope for me.

Why does it matter? It matters, because I want to be productive on all platforms and homogeneous experience, I believe, is the key. It won’t matter if I run MacOS, or Linux, or heaven forbid, Windows. It’s always Emacs.

For email client, there are many options. Previously I played around with mu / mu4e backed by either mbsync or OfflineIMAP with IMAPFilter (for IMAP IDLE live updates).

As for Calendar, I’ll have to dive deeper into Orgmode. Calendar should work just fine, according to this blog post.

org-babel config

I embrace literate programming, so rewriting Emacs config in LP style is an attractive idea.

Contributing back

Last year I extensively contributed to various Ruby OSS projects. And there was just one contribution to dumb-jump, a widely used Emacs library. Will try my best to contribute back!