Placing Anchors In Emacs And What eev Is

Emacs is a wonderful operating system, lacking only a text editor. 

I have friends who get cross about this joke (“Nuh-uh!”) but it obliquely gets at what eev-mode is, and what eev-mode is is hard to get at at all. (But see Eduardo’s own pages).

Without more ado, imagine that I am in eev-mode and I want to anchor myself in this file near this emacs-joke. I type

<emacs-joke>

followed by M-A (alt- shift- a). This replaces <emacs-joke> with

«.emacs-joke»	(to "emacs-joke")
«emacs-joke»  (to ".emacs-joke")

as you will have seen, I copied «.emacs-joke» (to "emacs-joke") up next to the emacs joke. In emacs with eev, I can press M-e near (to ".emacs-joke") and it pulls the cursor and me over to whereever the first «.emacs-joke» is. Normally the «.emacs-joke» one is moved over to an index at the top of your file, and the circular nature of the pair lets you jump between the actual anchored place in your file, and its dotted anchor pair in your file’s index which lets you branch out into surrounding context.

eev replaces C-x C-e with M-e

At first blush this small change is a funny value proposition. However if we are going to be using s-expressions everywhere and sometimes many of them per minute, a little bit easier is a lot easier.

So I can create pairs of teleportation anchors across my file (normally one in the index, the other at a heading) by typing <foo> M-A and I can use them - via the elisp function to by pressing M-e.

Linear text, the past and the future

In my recent interview with Kent M. Pitman (which you should listen to), in the context of the Cross Refereced Editor Facility he made out of emacs substrate in 1984, Kent shares that at that time the feeling was that simple linear text files were a thing of the past and on their way out with nonlinear hyperlinked text ascending, whereas what has mostly happened is that simple linear text useage became more ascendent.

Revisiting our joke

Emacs is a wonderful operating system, lacking only a text editor. 

the mistake in the joke is that it sounds like emacs needs a normal - which sounds like linear - text editor to complete it. Surprisingly and interestingly eev-mode provides something else. Lisp expression paired teleportation anchors that are extra easy to activate.

See you on

the Mastodon to talk about this.