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[Emacspeak] Emacspeak: Hidden Holiday Gems



Title: Emacspeak HHG: Hidden Holiday Gems

Emacspeak HHG: Hidden Holiday Gems

1. Introduction

This is an Emacspeak-specific follow-on to my article Emacs: Hidden Holiday Gems. This article extends its predecessor by:

  1. Adding Emacspeak-specific details for each gem; the earlier article purposely avoided anything Emacspeak-specific.
  2. Where appropriate, I'll point out the importance of choosing a solution that is appropriate to the user, e.g., low-vision vs complete eyes-free use. Note that for the most part, Emacspeak is optimized for the latter case.
  3. As before, the goal is not to be exhaustive; — rather the goal is to be thought-provoking with respect to encouraging readers to discover their own optimal solution. The reference section at the end links to some of the follow-up discussion on the Emacspeak Mailing List.
  4. All topics covered here are already well-documented in the Emacs and Emacspeak manuals, and this article will not attempt to replace those.

2. Emacspeak: Hidden Holiday Gems

Selective Display
This expands and collapses content purely based on indentation. The human eye is very efficient at scanning down the margin and ignore content indented beyond a given level; selective-display provides the same affordance when you cannot see the display.
Registers
Easily becomes part of muscle-memory, especially when moving text around, duplicating content in multiple locations. For more complex use-cases, I use yasnippets, which is one of Emacs' many template libraries.
Bookmarks
Emacspeak builds heavily on Emacs' built-in bookmarks to provide:
  1. Persistent bookmarks when reading EPub and Bookshare books.
  2. Audio Marks (AMarks) within org-mode buffers for marking locations in audio streams such as Podcasts.
  3. An Emacspeak browser for browsing saved eww-marks and a-marks.
  4. Together, the above make a very useful note-taking extension to org-mode.
Tabulated Lists

Implements tabulated UIs and is speech-enabled by Emacspeak.

  • Emacspeak augments it with additional keyboard navigation.
  • This is leveraged in Emacs by a variety of

end-user packages including package.el and its asynchronous cousin paradox.el.

  • It is also used to advantage by empv, a powerful

interface to the GNU MPv media player.

  • AMarks mentioned in the previous item, this is my present means of listening to tech-talks on Youtube while taking notes using org-mode.
Forms Mode
Forms interface used by Emacspeak to browse BBC programs.
Mark Ring
Supported by default in Emacspeak but something I dont use much. Some of its affordances really shine in transient-mark-mode but that facility is somewhat counter to eyes-free use.
Undo
Both basic and advanced. However a long series of undo and redo commands as with tree-undo can get confusing quickly in eyes-free interaction.
Dired
I use dired-mode and its derivatives heavily:
  • To browse the file-system as intended.
  • With emacspeak-zoxide to rapidly move to far-away portions of the file system.
  • With locate to search the file system.
  • With command emacspeak-m-player-locate-media to find and play local media.
  • With flx and fuzzy completion to provide a powerful interactive UI for finding and playing media such as Internet streams.
- Writeable Dired
Useful to:
  • Consistently rename files, especially when confronted with filenames with embedded white space.
Org-Mode
This margin is too small to do it justice; see documentation for module emacspeak-org for all that Emacspeak does with org.
Magit
As with the previous item, see the associated Emacspeak documentation for emacspeak-magit.
Forge
I use forge for issue tracking, but often revert to old habits and use gh at the shell inside Emacs.
EWW
See the Emacspeak documentation for emacspeak-eww. Highlights include:
  • Dom filtering,
  • XPath filtering,
  • MPlayer and EMpv integration for playing online media,
  • EPub and Bookshare books,
  • And much, much more.
Elfeed
My chosen means of following RSS and Atom feeds.
GNUS
For mail, now that Usenet is history.
  • I use gnus as an imap mail reader for GMail.
  • Emacspeak implements the equivalent of GMail's search operators.
  • I complement gnus with package vm for reading email delivered locally; I use fetchmail to fetch mail and procmail to sort mail into folders in the background.
  • And finally I use notmuch to search locally saved email.
Tramp
Accessing and working in the Cloud:
  • I use tramp to open remote files.
  • Emacspeak wizard emacspeak-wizards-tramp-open-location to quickly open files on servers I access often.
  • If you work in the Cloud, Emacspeak lets you SSH to your CloudTop and have Emacs running on the CloudTop speak on your local machine.
  • The above can be done using a plain old XTerm with screen, dtach, or emacs –daemon providing a persistent Emacs session at the remote end.
  • Alternatively, you can use wizard emacspeak-wizards-remote-frame to open a graphical frame on the remote machine.
Eshell
A Shell that is deeply integrated into Emacs. Fully speech-enabled by Emacspeak. Well-suited for running compile, grep and friends for starters.
Comint
This is the goto solution for software development in Emacspeak, be it Common Lisp or Python.
Zip Archives
One more reason you dont need to leave Emacs for a text console.
Calculators
From the simple to complex, we have it all!
  • Simple calculations.
  • Symbolic Algebra.
  • Calc in embedded mode can directly replace a calculation with an answer.
  • For even smarter work-flows, leverage org-mode with calc.
  • you can even audio-format computations in Calc output as LaTeX using AsTeR.

3. References

  1. Mailing List Discussion.
  2. Emacs: Hidden Holiday Gems.
  3. Emacspeak Manual.
  4. Emacspeak Blog Articles as a single page.

    Note that the Emacspeak blog, the online manual etc., are all available locally in the Emacspeak Git checkout.

Date: 2023-12-15 Fri 00:00

Author: T.V Raman

Created: 2023-12-19 Tue 16:18

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