Back in the late 1990s, like plenty of people who were very online, I was a very avid user of Usenet. There were a few groups I was very active in, even a couple that I maintained a FAQ for. Being that active and wanting to help and answer questions, I was forever posting and pasting links to various resources. Given that I used Emacs to edit my posts1, I eventually realised that I should come up with a tool that let me call on common URLs quickly.
So back in 1998 handyurl.el was born. It was a simple idea: have a file of URLs that I commonly refer to and let me quickly pick from one and paste it. This made for a useful tool and also gave me something to build given I was learning Emacs Lisp at the time.
For reasons I can't quite recall, some time later (the next year, by the looks of things), I wrote quickurl.el as a successor to handyurl.el. I honestly can't remember why this happened, I can't remember why I didn't just keep extending handyurl.el. But, anyway, quickurl.el did more and was more flexible, with built-in URL-grabbing and editing and so on.
Not that long later I got an email from the FSF asking if I might be willing to hand over copyright so that quickurl.el could become part of Emacs itself. I was, of course, delighted to do so.
Eventually quickurl.el was declared obsolete and, while it seems to still be shipped with Emacs, it's not documented or easy to discover.
In the deprecation notice in NEWS the suggestion is that the user should switch to one or more of 3 alternatives:
** The quickurl.el library is now obsolete.
Use 'abbrev', 'skeleton' or 'tempo' instead.
abbrev I know, the other two I've never noticed and don't know anything about.
Obviously, between quickurl.el being pulled into Emacs, and it being made obsolete, my use of it fell right off. I eventually stopped posting to and reading Usenet, I also stopped using mutt+Emacs as my mail client of choice, and so found myself seldom writing things that needed lots of links, in Emacs.
Until recently.
At the moment I'm finding that I'm wanting to write on my blog more and more, and doing that means I often want to include some common links, and I write my posts in Emacs using markdown-mode and with a little help from blogmore.el; the need to have an easy-to-pick-from common menu of URLs is back.
Driven by this I've made a point of using abbrev to initially solve this problem. This works, but I do have a problem: I keep forgetting what the abbreviations are. I find myself wanting to have a key binding that lets me at the very least completing-read the desired abbrev. So yesterday I quickly knocked up unabbrev.el.
It's simple, straightforward, small and does the job I needed. Doubtless there's something else out there that can do this sort of thing too, but part of the fun of Emacs (for me) is that I find I have a need and I can hack together some Lisp and get that problem solved.
I suppose what I should do is revive either handyurl.el or quickurl.el and tweak and update whichever, at the very least adding some sort of insert formatting facility that is sensitive to the underlying mode (because links in Markdown need a format different from links in HTML, etc).
For now though unabbrev.el is going to help my failing memory when I want to link a common resource.
As an aside, all of this does have me wonder about one thing: is the Free Software Foundation the place that code goes to die? Like, sure, of course I can make changes to quickurl.el and do my own thing with it, as long as I don't misrepresent the copyright status and maintain a compatible licence, etc; but there is this thing where, if Emacs doesn't want that code any more, if the FSF don't want that code any more, wouldn't it be nice if they'd sign it back over again?
I am tempted to drop them a line and see what the deal is. I did tag-ask on Mastodon but got no reply. Unfortunately though that account looks like the FSF treat Mastodon as a write-only resource.