Recent content in Emacs on Janusworx
I’ve never updated my Emacs packages until recently, because Emacs is where all my writing happens, and so I’m justifiably paranoid. But then some packages stopped working, due to various circumstances 1 and an update solved it. So I’ve decided to update my packages once a quarter, so that I don’t lose days yak shaving when something goes wrong and I handle breakage on my terms and not the…
Org Mode, by default, shows me the whole week, when I pull up my agenda. That’s not how I work though. I normally look at the week on Monday mornings (or Sunday evenings) to plan out the week and then work everyday by just looking at what I ought to get done that particular day. Like Dale Carnegie says, Shut off the past! Let the dead past bury its dead. Shut out the yesterdays which have lighted…
Now that I use my local machine to draft all my posts, desktop Emacs makes everything easier … with one exception. It swallows up a lot of my Espanso expansions. My current bugbear is that it will not render a = when expanding. I know this is entirely something that I brought on myself, and neither Emacs or Espanso in isolation will have issues. My workaround after rummaging through Espanso’s…
This is how I imagine diary float entries in Emacs. Photo courtesy, noah eleazar on Unsplash I finally went ahead and read about what Emacs Diary S-expressions were. Going back, a bit. I make heavy use of Org Mode’s deadline and scheduling features. I put schedules and deadlines in lots of tasks across my ten or so org files, so that I can look at them every week, to decide what I’ll be doing this…
I did one of those periodic, empty your mind sessions today. Everything is now in a brain dump org file. And now, like a every good productivity system preaches, I want to review the dump periodically. There is a task for my miscellenea for e.g. Could I convert it to a link and have it open the file at that precise location? Turns out Org Mode links let me do just that. All I need to do, is first…
Now that I have the power of large language models , in the palm of my hand … You just had to be there, to really appreciate this 😂 Image, courtesy user straiven on makeagif I decided to see, if it could help me solve one of my real pain points with Org Mode. I had asked for help over on the fediverse , after months of trial and error, on just how to fix this. The issue being, I needed a way to…
So I bought myself comics. And I was naively trying to count how many I got. And I went aha! I’ll paste the lines into Emacs and the lines numbers will tell me :) So I just selected stuff off the web and put it in and … Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, Vol. 2 Dynamite Entertainment CBZ 185.4 MB EPUB 105.4 MB PDF 439.9 MB Queen Sonja - Issue. #2 Dynamite Entertainment CBZ 17.7 MB EPUB 16.6 MB PDF 137.2…
Logo courtesy, the Org Mode Website Lisp is on the list of things to learn someday. 1 And in the meanwhile, I need to be able to hack Emacs to do the stuff I want. But also, there are a ton of other things, that are currently much, much higher on my list of priorities. 2 And while the community is extremely kind and generous, the expectation is that you need to put in the time and the work. Which…
tldr: C-x n s to narrow, C-x n w to widen Now that life’s getting busier and busier, with lots more things on my plate, ye olde system of writing the day’s tasks down on paper does not work any more. Specially since, I’ve begun logging clock times 1 . Writing them down by hand is a giant pain. This is what the plan’s begun to look like. An unwieldy plan. Click this image or any below, for larger…
Collection of various little things I find handy when I am lost in Emacs Truly lost and need help about help itself? C-h C-h or C-h ? C-h m should bring up a list of all the shortcuts available to that mode. Want to find out what the docs mean when they refer to something? C-h o and then type in that name. For e.g. when the Org Mode docs refer to org-hide-leading-stars , a C-h o => Return =>…
I must admit to stealing … quite a lot … from a bot at that! Zoetrope’s , “ random color contrasts ” gets colours from Adam Morse and John Otander’s Randoma11ly and posts them a few times a day. I’ve been writing down the ones I love and find interesting, in an Org note, in the hopes I’ll use them someday. (I know I’m just hoarding colours 😂. But hey, I used one 1 out of the thirty-odd colours,…
Updated to Emacs 29.2 , just now. Took me and my four core workhorse about fifteen minutes tops, from start to finish. Emacs 29.0 was the first version I compiled from source, because I wanted the latest release as soon as it was out and I no longer had the patience for the kindly distribution folk (or third party packagers) to give me a binary. The first time was a nightmare. I didn’t have…
If someone had told me three and a half years ago , that I would: Use Emacs as my primary editor nearly everywhere. Not just as an editor. In fact, I would stop thinking of it as an editor and come to see it for what it really is. A whole computer with an editor bolted on. Use Emacs not just for writing, but also have it serve as the cornerstone for two other extremely important activities in my…
Every evening, after my shutdown ritual , I move my current day’s branch to the bottom of my Org Mode file, so I begin the next day at the same fixed place, at line 36. 1 The day is done; moving it to the bottom of the pile Every time I move though, it goes there and sits, right next to the last branch, instead of under it. So I would grumble a bit, and then go hit the return key as required, to…
Figuring out my webapps problem yesterday made me ask myself if I could somehow repurpose that little xdotool script to solve another niche itch that I had. Spoiler alert: It did. I run Emacs as a daemon , and use EmacsClient to connect to the Emacs process. Makes it really ease to launch, work on, sling around and close lots of Emacs windows. 1 Which brings me to the hiccough. I launch…
I love it whenever the Roger Ebert of the Emacs world aka Jon Snader aka irreal, gets his hands on one of my posts and uses it for his insightful annotations. His conclusion is something I totally relate to, because that is exactly what has kept me using Emacs ever since I began using it. It bends to my will. Or as Jon puts it … It’s yet another way that Emacs adapts itself to its users rather…
Updated: 2023-11-17. Read more below Nearly everything I write is in Emacs. 1 It’s been slightly more than two years, since I made the move to using it as my everyday text editor. I have a spartan Emacs config, with only a few customisations, that I found by watching David Wilson aka System Crafters’ Emacs From Scratch #1 video and the rest by searching on the web and asking around on the…
I’ve been struggling to get org-caldav working on the desktop. Nothing to do with the program itself. It’s excellent, fairly intuitive and really well documented. There just seems to be some gremlin in the works, that does not let the darned calendar see my org files. 1 Will keep at it. What this note is for however, was the pleasant realisation that Emacs can transparently work with gpg encrypted…
When I wrote about, ticking off checkboxes in Org Mode , I’d linked to line 101 of org-mouse.el . While I’d read the main summary, I somehow missed line 30 … ;; * subtree expansion/collapse (org-cycle) with the left mouse button Which I accidentally triggered today … After an (accidental) click opens up to … Org Mode continues to delight! Hurrah! Feedback on this post? Mail me at…
Nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing! I didn’t feel well today. So I went to bed. Did log my usual weekly, books and fitness entries though. 1 Urdu # Did the “ain” / “gain” group. Had fun, trying to pronounce the fricative gh ( /ɣ/ ) sound. Emacs # Just a little note of gratitude to the community over at Emacslife Me, thinking out aloud in the last part of this section , led to several folks…
Rest day! Not doing much! Emacs # It works! Yesterday’s little hack , to clock in and out when I change state works well! It doesn’t seem to have broken anything. Also I added a WORKING state, and tagged my function to that. The clock in and out happen when I switch in an out of the WORKING state. Because I want my parent task to show IN_PROGRESS and the current subtask to be what I am working on.…
Decided to play hooky today, because I got up reallly late and then I got stuff at home to do. Emacs # Since I was playing hooky with my time and attention anyway, I decided to see, if I could tackle this little thing, I wanted to happen with my Org Mode. Everytime I move my TODO status for a task to IN_PROGRESS , I want Org to automatically clock in for me. And everytime I move out of the…
While I mostly use the keyboard when doing everything Org related, there are a few times in the day, when I cannot. These are mostly mornings and evenings when I bustle about home, doing this thing and that. Things that are part of my routine. Things that are checkboxes in my routine.org file. It helps me get through the day without thinking of whether, I gave the better half her meds or whether I…
I wrote the other day , about switching to Noah Webster’s dictionary everywhere, I possibly could. Now I did that after reading this lovely James Somers post. And that post seems to be resounding through the web, with folks integrating it into their workflows in different ways. So I was really happy when I read Jon Snader’s post telling me I could have my beloved Webster’s dictionary in Emacs!…
This post was originaly published on 2022-09-27. Updated 2022-09-28 , to include the improved script. It’s been a year, since I figured out the hack that finally let me use my Compose key in Emacs. 1 Without it, I am unable to type any kind of quotation marks or umlauts in emacs. A year in, and I’m tired of restarting the service everytime the machine comes on. The computer can do that for me. So…
I remember, when I first learned it, the Org Manual mentioning I could have code, quotes, poetry and sundry self structured blocks of text, where the text in that block would flow like I wanted it to. I could have indentation or line breaks as I pleased. And then I promptly forgot about it. The only thing I did remember were code blocks. And that I needed to do a #+begin_src and then a #+end_src…
I often fat fingered the file name / buffer name / Org Roam link name when launching something new. And then when I am busy and knee deep in work, I glance up to see the error glaring at me. I figured out , looked up how to fix it Hit C-x d to flip into a dired buffer Find my filename in the list. ( C-s can help search and narrow stuff) Then C-x C-q to go into Wdired mode Change the file name to…
More diving into Org Mode and Emacs. I have a stuff-to-do.org file, that serves as an inbox for most long term tasks that I want to tackle. Stuff that needs doing, books that I want to buy, books that I want to read, courses that I want to learn, movies or tv shows that I want to watch, stuff on the web that I want to catchup on, etc. etc. etc. And all this while, I have been moving tasks into my…
I started with a very simple init.el when I started using Emacs. Rather than learning it in a structured manner, I just decided to jump in at whatever end of the pool and figure it out as I go. I may not know Emacs, but I do know what I want out of a general purpose text editor. And bending Emacs to do my will, to do what I want it to do or behave in the manner I want it to behave. And Emacs to my…
Org mode is slowly spreading its tentacles increasingly becoming something, I cannot live without, to manage my day. And I’m getting pretty consistent with it too! Like you see above, I use dates as my headlines, below which I list the various tasks for the day. 1 And that’s where I run into my current itch to scratch. I don’t want to keep typing out the date daily. The computer can do that for…
Originally published 2021/10/27. Updated to include the .xssessionsrc point I run pretty often into this issue, so this is a checklist for me. Issue being, that I cannot use Compose key sequences to type out the characters I need. Case in point being, the apostrophe ’ and the quote marks “” , ‘’ that I use, all the live long day. Make sure that emacs is running as a service. It runs in your user,…
Did I not just write about this, the other day with Emacs? I did, but Pycharm seems to have the same affliction. Pycharm, just like Emacs, stubbornly refuses to accept my Compose key combinations. Which means … you guessed it, no ‘,”,“ or ’ punctuation and all the other affordances, Compose gives me. Considering that I need both , Pycharm as well as Emacs in my life , it behooved me, that I go…
I want to leave VS Code behind me and move to using Emacs for mostly everything I write in the long haul. Emacs is the editor I use to putter around for any text editing I need to do, but most of my long form writing and coding were done in VS Code. And the more I use it (VS Code, not Emacs), the more uncomfortable I get, no matter how nice and shiny it is. While they are old and crufty, there is…
Whenever Emacs saves a file, it makes a backup of the original. So if I had a file.txt and I make changes and save it, Emacs firsts backs up the original to file.txt~ . While I love this functionality, and it has saved me from a pickle more than once, I don’t love the way my folders get polluted with ~ files all over the place. My blog’s drafts folder had hundreds of these. Mercifully, Emacs…
Unlike #100DaysOfCode, I am not quite giving up on Emacs. Rather that it has turned out to be a habit that has fit in, quite well, and I don’t need this accountability any more. I use it for most of my prose (not code, yet.) This post, is in fact, written in Emacs :) I have not gained any modicum of knowledge by any means. But I have enough muscle memory and immersion, to make sure I will continue…
Practiced moving around with the Emacs keys for 30 mins
Learnt all about movement and search today.
Too tired, so just worked my way through the Anki deck for a bit today.
Had an extremely busy day with studies today, so could not spend time learning much Emacs. Decided to do a little bit of plucking the low hanging fruit and customising Emacs a bit to my liking. I created an init.el file in the emacs.d folder in my home directory, to add all my custom stuff into. Adding Package Managers # Yesterday, I had learnt, that I could install additional functionality by…
Slowly making my way through the Mastering Emacs book. Things I did / learnt today … Learnt that if I want to run Emacs all over the place (like I do), then the best thing to do is to have Emacs, running as a daemon in the background. So I did that via the handy systemd instructions, on this page. And that Emacs has a kitchen sink’s worth of commands. And that Emacs commands are like playing…
Getting back to life slowly. Abandoning the idea of the daily posts. Too amorphous for me. Doing short 20 hour projects seems to work better for me. To that end, here are my goals for September 20h of emacs - goal - get familiar 20h of Dvorak - goal - get upto 35wpm walk daily - goal - 10000 steps or 90m daily More as I figure this out. Daily programming is dead! Long live working towards daily…