Recent content in Emacs on Jiewawa's blog
I previously wrote about useful Emacs commands for reading . This allowed me to use j and k to scroll the window up and down instead of going forward or backward a line. I am now using meow for my modal editing needs and have been really happy with it. Meow allows for custom states to be defined, but I have been using a different method recently that takes advantage of the built-in normal and…
It’s been nearly a year since the last time I wrote one of these and I am still working through the backlog. Here are 10 more Chinese books that I’ve read with a bonus DNF that I may get back to one day. 闯荡江湖二十年 by 龙乘风 | Roaming the Jianghu for Twenty Years by Long Chengfeng This was my final book of 2023 and I read it in only a day or two. I heard about Long Chengfeng being a Gu Long…
In my 20 years of studying Chinese, I have tried countless tools for helping me learn efficiently. Recently, I have seen a growing overlap between Chinese learners and Emacs users. Therefore I want to share some of the tools that I have found or developed since switching to our beloved editor. On AI/LLMs It’s probably quite shocking to find no AI packages on this list. While I don’t…
For the last few years, I have been using Emacs for almost all of my daily computing needs. In that time, I have also become fairly proficient at elisp. Across many files in my user-emacs-directory , I have hundreds of functions and snippets of code that I have written myself. However, one area that I would like to improve is what I am calling “the last 20%”. These functions mostly…
Since I started using Emacs, I’ve written hundreds of functions that I only used once and then were left to rot in the depths of my init.el . Today I would like to share some simple commands that I wrote when I was just starting off with Emacs that I had forgotten that I had written and assumed that this was the default behaviour as it now seems to natural to me. A very small amount of the…
It’s been over a year since I wrote about the first ten Chinese books I read , so I think it’s time for an update. I tried only reading books in Chinese in 2023, and I was doing well until I hit a bit of a reading slump and started reading English again. A list of all the books I’ve read can be found here . 《悟空传 - 典藏纪念版》今何在 - Wukong Biography by Jin Hezai This is considered to be…
I was browsing Planet Emacslife yesterday when I came across Anand Tamariya’s post Mozilla Readability in GNU Emacs . I recently wrote a minor mode that had achieves the same thing, but Anand and I took very different approaches to get the same results. Anand used the official Mozilla Readability package, but I use rdrview which is a port of Mozilla’s original program written in C. The…
⚠️ Warning! The code in this blog post was made obsolete by later versions of Denote. Updated code can be found at the bottom of the page. A few months ago, I replaced Org-Roam with Prot’s Denote package and have been using it for a while now. I have mostly been using it to manage my collection of personal notes, but I also want the option to publish any note as a blog post quickly and…
For several years now, I have been using the method that Pavel Korytov describes in this post to gain a consistent set of keybindings between Emacs and Sway . I have been extremely happy with the setup and I decided that if I ever move away from Sway, I will need to replicate this setup in another window manager. I mostly work on a 14 inch laptop screen, so being able to make applications…
I want to get back into the habit of posting on my blog, and I thought a simple post like this would be good in terms of getting me back on track. I didn’t spend too much time thinking it through and my opinions could change completely as the transfer window doesn’t close for another three weeks. Manchester City Arsenal Liverpool Chelsea Manchester United Aston Villa Tottenham Hotspur…
Recently, I have been wanting to include more images within the notes that I take in Emacs org-mode. Previously I had been using this script to take screenshots, but it was something that I never really used it to its full potential. I bound the script in my sway config as below: bindsym print exec ~/bin/screenshot.sh I had the idea to implement a photo sharing menu similar to what you get on an…
I have been studying Chinese for over 15 years now, but it was only in the last year that I started reading Chinese books. At first, I found it really difficult and I couldn’t read more than a few pages before my brain physically started hurting. Over time, I have managed to build up much more endurance and there are even times when I can read for a few hours straight if time allows. I…
Earlier this year, I read several interesting posts on Chinese Forums in which users recorded their Chinese speed. It was fascinating to see the progress that the users had made and I was curious to try it for myself. Most of the users had a workflow that consisted of recording their time in a time tracking application and then manually inputting all times into a spreadsheet. I have come up with…
I have made it clear that I am a big fan of Mastodon and the wider fediverse. As far as I’m concerned they provide a superior social media experience to traditional platforms. My favourite thing about the fediverse is the interesting people I’ve met and the fascinating conversations that I’ve taken part in. For the longest time, there weren’t many football fans to chat with…
I said that I wanted to read eight books in the first three months of 2022, and I did manage to finish eight. However three of them were leftovers from last year. I have been quite busy recently and haven’t done as much reading as I would have liked. Also, I noticed that I don’t really have the time for listening to audiobooks for long stretches during the day. I was mostly listening…
Background The first time I wrote a CV, it was in Microsoft word. Getting the relevant information onto the page was not particularly difficult or time consuming. The difficult part was the formatting. Going in and changing all the margins, font sizes and table properties nearly drove me insane. A few years went by and I got sick of having to spend so long formatting after making any simple…
2021 was the year in which I became a reader. I read more books last year than I probably had in the last ten years combined. Having said that, there are still parts of my reading workflow that I would like to change. Throughout the year, there were times when I had more than one book on the go, but I would say that it was more common that I was reading one book at a time. There is nothing wrong…
A new season of the Premier League is nearly upon us with the first match of the season between Brentford and Arsenal kicking off this Friday evening. Because of this, I thought it would be a good time to make some predicitons for the upcoming season so we can all have a laugh about how much I got wrong come next May. There are still over two weeks until the transfer window closes, so I will be…
We’re half way through the year now, so I think it is as good as time as any to reflect upon the goals that I set for myself in 2021. There are some areas in which I am proud of the progress that I made, there are some areas in which I could have done better and there are some that I didn’t bother with at all. I wanted to see if setting quantifiable and gamified goals would make me…
When we talk about new social media platforms, people may often refer to them as “Facebook Killers” or “Twitter Slayers”. Generally, I think this is a pretty moot point for comparison. However, I believe that what I will be introducing to you in this post, the Fediverse, perhaps has a better chance to replace these sites which already have millions and billions of users…
New Year, New Me As the year draws to a close, it’s once again time for everyone to consider what changes they want to make in their lives. I’m sure that nobody could have predicted how 2020 would have panned out. Most people probably found themselves with more free time than they had in previous years. I know I did, but still I feel as though I didn’t really make the best use of…