Irreal

Thanks to Tim Stewart, I stumbled across the anchored-transpose package. You can think of it as a generalization of the other transpose functions such as transpose-chars, transpose-words, transpose-sexps, and the other less used transposition functions. Instead of transposing around the point, anchored-transpose lets you specify an arbitrary anchor region to pivot around.

Here’s an example of its use: suppose I have

First DO this and then do that.

and I want

First do that and then DO this.

To do that

1. Select a region that covers the things you want to swap and everything in between.
2. Call anchored-transpose.
3. Select the anchor region. That is everything in between what you want to transpose.
4. Call anchored-transpose again.

For our example, we first select the region

DO this and then do that

and call anchored-transpose. Then select

and then

and call anchored-transpose again.

You can also swap two disjoint regions by selecting one, calling anchored-transpose, selecting the other, and calling anchored-transpose again. You can specify the two regions in any order. You can also select the entire phrase and anchor phrase in the first example in either order.

I often want to swap parts of a sentence or even several sentences so anchored-transpose is a real win for me. I’ve mapped it to 【Hyper+t】 to make it easy to call.

You can get anchored-transpose from Melpa.

I recently ran across this old post from Emacs master Mickey. In it, Mickey explores ways to enter diacritical marks in Emacs. For example, if you want resume to be rendered (properly) as résumé you need to know how to convince Emacs to do that.

It turns out that there’s at least three ways of doing it. To get the ‘é’ character, I usually just type 【Ctrl+x 8 ' e】 but I could also type 【Ctrl+x 8 Return】 LATIN SMALL LETTER E ACUTE or if I know the codepoint, 【Ctrl+x 8 Return】 e9.

If you’ve used Emacs for any length of time and needed to enter diacritical marks, you’re probably familiar with these methods. Mickey has a third way that I didn’t know about: you can use multilingual text input along with TeX input mode. If you’re writing a document with a lot of diacriticals, this method may be your best bet. Head on over to Mickey’s post for the details.

Last week, I posted an EmacsGolf challenge on changing times to 24-hour notation. Most of the solutions were much like mine: they used query-replace-regexp with a complicated regular expression and an even more complex replacement expression. One trick that most responders missed was using \#n to get the n^th subexpression as a number. That avoids needing to call string-to-int or something similar.

That said, my solution was to call query-replace-regexp with

\([0-9][0-9]?!\):\([0-9][0-9]!\)\([ap]!\)

as the regular expression to search for and

\,(format "%02d:%s" (if (equal \3 "p") (+ \#1 12) \#1) \2)

as the replacement expression.

David Ongaro had a really great (and surprising) solution leveraging the date handling functions of Emacs Calc. It’s nice because it avoids the horrendous regular expression that the rest of us used and simplified the replacement. Very clever.

Sacha Chua has a new Emacs Chat up. This time it’s with Karl Voit. It’s a really interesting chat. Voit is concerned with managing personal information and uses Org Mode and some custom scripts to do that.

One set of scripts, Memacs, captures information from his email, SMS, RSS-feeds, blog posts, bank statements, and VCS commits and exports them into Org format so that they can be included in his Org files. The result is a sort of diary of that records all his appointments, phone calls, text messages, tweets, work product, and other noteworthy events that happened on any given date. That makes it easy to ask easy questions such as, “What was I doing on June 2, 2009?” as well as more difficult questions such as, “Who called me on the day I met my girl friend?” and the like. Org mode makes queries like these easy even if you don’t remember the date you met your girl friend.

Voit also describes his home-grown blogging system, lazyblorg. A nice feature of lazyblorg is that he can write a blog post in any Org file and export it to his blog. Thus, if he’s working in the Org file associated with one of one of his projects, he can write the post about what’s he doing in situ and publish it. If he’s working in some other file and wants to blog about it, he just writes the post and published it. As a result, his blog posts are associated with the files they’re about. Very handy.

Later in the chat, Voit talks about using yasnippet to semi-automate repetitive chores. The example he gives is organizing trips to a local comedy club with like-minded friends. The snippet captures all the details of the outing including the when, where, and who of the act as well as dates he should send initial and reminder emails to his friends.

If you’re interested in organizing your life and capturing the details for later research, you should watch this chat and check out some of Voit’s software.