Irreal

Matus Goljer (Fuco1), whose work I’ve written about many times before, has an interesting post on his use of org-attach. The point of the post is a way of automating the finding of the Org headline that points to an attached file. Normally, that’s not a problem because you’re starting with the Org file but occasionally you search for the attached file directly outside of Org and want to find the Org entry that points to it.

To me, the part of the post that resonated the most was that org-attach provides a way of avoiding the agonizing decision making that goes into deciding where to store documents in the file hierarchy. In that respect, it sort of reminds me of my email strategy. Following Ben Maughan, I store all my saved emails in a single flat file and use the excellent mu4e search capability to find them. It really is far superior to trying to figure out where in a complex file hierarchy the email belongs.

The same is true in storing a file related to an Org file heading. Rather than trying to figure out the proper place to store it, you simply let Org worry about where it is and use Org’s search and linking capabilities to find it.

Goljer’s post is short and worth a read. It’s another example of how Emacs and Org mode can make your life easier.

If you do even a little writing in Org mode, you’ve almost certainly needed to occasionally typeset a word or sequence of words in a typewriter font. This, at least for me, comes up in two ways:

1. I want to typeset something that would normally be part of a code buffer
2. I want to typeset something like a file name or extension

To a first approximation, the distinction doesn’t really matter because they both end up as a typewriter font. But the two categories are different and Org distinguishes between them. For code items, you’re suppose to use a tilde:

~(setq variable value)~

For the other category—unhelpfully labeled “verbatim”—you’re supposed to use =:

On startup, Emacs reads the configuration file =init.el=.

It’s a great distinction but one that I, and probably many other people, ignore. I always use = for the simple reason that it’s easier to type than ~. After all, they’re typeset the same way so why bother trying figure out the correct one to use when = is easier anyway?

Still, in the back of my mind there’s a little voice that keeps saying, “What if it’s like Y2K? What if one day there’s an exporter that typesets them differently?” It seems like an unlikely, theoretical problem but then so did Y2k. Early programmers waved away the problem with the same sort of rationalizations that I’m using to ignore the difference between = and ~.

Some folks are more forward looking. Grant Rettke, for example, has a system that he adheres to and has even documented. His post, Choosing Between Code and Verbatim Markup In Org Mode, lays out his system and specifies which terms get the verbatim markup and which get the code markup. If you want to do the right thing, his post is a good place to start. Or you could be like me and suffer the consequences when the hammer falls.

As long term Irreal readers know, I was trained as a mathematician and later became a computer software engineer so you’d think I’d be pretty good at generating plots: Nope. I’m terrible at it. My go to tool is Gnuplot, which is powerful and flexible but hard to master for those of us who don’t use it regularly.

I’ve tried Org Plot as an intermediary but I couldn’t get decent results even though Org Plot is just a front end for Gnuplot. Charles Choi to the rescue. He has an excellent post on how to use Org Plot to make nice looking graphs.

His secret is leveraging YASnippet to take care of all the boilerplate that Gnuplot requires. That’s the real problem with Gnuplot. Setting it up requires a lot of very unintuitive specifications in an obscure configuration language. Choi’s solution is to make a YASnippet template for each type of graph so that it’s easy to insert it when needed.

Choi’s solution doesn’t stop there though. He also has a context-sensitive menu that’s activated when you click on an Org table. From there, you can pick the type of graph you want to plot and the appropriate boilerplate will be inserted. Another menu option will run Org plot and generate the graph. See his post for the details including the YASnippets and the Elisp code for the menu.

This is a nice solution for those of us who only occasionally generate graphs but still want them to look nice. And, of course, it’s yet another example of how Emacs lets you have it your way.