Today, I saw this amusing, but doubtlessly true, quote in a tweet
"90% of Emacs users have unusual setups and the remaining 10% are really unusual" — https://t.co/F1w7WrbrTh #emacs
— Brad Collins (@deerpig) February 1, 2017
The link points to the Emacs auth-source library manual from which Collins got the quote. If you’d like to automate password lookup in Emacs, this manual tells you how. Definitely worth a look.
Here’s some good news
Finally, MobileOrg received an update! #orgmode pic.twitter.com/yM2fENjfVI
— Toon Claes (@to1ne) January 31, 2017
The iOS version of Mobile Org has long been moribund so it’s great to see it being updated. Earlier this month, I wrote that there appeared to be movement with Mobile Org and here, at last, is the result.
I’ve downloaded the app but have not yet set things up. I’ll probably write more about it when I do. In the meantime, if you’re using it and have wisdom to share, leave a comment.
Marcin Borkowski (mbork) posted a handy bit of knowledge that I didn’t know about. If you’re one of the public benefactors willing to use the development versions of Emacs and report the bugs you find, you’ll want to submit the exact version you’re using so the developers have the right context. When you’re compiling from git source that means the git commit hash.
Mbork tells us that the emacs-repository-get-version function will return the commit hash and gives us a bit of Elisp that will insert the Emacs version and commit information into the current buffer. That’s just what you need when filling out a bug report.
I don’t have anything interesting to say today so here’s some amusing Emacs quotes for your entertainment. I especially like Sean McGrathi’s.
Last Wednesday Eric Raymond (ESR) wrote a blog post noticing that younger engineers no longer understood the ASCII code set at the bit level and didn’t understand what many of the non-printable characters were for. He speculated that this was a result of the demise of RS-232 terminals in the early 1990s. When the traditional (not USB) serial interface all but disappeared the meaning of most of those special characters and how to generate them from the keyboard were no longer core knowledge that every hacker had to know.
As a followup to the post, ESR has written a short article on Things Every Hacker Once Knew that tells the story of what the various special characters were used for and describes their hardware context. If you don’t have a bunch of gender benders and a breakout box gathering dust in your (hardware) toolkit, you probably don’t know most of what’s in the article and you should definitely give it a read. Not only is it interesting, it’s a part of our culture and we should all be at least dimly aware of it.
As ESR says, although there are a few vestiges of things like the DLE character still being used mostly it’s not something today’s engineer will need to know. Still, it is worth knowing if only so you don’t have a moment like this
OH MY GOD
YOU DIAL A PHONE
BECAUSE THE FIRST ONES HAD A CIRCULAR DIAL
I NEVER CONNECTED THIS BEFORE— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) January 27, 2017
Mike Zamansky has posted the latest video in his Using Emacs series. This time it’s about using shell and eshell from within Emacs. Like Zamansky, I’m an old time command line user—I even used the MKS toolkit—and before Emacs I did almost all my work directly in the shell. Since coming to Emacs, I’ve tried to train myself to use the shell from within Emacs. I had only partial success until I started using eshell.
While there are still some gotchas with eshell, it mostly works fine and, indeed, is often superior to a plain shell. Most of the problems involve things like cursor addressing but even there eshell can do the right thing by running the application in a term buffer. See this post from October for the details.
As Zamansky notes in his video, an advantage of eshell is that you can run Emacs command directly from the “command line.” There are other advantages as well. Try cding into a remote machine as Zamansky demonstrates and you’ll be convinced. Mickey, of course, has all the details in his excellent Mastering Eshell article. If you’re an eshell user, or would like to become one, you MUST read his article. I reread it periodically and I always learn something new.
Zamansky’s video is 8 and a half minutes so it’s perfect for a coffee break.
Who knew? It turns out, though, that besides the noise and risk of contagion, open offices are also bad for your memory. Research shows that we retain more information when we sit in one spot. That’s because ideas and details become associated with surrounding and often ideas and details cannot be recalled outside of those surroundings.
There’s no longer any excuse for open offices. The research is clear: they’re harmful to productivity, the health and well being of employees, and even communication between them (the most often cited “advantage” of open offices). My suspicion is that they’ve now become a fad that everyone follows because the other guys do. “The startup next door has an open office and so does Facebook; we better have one too.” Any amount of checking into the current research on the would show any manager, no matter how pointy his hair, that they’re a bad idea.
On a related issue, David Tate takes a poleaxe to the usual reasons offered for why you can’t work from home. Again, it’s mostly superstition and ignorance but it’s depressingly wide spread.
Bastien announced a new version of Org Mode.
#emacs #orgmode 9.0.4 is out. Celebrating with a #unicorn I met in a store, with her baby unicorn. <3 pic.twitter.com/1vTE5AzQxD
— Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) January 24, 2017
At the time I posted this, it had not yet appeared in Melpa.
Scott Nesbitt has posted a very useful tutorial on making Reveal.js slides with Org mode. There are lots of Reveal.js tutorials, of course, including the excellent video from Mike Zamansky but what sets Nesbitt’s tutorial apart is that he approaches the subject from the point of view of someone who doesn’t have Org mode experience. Actually, he doesn’t even assume the reader has Emacs experience but he offers no help there other than to recommend Mickey’s book.
If we stipulate that the reader has an elementary knowledge of Emacs, the tutorial is self contained. Nesbitt shows every step you need to take to put together a slide deck. My only complaint is that he doesn’t provide a complete Org file for a simple two or three slide example.
Everyone says they hate slide decks but everyone uses them. Given that if you gives talks you’re going to need slides, Reveal.js is a nice way of producing them. An added advantage is that the slides don’t require any special presentation software other than a browser. The other nice thing is that it’s very easy to get started and if you follow Nesbitt’s tutorial, there’s virtually no learning curve.
Ben Maughan spent a bit of time getting his Org agenda view just the way he liked it. Evidently, he is more efficient and/or busier than I am because he wanted to shorten the number of keys in the shortcut to invoke the agenda. That turns out to be easy to do as he shows demonstrates at the link.
If you invoke the agenda a lot and are looking for a way to speed things up, be sure to take a look at Maughan’s post.
Red Meat Friday: AI And The End Times