Irreal

In response to my post Renaming Tags, Karl Voit pointed me to his recent post on How To Use Tags. He said that his system could solve many of the problems I experience with using tags. It’s a long post with lots of good advice but the heart of it are 8 rules he uses for choosing tags. It’s definitely worth taking a look at those rules if you use tags.

The two rules that would most help me are:

1. Use as few tags as possible
2. By convention, tags are plural

My major problem is #1. Rather than deciding on a specific set of tags, I tend to make them up as I go along. All of my tagging is happening in an Org Mode context so I get a list for the first tag but I’m on my own for any subsequent tags so I can’t see what I’ve used before. Voit’s tagging system is more general and acts at the file level so his tools have a way of handling this problem.

After dealing with grocery/groceries for a while I (sort of) settled on a rule of using the singular form but I didn’t make it a hard rule. A lot of my problems would disappear if I strictly enforced this rule.

Even if I religiously followed Voit’s suggestions, I would still find myself needing to bulk change tags so I’m grateful for Sagar’s post. Still, if you’re a tag user, you can make your life a lot easier by reading and following the advice in Voit’s post.

I’ve been using paredit for 11 or 12 years. I don’t use nearly all its features but I still wouldn’t want to live without it. As I discovered early on, the real secret of paredit is understanding slurp and barf. Without them you can’t edit your file effectively.

Susam Pal has a short post about mnemonics for remembering the shortcuts for paredit’s slurp and barf. Some developers, he says, confuse the shortcuts for snarfing for those for slurping. Pal provides the mnemonics that he used to remember them. I never had that problem. To me, the braces suggest pointing out so Ctrl+} and Ctrl+{ are clearly for barfing.

Actually, I don’t find his mnemonics very helpful but your mileage may vary. His post also gives examples of using slurp and barf so you may find that helpful if you’re not familiar with paredit. One thing for sure, if you’re writing in any of the Lisps, learning paredit is definitely worthwhile.

Arne Babenhauserheide has an interesting post on how he listens to podcasts in Emacs using Elfeed and EMMS. It’s a perfect workflow: the podcast episodes are collected from RSS and listed with Elfeed and those he wants to listen to are queued by simply typing A next to the entry in Elfeed. That queues up the entry in EMMS. Babenhauserheide has a step-by-step guide to the workflow in the post.

There’s a tiny bit of configuration to do but it’s just a few lines. Best of all, everything happens from within Emacs and you can do other work while you’re listening if you like.

I don’t generally listen to podcasts but if I did, I’d certainly try this method out. The nice thing about it is that it’s simple to set up and try out. If you decide you don’t like it, it’s easy to back out the changes. Of course, you’ll want Elfeed regardless because it’s the absolute best RSS reader. I don’t use EMMS because

1. I’m too lazy to set it up
2. I don’t usually listen to music while I’m working so I just depend on iTunes. (See #1.)

If you’re an Emacs user who listens to podcasts, be sure to take a look at Babenhauserheide’s post. The section on Elfeed/EMMS is short and will take less than a minute to read.

David Wilson over at the System Crafters Channel has a new video up on The 6 Emacs Settings Every User Should Consider. The six settings are

1. Enable remembering recently edited files
2. Enable minibuffer history
3. Enable remembering last place visited in file
4. Changing the location of the custom file
5. Disabling UI dialog boxes
6. Enabling automatic reversion of file changes

Even intermediate Emacs users are probably familiar with most of those settings although I had never heard about disabling dialog boxes before. That’s probably because they only come into play when you’re using the mouse, which I virtually never do.

Oddly, I use only two of these settings. I have my init.el under version control so it’s really annoying when some random function decides to scribble in it. That can be avoided by moving the custom data to a separate file. That file will also receive the random scribblings so my init.el doesn’t get corrupted with transient information.

The other setting I use is to enable minibuffer history. That’s really useful and something I take advantage of many times a day.

I haven’t explicitly enabled recentf but something else in my configuration has because recent files are being saved and when I tried recentf-open-files I got the list as shown in the video. Even so, my workflow is such that I’d hardly ever use the facility so I ignore the setting and will probably forget all about it soon.

The same goes for remembering the last place visited in files. I hate that kind of thing. Emacs has great search capabilities—which avy makes even better—so I can always easily find where I want to go in a file. Most likely that’s the end of the file so a simple Meta+> suffices.

The same goes for global-auto-revert-mode. My workflow just doesn’t have the problem of other processes updating files I’m working on so the overhead isn’t worth it to me.

Other folks will certainly have preferences that differ from mine so it’s worthwhile taking a look at the video. The run time is 15 minutes, 40 seconds so plan accordingly.