Irreal

Mike Zamansky, on the heals of his last video, has another offering in his Using Emacs Series. This time it’s about the new Project library built into the latest Emacs. If you’re familiar with Bozhidar Batsov’s Projectile package, you can think of Project as a pared down, built-in Projectile.

Zamansky is refactoring his Emacs configuration and trying to keep down the bloat. Since he doesn’t use the Project/Projectile functionalities very often it makes sense for him to see if he can replace Projectile with Project.

The video takes us through the Project workflow and concludes that, at least for Zamansky’s needs, it’s a decent replacement for Projectile. There’s no doubt that Projectile is more complete and polished at this point but Project will no doubt evolve to meet the needs of its users.

Projectile has long been a popular project and many people swear by it. I’ve never felt the need for what it offers so I have nothing to offer in the way of informed advice. By way of uninformed advice, I’d say try out Project and if it works for you, investigate Projectile.

The video is 11 minutes, 39 seconds so you can probably fit it into a coffee break. The good news is Zamasnsky is promising more videos in the near future.

John Kitchin has been vlogging up a storm. He’s producing so many videos, Irreal is having a hard time keeping up. One of his recent offerings is a really great¹ video on one of my favorite Emacs packages: Elfeed. Elfeed, of course, is the Emacs RSS reader. My use of it is pretty much out-of-the-box: it had everything I needed and in any event there weren’t any obvious ways of customizing it short of digging into the code. Kitchin, of course, showed that for the nonsense it is. He’s made numerous tweaks without touching the Elfeed source code.

The first thing that struck me was that he set up a timer to update his feed database automatically, much like email. Elfeed doesn’t have that built in but it’s a trivial one command addition to the Elfeed config to implement it.

He also sets some font faces so that article headlines display in a different color depending on their subject matter. The latest Elfeed README has some guidance on how to do this. If this appeals to you, it’s easy to do and Kitchin explains one implementation.

For most people, Kitchin’s biggest tweak is probably his implementation of scoring. He used to have a home-grown solution for that but now uses the elfeed-score package. It provides Gnus style scoring so that articles that are of the most interest to you are at the top. If you have lots of feeds, seldomly check them, or have limited time to deal with them, scoring is an excellent way of concentrating on the ones most important to you.

Being a researcher, Kitchin also has several functions to do things like email an RSS entry to a colleague, capture an entry into his bibliography database and store links for later use.

If you aren’t an Elfeed user, you should be. If you are an Elfeed user, you should definitely watch Kitchin’s video; it has a ton of useful ideas to make your workflow better and easier.

Mike Zamansky has come up for air and after a long hiatus, he’s back with another video in his Using Emacs Series. This video is about his project grading workflow. That may not seem to interesting to some folks but, as usual, he leverages Emacs and some new packages that he hasn’t discussed previously.

If you haven’t been a teacher, you probably have no idea what a chore grading is. If you want to evaluate your students fairly, you have to bear down and can’t just phone it in. Therefore, anything that eliminates routine chores and makes the process run more smoothly is a real win.

To a first approximation, Zamansky use GitHub and GitHub Classroom to handle his homework and project assignments and their grading. GitHub provides a very nice infrastructure for teaching and coordinating with students. That was true before COVID-19 and is probably more true now. The problem with it is that it’s Web based and involves a lot of clicking when you’re dealing with several students and their repositories.

Zamansky deals with this by cloning all the student repositories to his local machine. That’s a win because he can then deal with everything from inside Emacs. For example, if he wants to compile and run some student code, that’s easy from within Emacs.

A typical workflow is grading a project. Zamansky first runs consult-find to find all student programs implementing the project. He can direct all the paths to a separate buffer from which he can visit each in turn. There’s no navigating to each student, then to the proper project, and finally to the code. Everything is right there so he can simply step through the list. This is handled through the consult package.

Likewise, he can communicate with a student by leveraging the forge package to raise an issue in the student’s repository. Similarly, a student can raise an issue that can be downloaded with forge. Finally, Zamansky can use the Embark package to render PDFs or link in a separate utility, although he usually prefers to render it directly in Emacs.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, you can also take a look at this 2014 blog post and video from John Kitchin on how he handled things then: blog post, video. I’m sure he’s evolved his system subsequently but it was already pretty powerful and completely Emacs based.

Zamansky’s video is 18 minutes, 39 seconds long so plan accordingly. It’s interesting even if you aren’t a teacher. In any event, it’s nice to have Zamansky back.

John Kitchin has another video up in his Scimax series. This one is about how he handles spell checking in Scimax. As I watched the video, I thought that his setup was really new and different but it turns out that it’s all built on top of flyspell and Aspell with some help from flyspell-correct and flyspell-correct-ivy (included with flyspell-correct).

Watch the video to see how it all works. There’s no reason you can’t integrate Kitchin’s system into your own. There’s not a whole lot of code involved as you can see from scimax-spellcheck.el. The hydra that he discusses in here.

The video is 7 minutes, 23 seconds so it should be easy to fit into a coffee break.