An Introduction to Org Capture

Posted on 2020-03-01 by jcs

One of the most powerful and useful functions provided by Org Mode is the capture facility. With it, you can easily capture data and context and store it in an Org file of like items in any of a number of useful formats. I have capture templates for everything. If I see a blog post or tweet that I think might form the basis of an Irreal post, I can pop up a capture buffer that will automatically capture the context—the Web page or tweet embedding code—along with any notes that I want to add. These go right into my Blog Ideas org file for later use. Similarly, I never write directly in my journal. I just pop up a capture buffer, write whatever I have to say, and it gets filed with the proper date and time in my journal. I have a template for every type of data that I enter regularly. It’s a huge timesaver.

If you look at a capture template, it can seem intimidating. There are all sorts of special symbols and keywords with no obvious meaning. In truth, it’s not really very complicated once you learn how things work and you don’t have to remember the keywords and symbols except when you’re writing the template.

If you’re a visual learner, you might be interested in Protesilaos Stavrou’s video on how to write and use capture templates. He says at the beginning that the video isn’t meant to be comprehensive but he covers just about everything you need to know and points you to the appropriate help system documentation for keywords and symbols that you can use. If you aren’t already using Org capture you’re working too hard and should take a look at Stavrou’s video.

The video is just short of 29 minutes so you’ll need to schedule some time. Even if you’re already using Org capture you might learn a few new things so it’s worth taking a look if you can find the time.

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Revolt of the Librarians

Posted on 2020-02-29 by jcs

Ars Technica has an interesting article about the on-going open access wars. University libraries, like everyone else, have to operate on a budget and fee increases from journal publishers is putting the squeeze on those budgets. Librarians are starting to fight back. I’ve already written about the University of California’s refusal to renew its contract with Elsevier and Ars Technica’s article documents another data point in the struggle.

Florida State University’s library has also refused to renew their Elsevier contract and despite dire predictions from the publisher about even costlier per view charges, FSU does not appear to be suffering. Elsevier told them they could expect a one million dollar increase in costs but to everyone’s surprise, the library has spent only $20,000 in the eight months after their cancellation.

The article makes clear the UC and FSU are still in the minority but that pressure is increasing on the publishers and the revolt is gathering steam. As the article points out, you can understand why the publishers are loathe to give up their business models. They get their content for free, use volunteers to referee and edit it, and sell it back to the institutions that financed the research for a premium price.

Elsevier has a new CEO who has shown a willingness to be more flexible. Perhaps open access will move from a dream to a reality sooner than we hoped. Already, Ars Technica says, 31% of journal articles published in 2019 are not behind a pay wall.

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Using Org Capture Globally

Posted on 2020-02-28 by jcs

After my recent disaster with my old MacBook Pro, one of the functionalities that I still haven’t restored is the ability to call Org capture from outside Emacs. I used to have a bit of Apple Script that I could call to do that but it was sometimes flaky so I was inspired to find something better with my new setup. This is especially important to my workflow because I use it all the time to capture links to Web pages and store them into my blog queue.

The most promising approach seemed to be using org-protocol. I found two excellent, recent blog posts that describe using org-protocol for capturing from other apps. Just what I wanted. The first, by mistan, described how to set things up in Linux. The other, by Christian Tietze, discussed the same thing under MacOS.

Using Tietze’s post as a guide, I configured org-protocol and tried calling org-capture from the terminal. I called my TODO template, like Tietze did, and it worked perfectly but I couldn’t figure out how to get the Org Capture menu, which my workflow needs as there are multiple templates that I need to call and I didn’t want to use different calls for each one.

Then I remembered writing about the methods used by Karlicoss to capture data from many different sorts of applications. The crux of his method is a script that does most of the heavy lifting and then a series of other scripts that call that one. I shamelessly stole his script, made some changes for MacOS, and called it from a script named call-org-capture. That worked perfectly. I can bind the call to call-org-capture to a convenient hot key and the problem is solved.

If you’re looking for a general way of calling Org Capture from other applications, I can recommend this approach. It’s working very well for me.

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Tom Tromey on the Future of Emacs

Posted on 2020-02-27 by jcs

During FOSDEM ’20 Tom Tromey gave a very interesting talk on what he believes the future of Emacs will be. Others, such as Perry Metzger, have also addressed this question. Almost always, one of the suggestions that come out of these talks is the idea of rewriting Emacs in some other language. Sometimes, as with Metzger’s talk, the idea is to replace the C code with some other, safer language such as Rust. Other times the idea is to replace Emacs Lisp with something else such as Guile, Common Lisp, or even—shudder—JavaScript.

Tromey’s idea seems radical but is actually the conservative approach. His idea is to replace the C core of Emacs with … Elisp. Everyone loves to hate on Elisp but Tromey likes it and believes that it’s just the right solution for Emacs. I’ll let you listen to his talk to hear his justification for that but he makes a convincing argument that doing so will solve a lot of problems. For example, implementing threads is tremendously difficult because of race conditions hidden in the C code. If everything were written in Elisp and compiled with a compiler that understood threading, this could be handled more or less trivially.

Tromey’s idea is that while there would be no C code in the core it would still exist in libraries that do things like display PNGs. All that would be handled through a foreign function interface and be isolated from the core functionality. The idea is not to just move the current C code into a library.

The talk is 19 minutes so it shouldn’t be too hard to fit it in. One problem I had was, I guess, limited bandwidth from the server. The talk kept stopping for a second or two giving it a stuttering effect. Perhaps everyone else was trying to listen at the same time I was so you might do better but be warned.

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Even Google Employees Are Trying to Escape

Posted on 2020-02-26 by jcs

As regular Irreal readers know to their sorrow, one of my favorite hobby horses is the need to keep control of your data. Broadly that means keeping it in open formats and on computers that you manage. If you’re committing your only copy of valuable data to some cloud service, you’re acting recklessly and are likely to suffer the consequences.

Jack Wharton has an interesting post in which he discusses the need and means of migrating his data off Google. More precisely, he wants to create a backup for his Google data while still using Google services. Wharton is a Google employee who “trust[s] Google completely in their ability to correctly retain [his] data” but he worries about Google’s recent inclination to lock users’ accounts for suspected Bad Think™.

I see many articles discussing getting Google-free but Wharton’s explains in detail how to get your data from Google. It is, he says, the least you should do. The processes turn out to be manual and a bit finicky but doable. Wharton has two decades worth of email, photos, and other important papers stored with Google so he needs a lot of backup space. He solved that problem by building a storage server to hold it all. Again, he gives a fair amount of detail on this so if you have similar storage needs you should definitely take a look at his solution.

If your requirements are more modest or you’re operating on a limited budget, you can still buy an inexpensive, reasonably-sized portable hard drive for your backups. After that, all that’s required is a regular backup routine to make sure you always have up-to-date copies of your data under your direct control. I store various data on iCloud so that it’s available across all my devices even when I’m on the go but none of it is committed only to iCloud. I always have a local copy. If you follow a similar policy, it won’t matter (much) if some cloud provider goes away or decides not to do business with you anymore.

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Who Cares About Emacs?

Posted on 2020-02-25 by jcs

Over at Opensource.com, Seth Kenlon has an article that asks the question, “Who cares about Emacs?” After all, the editor is ancient. Its GNU incarnation has been around since 1983 and there are plenty of glittery new editors to choose from. Furthermore, whatever functionalities you like in Emacs are probably available in those other editors too. Kenlon asks if Emacs is even relevant anymore.

Of course, we all know the answer. Kenlon gives several reasons why learning and using Emacs still makes a lot of sense. You can read the article for the complete list but the two that resonated with me were that Emacs works just fine in text mode and, most importantly, that it’s hackable.

Some folks prefer using Emacs in a terminal—and emacsclient makes that simple and painless—but even those of us who prefer the GUI there are times when the GUI version is too heavyweight. In those cases, having a text based Emacs with all the features of the GUI version—modulo things like displaying PDFs or images—is a real win.

Of course, the thing that sets Emacs apart is its hackability. Lots of editors claim they’re hackable but often this means, “We provide an API and maybe a scripting language to use with it.” Emacs is not like that. At its base, Emacs is a Lisp interpreter and almost all its functionality is implemented in that Lisp. The important point is that that Lisp is available to the user too, so you can change or add functionality on the same basis as the original implementers. There’s no API to limit what you can do; you can do anything.

Hardcore Emacsers won’t learn anything they didn’t already know but the article is an enjoyable read and worth a few minutes of your time.

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Refcards

Posted on 2020-02-24 by jcs

Emacs has many subsystems that are complicated enough that they have their own reference cards: Dired, Org Mode, and Calc are prime examples but there are others. If I find myself using a refcard frequently, I bookmark in my browser and maybe in Emacs’ bookmarks so it’s easy to find. I recently saw a tweet with another idea:

That never occurred to me probably because the locate database isn’t built by default on MacOS and I’ve never bothered to build it. The Mac does have Spotlight, though, which includes locate’s functionality so I invoked it and typed in “refcards.” Just as Manerikar said, I got a list of every refcard on my system. When I clicked on dired-ref.pdf it opened a Preview window with Dired’s refcard. That’s really handy. I may even build the locate database just to try it out there.

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Zamansky 67: Emacs vs. Vi(m)

Posted on 2020-02-23 by jcs

As promised, Mike Zamansky has published his thoughts on the Emacs vs. Vi controversy in a another video in his Using Emacs Series. Unlike Zamansky, I was a long time user of Vi/Vim before I moved to Emacs so I’m intimately familiar with both editors on a muscle memory level. Zamansky is absolutely right that neither is objectively better than the other; they both have good points and bad points and furthermore what those good and bad points are can vary with every user. As I’ve said before, choosing an editor is like choosing a mate: everyone else should butt out. Zamansky echoes that feeling and says to choose whatever works best for you but to spent some serious time with your candidates to give them a reasonable evaluation.

One of the very best features of Zamansky’s video is that he covers the history of the two editors to show how they evolved and why they are the way that are. He even gives a demo of the Teco editor, which I’ve never seen running before. He also demonstrates Ex and shows how it evolved into Vi. Most of what partisans claim are examples of superior design turn out to be accidents of history.

I hold onto my belief that Emacs and Vi are two different things: that Emacs is an entire development or operating environment and that Vi is an editor that embraces the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well and that therefore the type of workflow you are looking for should be the deciding factor. I do think that Vi’s composable keybindings are easier to learn any possibly a bit faster but that Emacs has more and better editing features and if you find one it doesn’t have, it’s easy to add it as a first class command at the same level as every other Emacs command.

This is a really excellent video. You probably won’t learn anything new—except possibly what a Teco or Ex session looks like—but the historical background and good sense suggestions make it more than worth watching. The video is 35 minutes, 20 seconds so you’ll need to plan ahead.

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A Comparison of Vim and Emacs

Posted on 2020-02-22 by jcs

Over at the YouTube DistroTube Channel, Derek Taylor has an even handed video that explores the question Vim Versus Emacs. Which Is Better? Taylor is a n00b with both editors but has come to the same conclusion that I have: why would a serious developer not use one of these editors? The video is barely a week old as I write this so we can be sure that Taylor is aware of all the hot new coolness such as VS Code, Sublime Text, Atom, and the others but he still recommends the “ancient” Vi/Vim and Emacs editors.

Taylor starts off by making the same observation that I often have: comparing Vim and Emacs doesn’t make much sense because they are really different things. Vim is a fast, efficient editor that embraces the notion of doing one thing well. Emacs is more of a development environment that can do almost anything and ships with many built-in apps one of which is an editor.

Taylor is using the Doom distribution so he says actual editing between the two editors is virtually identical and not worth comparing. Rather, he looks at a range of other chores such as file handling, git, and invoking shells. He compares the ease of doing all these with the two editors. Oddly, he doesn’t mention the real Emacs killer app: Org Mode. Everyone here knows that I depend on Org mode and consider it one of the most important parts of Emacs but it’s not just me. Org mode is widely considered Emacs’ killer app and the gateway for many new Emacs users.

The video is 30 minutes, 37 seconds so you’ll need to schedule some time. If you’re interested in a relative new comer’s opinion on the great Editor War the video is definitely worth your time. Taylor is worth listening to because he doesn’t have any preconceived preferences and is not defending his own choices.

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An Org Mode Workflow for Spacemacs

Posted on 2020-02-21 by jcs

Over at OutOfCheeseError there’s a useful discussion of an Org-mode workflow for Spacemacs. If you’re a member of the Spacemacs sect, you should take a look. Interestingly, the post is part of his .spacemacs file so it’s pretty much always up to date.

Even if you’re not a Spacemacs user, there’s some good ideas and useful information in the post. The author likes fancy text and symbols so he makes heavy use of org-entities and shows some examples. I already knew about org-entities-help but I tend to forget about them. It’s amazing how many there are. If you have a use for these, take a look at John Kitchin’s code to bring up an Ivy list to choose from. There’s also a version that works with Helm.

There’s also a very nice section on how he uses capture templates. He even has one for starting a blog post. Again, aside from the key shortcuts, none of this is specific to Spacemacs so all Emacs users can benefit from reading it, especially if you like to work with nice looking text.

If you’re coming from Vim, you may be surprised at what a powerful workflow Spacemacs and Org can provide. As always with Emacs, it’s all about reducing friction.

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