I almost forgot. Today is the 44th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Somehow I forgot to mention it last year.
Dark Side of the Moon holds the record for the largest (by far) number of weeks on the Billboard 200 (927 weeks) and although it isn’t on the list this week—it pops on and off—it was 193 on the year end list. It’s truly one of the greatest albums of all time.
Ben Elijah over at Ink and Ben has posted a nice set of Org and Emacs resources. Folks are always asking for basic tutorials and other information on how to take advantage of Emacs and Org mode. Elijah’s list is mostly about Org mode but he does include some Emacs resources on the grounds that you need to know at least a little Emacs to use Org.
It’s only just, after all
WEB DESIGNER: (wakes up in lava) Wh…why am I in hell?
SATAN: You know
WD: Was it the autopl-
SATAN: It was the fucking autoplay videos, dude— Elle Oh Hell (@ElleOhHell) March 5, 2017
The other day, I wrote about blogging with Hugo and Org. Part of that post involved how Diego Mundo worked around the fact that Hugo expects its input in markdown so that he could write his posts in Org markup. Xuchunyang commented that as of version 0.19 Hugo also supports Org mode natively.
It turns out that the Org mode integration is handled by the goorgeous module. Over at A Scriptor’s Notes there’s a nice post on how to build Hugo and goorgeous from scratch. This may be attractive if you want to keep up to date with the rapidly evolving Hugo ecosystem. The post takes you through everything you need to do to install and build from source. You’ll need to install the Go tool chain, but you don’t need to know how to program in Go.
There’s also a complete build script so once you’ve done the initial install, all you have to do is run the script. It’s probably worth your while to investigate this post if you’re using Hugo to blog.
One of my favorite applications of Org mode and Babel is demonstrated by Howard Abrams’ post and video on what he calls Literate DevOps. The basic idea is that he documents his work in an Org file complete with the actual code that he uses. What Babel makes possible is that he executes the code from inside Org mode and the results are automatically added to his Org file. In the end, he has a complete record of what he did along with the results. That makes the process easily reproducible and he can send to file to a colleague wishing to build on his work or needing a go-by for a similar project.
Vincent Bernat has taken Abrams’ DevOps idea and applied it to network operations. He calls it netops. If you’re working in network operations and want a nice way of documenting your work, take a look at Bernat’s post and the accompanying three videos. As with DevOps, everything you do is documented along with the code and results.
If you aren’t a network engineer you probably won’t understand everything he’s doing but you can still follow his process. My only complaint is that the videos have no audio; Bernat just types in what he is going to do. I find videos like that harder to follow but they’re still definitely worth watching.
The rollover joke for this XKCD cartoon says
If used with software that could keep up, a scroll wheel mapped to send a stream of ’undo’ and ’redo’ events could be kind of cool.
So of course an Emacs geek, ncsuwolf, immediately implemented it. It’s probably not something you’d really want but it is neat that it was so easy to do.
In the comments, someone else suggested using the scroll wheel to control the Git time machine. That might be slightly more useful but others really liked controlling undo/redo with the scroll wheel. If you’d like to try either one, they’re each only 3 lines in your init.el.
Mike Zamansky has another great video up. It’s number 32 in his Using Emacs series and discusses using Emacs for C++ coding. I’m always seeing Twitter queries on how to use Emacs as a C++ development platform and I’ve written about some good solutions (see here, here, and here for example). Those solutions—particularly Neves’—try to reproduce the functionality of a dedicated C++ IDE such as Eclipse and might be considered too much work for a casual C++ user.
Zamansky’s video is intended for his beginning C++ students so he aims at simplicity and usefulness rather than a reimplementation of Eclipse’s functionality. Nevertheless, he provides a configuration that results in a C++ environment that should be more than adequate for all but the most hardcore C++ developer. In particular, if you’re a student looking for a way to use Emacs for your C++ school work, Zamansky’s video provides just what you need.
As usual, the entire configuration is available with the video. He’s even broken out the C++ parts so that you don’t need to use his entire configuration if you don’t want or need it. You can just paste his configuration into your own (or use his as is), fire up Emacs, and the package system will take care of loading the packages you need automatically.
There isn’t anything in his configuration that’s limited to C++ so the same setup will work equally well for C and similar languages. The video is just short of 22 minutes so plan accordingly.
Diego A. Mundo over at whyarethingsthewaytheyare.com has a nice post on how to blog with Hugo and Org mode. Hugo uses markdown as its input language but Mundo likes to work with Org so he wrote a bit of Elisp to export Org markup to markdown. That’s a nice bit of code because it shows how to use ox-pandoc to do the export. It serves as a handy go-by for automating other Pandoc translations from Org.
Mundo uses a single file for his blog with each post in a level 1 subtree. This is like the strategy that Artur Malabarba uses for Endless Parentheses. I like the single file idea a lot and would probably steal it except that I’m afraid a single file wouldn’t scale well with the daily posts that Irreal inflicts on the world.
As I’ve said many times, I’m a reasonably happy WordPress user but if I decided that I wanted a simpler homegrown method, Hugo and Org would be a something I’d definitely look at. You might think that you need to be an expert it do this type of thing but Mundo says he knows next to nothing about setting up a blog. He used Google Domains to register and maintain his domain and Gitlab Pages to host it. Everything else is contained in that single blog file and the bit of Elisp we wrote to turn his Org markup to a Hugo input file in markdown. Head on over to Mundo’s post for the details of how he set things up.
Gregory Stein over at Caches to Caches has a really nice tutorial on configuring mu4e and offlineimap to handle your email from within Emacs. That’s an on-going project—delayed mostly by laziness—here at Irreal so I was especially interested in the post. My only complaint is the use of offlineimap instead of the faster mbsync.
Still, Stein shows you how to get things set up so that your mail is automatically downloaded every 5 minutes and Emacs lets you know when you have email. He found a couple little glitches when he was configuring his system and he explains those and gives workarounds for them.
If you’ve been looking for a way to move email inside Emacs, mu4e is an excellent solution. If you want some inspiration, take a look at my post where I discuss Ben Maughan’s email setup. As I say in that post, Maughan has leveraged mu4e to make what I consider a near-perfect email setup.
Years ago, there were not only library card catalogs but the cards within them were handwritten. Written not with the hen scratching that characterizes my (and probably your) handwriting but with a beautiful, legible, and, as it turns out, standard penmanship.
Librarians of the day settled on a standard way of writing the cards called Library Hand. If you follow the link, you will find several examples using both printing and long hand. These days everything is computerized—or at the very least the cards are printed—but it’s fun to read about how librarians struggled to find a standard way of writing for the cards. If nothing else, you can enjoy the examples of the art.