Irreal

Last month, I had three (1, 2, 3) posts on how people are integrating their Google Calendars with Emacs. The common idea was to be able to see some or all of the calendar items in Emacs. Mike Zmansky’s solution goes further and allows you to move data in both directions so that you can add data to your Google Calendar from Emacs.

James Williams has his own take on the problem. Like Zamansky, he uses org-gcal to move entries between Emacs and GCal. He also uses emacs-calfw to get a nice calendar-like display.

Even if you’re not a GCal user, you may be interested in emacs-calfw. It can be configured for use with Org, Emacs diary, iCalendar (GCal, iCal, etc.), and howm.

These four solutions for integrating GCal show again how easily you can adapt Emacs to your workflow. And, of course, how you can spend most of your time in Emacs.

As I’ve written before, I maintain an almost exclusively digital workflow. About 8 years ago I banished pads, pens, and pencils from my desk and started taking notes and doing other record keeping chores on my computers and iOS devices. I write very few checks and other than signing charge slips—when Apple Pay isn’t available—I hardly ever write anything.

Somewhere along the line, I replaced my slow and tedious flatbed scanner with a snappy Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M scanner and even allowed a pen back on my desk for those rare checks. Almost all our bills are paid online through our bank. Whatever paper we do get is scanned and shredded.

In my post linked above, I point to a post by Steve Losh in which he describes how he deals with his scanned documents. His idea is to run OCR on the documents, throw them all into a single directory and use his system’s search capabilities to find the ones he wants. This is simple and has the advantage that everything but the actual scanning can be automated. My ScanSnap takes care of the OCR for me but I still have to deal with filing the scanned documents. Because a lot of my scanned documents are tax related, I like to keep them filed by tax year. Other than a few other specialized documents the scans are mostly filed in a scanned-documents directory.

The fact that there’s more than one destination for them means that it’s hard to automate the task as Losh did. It turns out there’s a nice Emacs solution for this. Anthony Green has the Paperless app (also available on Melpa) that almost automates the filing process. You dump the scanned documents in a staging directory and paperless gives you a list of documents and target destinations. You can display the document if you need to before choosing a destination.

My only complaint is that all the target destinations have to live in a single hierarchy in which all the files are possible targets. That’s not an insurmountable problem, of course, even for someone like me who has an existing setup. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, take a look at the README on Github to get the details. This is, I think, a really nice solution and moves one more chore into Emacs. What’s not to like?

UPDATE [2017-02-15 Wed 19:49]: Karl Voit, who I think can be fairly characterized as a researcher in digital workflow, has a comment below that contains some links to his solutions to the problems discussed in this post. I’ve read most of these before and can testify that they’re well worth your time.

UPDATE [2017-02-22 Wed 15:01]: you’re → your.

A few days ago I wrote about Mike Zamansky’s video on rectangles. Most of my commentary involved ways of dealing with the difficulty of remembering the rectangle commands and their key chords. One of the solutions I discussed was which-key, a good solution requiring only that you remember that the prefix for rectangle shortcuts is Ctrl+x r.

Since there’s a new version of which-key out

New package: #emacs-which-key Version: 2.0-1 by Lev Lamberov … https://t.co/1mR5WlspoG

— Koe mat soe gata (@gogasi_) February 9, 2017

this seems like a good time to repeat how much I like it. I’m still using the default configuration and it’s working really well for me. If I pause while typing a shortcut, which-key automatically pops up a buffer showing all the completions. Once I type some more, the popup disappears so it’s pretty unobtrusive.

All this makes which-key ideal for commands like those involving rectangles that you probably don’t use that often. You can, of course, type Ctrl+h after the prefix to see the completions but I like that which-key automatically provides them if I stop to think in the middle of a key sequence. I also like that the which-key popup disappears automatically unlike the buffer you get with Ctrl+h.

If you don’t have which-key installed, give it a try. It pretty much stays out of your way until you need it. Definitely recommended.

Apropos of yesterday’s post, I came across this query on Reddit and learned a new keystroke. One of the counterintuitive peculiarities of Elisp—and Lisps in general—is that a value defined by defvar or defcustom is immutable: once set it can’t be changed without restarting the process.

It turns out, though, that that’s not quite right. If you evaluate an expression such as

(defvar user "Jim")

with Ctrl+Meta+x instead of, say, Ctrl+x Ctrl+e you can change the value. I usually want to do this when I’m in the development phase an need to tweek a parameter. If you’re not an Elisp developer you won’t need to know this and even if you are, you probably won’t use it very often but it’s a really handy thing to know. And further proof that our Emacs education is never complete.

Never, apparently

I started using EMACS with Gosling Emacs in 1987. I'm still learning useful new key chords 30 years later. #oldcoder #emacs

— awadelewis (@awadelewis) February 7, 2017