A Hydra for the Org Agenda View Dispatcher

Posted on 2016-04-09 by jcs

Abo-abo has a great post that demonstrates a hydra for the Org Agenda view menu. Instead of the ugly static menu, you get a beautiful hydra that shows you the state of the toggles and other information.

It’s that last bit that’s significant here. Hydra has a new extended doc syntax that allows you to dynamically add status items to a hydra menu. For example, in the Agenda view you can see things by day, week, fortnight, month, or year. The hydra includes code that puts a check box next to the chosen display mode. It also displays the status of the toggles such as org-agenda-follow-mode.

If, like me, you use agenda views a lot, you may find this hydra useful. Take a look at abo-abo’s post to see what it looks like and what it can do. You may also want to make use of the extended doc syntax in some of your other hydras. If you don’t have the hydra package installed, you should consider it. There’s a video that shows the basic capabilities but abo-abo has added more to the package since he made the video. Again, I highly recommend you check it out if you haven’t already.

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Emacs and Outlook

Posted on 2016-04-08 by jcs

I’m in the happy position of not needing—indeed never have been needing—to use Outlook for my email. Others, sadly, are not so lucky. Karl Voit points to a remedy that allows you to compose your email in Emacs and send it via Outlook.

That’s nice but it got me wondering if something like mbsync could be leveraged to solve this problem. Ben Francom has a post that describes using mbsync with Outlook365 to handle his email with Mutt. Of course, once you get mbsync dealing with Outlook, a large array of solutions are possible. You could, for example, handle your Outlook email with mu4e or any of the other Emacs based mail clients.

As I say, I’m not and never have been an Outlook user so I don’t know how well these solutions work and what the gotchas are but if I were, I’d sure be looking into them. If you’re constrained to use an Outlook account, you might find the two links above useful.

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Improved HTML Capturing with Org

Posted on 2016-04-07 by jcs

If, like me, you use Org mode for your note taking and record keeping, you’ve probably found yourself occasionally needing to capture data from a Web page. You can already to that but many browsers don’t handle the conversion from HTML to text very well.

Alphapapa has an interesting solution in the org-protocol-capture-html package. The README.org page shows the result of capturing one of John Kitchin’s pages. It looks pretty nice and even turned a table into its Org equivalent.

I’m not sure how universal the solution is. Part of the requirements is a bookmarklet for the browser. Alphapapa gives examples for Firefox and Chrome but nothing for I.E. or Safari. It probably wouldn’t be very hard to get it working for those browsers too but I haven’t looked into the problem.

Sadly, there isn’t an ELPA package so you have to install it yourself. Of course, that isn’t hard but it does make it harder to keep things up to date. This package seems like a useful addition to Emacs if you often have a need to capture Web pages to Org mode.

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Any Option You Like

Posted on 2016-04-06 by jcs

This clearly falls in the different strokes for different folks category but it would make me want to stab myself in the eye.

Is it just me or does anyone else think having the focus yanked away because you mistyped a command is a really bad idea? Of course, Emacs lets you have it your own way even if others might think that way is, um, less than optimal.

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Do Biometric Sensors Decrease Security?

Posted on 2016-04-06 by jcs

Hitoshi Kokumai over at ProgrammableWeb has a rather silly article arguing that smartphone fingerprint sensors actually worsen security. Strictly speaking, the article is correct in the sense that the government could force you to provide a fingerprint while they can’t compel you to open your phone with a password. But, as always with security, what’s good is informed by your threat model.

If your threat model includes being arrested with incriminating data on your phone, then yes, you should turn off the fingerprint sensor and use a password more secure than a 4-digit pin. Most of us, of course, don’t have that threat model. It’s much more likely to be, “I want to protect the data on my phone if it is lost or stolen.” In that case, the fingerprint scanner is arguably more secure than a pin.

Kokumai argues that what’s really needed is two-factor authentication where both the pin and the fingerprint scan are needed to unlock the phone. Of course, that wouldn’t increase security because nobody would bother. The point of the scanner is convenience. If you make using it an additional burden no user would want it. It doesn’t even help the drug dealer who could just use the password without harming security while making unlocking the phone more convenient.

In the real world, it’s at least arguable that the fingerprint scanners make phones more secure because people who wouldn’t bother with a pin might find the scanner convenient enough to use them instead of leaving the phone unprotected. If you’re not a drug dealer or otherwise a specific target of law enforcement there’s no reason to fear the scanners; they just make your life easier without having any significant effect on your security. As exciting as all those James Bond scenarios seem, most of us do live in the real world.

UPDATE: Even

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Coming in Emacs 25: Dynamic Modules

Posted on 2016-04-05 by jcs

I like Emacs Lisp and am always adding little bits of Elisp to my init.el that improves my workflow or enhances Emacs in one way or another. Mostly, I can make Elisp do whatever I need it to do but sometimes the bindings just aren’t there and I have to invoke a shell. Starting with Emacs 25, all that is going to change.

Emacs 25 supports the notion of dynamic modules. These modules are natively compiled pieces of code that can be called directly from Emacs and that can access the Emacs environment. It doesn’t take a lot of thought to see the opportunities this offers.

Aurélien Aptel has an excellent post that describes the module system and offers a simple example to so you can see how it works. Modules are, as Aptel notes, like plugins for other software. There’s a bit of busywork to register the module and access the Emacs environment but then it’s just normal C code except when you’re interacting with the environment. It sounds harder than it is: see Aptel’s example.

This facility isn’t something you’re going to be using everyday but when you need a capability that can’t be implemented with Elisp directly, modules are just what you need. Tale a look at Aptel’s post to get a feel for what’s involved and how they work.

UPDATE: Emacs 24 → Emacs 25

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The Walking Dead

Posted on 2016-04-04 by jcs

Who knew these clowns were still alive? Maybe, as The Register suggests, they really aren’t. A better question is why they aren’t the subject of a RICO investigation.

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SBCL 1.3.4

Posted on 2016-04-03 by jcs

I just installed the latest version of the wonderful Steel Bank Common Lisp system. Version 1.3.4 is mostly a bug fix but there are a couple of enhancements and an optimization. You can read the details on the NEWS page.

The SBCL development team generally releases a new version every month so the system is well maintained and up to date. I say it every time but it’s still true: if you’re looking for a really excellent, free (as in beer and freedom) Common Lisp system, it’s hard to do better than SBCL.

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Some Calc Features

Posted on 2016-04-02 by jcs

I haven’t written about Emacs Calc for a while but I find myself using it all the time. It’s one of the lesser known secrets of Emacs and that’s too bad. You can use it as a quick calculator in the minibuffer or you can leverage its considerable advanced features which come close to rivaling those of dedicated systems like Macsyma and Mathematica.

Florian Adamsky has a nice post that highlights a couple of Calc’s functionalities. He demonstrates Calc’s ability to work with numbers in different bases and perform not just arithmetical operations but logical ones as well. He also mentions the extensible units systems that allows you to define and work with your own units. Very handy for problems in unusual domains.

As Adamsky says, he’s mostly interested in demonstrating the factors that are of use to his programming activities but Calc is much more than a programmers’ calculator. If you haven’t explored it, you really should give it a look. It probably can’t replace Mathematica but it can allow you to solve all sorts of mathematical problems—including symbolic ones—without leaving Emacs. And not leaving Emacs is, of course, one of our major goals1.

UPDATE: Added missing link to Adamsky’s post

Footnotes:

1

Only slightly tongue-in-cheek.

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ob-hy.el

Posted on 2016-04-02 by jcs

Just a quickie to report that John Kitchin is on a tear with Hy. Today he’s posting about his development of ob-hy.el to further integrate Hy into Org mode. It’s pretty nice. One day in and he can already execute Hy from Org code blocks.

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