Irreal

I’ve written previously about John Kitchin and how he uses Emacs and Org mode for reproducible research. Kitchen is a researcher in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University so he writes a lot of technical papers and he uses Org mode and Emacs to prepare them. You can watch the video that I linked above to get an idea of how he uses them to integrate his research notes and calculations into the source file for the paper.

If you’ve written or read any research papers from any scientific field, you know that they typically have citations to other papers and internal references to tables, figures, or other parts of the paper. Org can handle a lot of that—especially the internal links—out of the box and there are external packages to help with the bibtex tools.

Kitchin has written an Emacs package, org-ref, that integrates these functions in a consistent way. He describes the package in a blog post on his group’s site. If you write research or technical papers that have a lot of internal/external references you should take a look at the package to see if it can help you.

Kitchin says that the package currently works well only for LaTeX export but suggests that he will be adding support for other formats such as HTML in the future. Right now the package isn’t in ELPA and he doesn’t say whether he will place it there but it is available from his site: see his blog post for the link.

I hope he continues work on this package. It looks as if it could really make handling bibliographies a lot easier.

Update: Apparently, Kitchen is continuing work on org-ref. In a subsequent post he describes how to export to other formats and remarks that export to HTML is working pretty well now. If you’re interested in using Emacs to handle bibliographies, you should take a look at Kitchen’s blog. He has many posts describing the work he’s done in that area. It’s pretty impressive.

This is by way of an obvious Emacs tip. While I was in my emacs.el adding ace-windows, I decided to fix a problem with ace-jump-mode as well. When I first installed it I used【Ctrl+x Space】as the triggering key sequence. Somewhere along the line that got taken over by GUD so I changed it to 【Ctrl+c Space】 but that doesn’t work for Org files because it’s used to blank table fields so I needed a new binding. I chose 【Hyper+a】 because it easy to type and therefore fast. Once I got that taken care of I starting thinking about ace-jump-mode and realized that I could use it more widely than I’d been doing.

Mostly I was using it for micromovements and using isearch for larger movements as recommended by Steve Yegge but if the place you want to go is on the current page it’s a lot easier and faster to use ace-jump-mode. I just use the first letter of the word I want to go to as the jump target, pick the correct red letter, and I’m there. I could, I suppose, specify the universal argument to jump into the middle of a word but it doesn’t seem necessary.

I’ve been making an effort to follow this plan for a few days now and it’s working out very well. If you aren’t doing this, try it out. You might find yourself with a new habit.

The other day, I wrote about ace-window, a really nice way of quickly jumping from one window to another. I used the suggested key sequence 【Meta+p】 to trigger it so it seemed pretty fast.

After using it for a while, I noticed that it didn’t work with ibuffer because ibuffer uses 【Meta+p】 to move through filters. Since I very often have an ibuffer buffer open, I decided to change the triggering key sequence.

One further thing you should know about ace-window is that if there are only two windows, it simply switches to the window that doesn’t have focus (exactly as if you had typed 【Ctrl+x o】). I remembered that Mathias Dahl had commented that he used 【F1】 and 【F2】 to move between windows because it was a single key and very quick so I decided to use a function key. I chose 【F11】 because I find it easy to reach. Now things are even better. If I have two windows open I can switch between them with 【F11】 and if there are more than two windows, ace-window gets triggered with the same key. A definite win.

Sacha Chua has posted the latest episode in her Emacs Chats series. This time it’s with Bozhidar Batsov, who, among other things, runs the excellent Emacs Redux blog. Batsov is also the author of the prelude, projectile, and cider packages for Emacs.

Batsov talks about how he got started with Emacs, his hopes for its future, and his plans for ongoing Emacs work. He demonstrates some of the features of prelude, a sort of advanced starter kit for Emacs, and his project manager projectile. I was delighted to learn that he uses many of the same micro-optimizations that I do. For example, he’s a big user of ace-jump-mode and ace-windows, two packages that I’m using more and more lately.

The chat is a bit over 53 minutes so you’ll need to set some time aside. The beginning of the chat has some technical problems with bandwidth but once you get through the initial snafus it’s fine. Batsov has made some significant contributions to the Emacs community so I think you’ll enjoy hearing what he has to say.

Update: Added link to the video.