Irreal

A couple of days ago I wrote about finally solving a long standing Emacs problem involving missing glyphs in my default font. I was really happy to have the problem resolved. So pleased I wrote about it in glowing terms.

That solution involved installing the unicode-fonts package, which scans your fonts for missing glyphs, finds them in other installed fonts, and arranges for them to be used in place of the missing glyphs. It’s a really great package but it does much more than I need. I really just wanted to specify an alternate font for those missing glyphs.

As soon as I published my post, Xah Lee and Artur Malabarba suggested a simpler solution. I was happy with unicode-fonts but couldn’t resist the one line solution that Lee and Malabarba offered. So I disabled unicode-fonts and added the line

(set-fontset-font "fontset-default" nil 
                  (font-spec :size 20 :name "Symbola"))

to my init.el. It worked perfectly, of course, so I uninstalled unicode-fonts and went with the Lee-Malabarba solution.

Malabarba notes that the documentation for set-fontset-font is a bit opaque. That’s an understatement. I had to read it several times before I could figure out why it worked for my problem. No matter. If you’re having the same problem you can just think of it as a magic incantation.

Over at Endless Parentheses, which I’ve mentioned before, Artur Malabarba has a really good idea. He shows how to define a custom key map that he uses to toggle modes that he uses frequently. He binds the commands to the prefix【Ctrl+x t】, an unused key sequence in stock Emacs. Then he has a third key that mnemonically suggest the mode he wants to toggle. Thus,【Ctrl+x t c】toggles column-number-mode and【Ctrl+x t r】toggles read-only-mode and so on.

Oddly, none of the shortcuts that he proposes are ones I care about but I do have a list of my own

As Malabarba says, these aren’t keys I’ll use everyday but they are mnemonic enough that I’ll be able to remember then.

Doubtless you have your own list of modes you’d like to be able to toggle easily and Malabarba’s method makes it easy to bind them to an easily remembered key.

A very useful post, I think. I’m going to implement the above list in my own init.el as soon as I finish writing this.

It’s been a while since Irreal has had an EmacsGolf challenge but yesterday’s post on Programming Silliness suggested a nice one. When I ran the grep, I got

The challenge is in two parts:

1. Rearrange the long, single column list into four columns the way it was in yesterday’s post.
2. I was lazy in yesterday’s post and left the results sorted by rows instead of the more natural by columns. Rearrange the list so that the results are sorted by columns.

Continuing with our theme of using Emacs for writing rather than coding, Mark Szepieniec and Christophe-Marie Duquesne have a couple of nice posts about writing your résumé in Markdown and then exporting it to the desired format with Pandoc.

There’s a lot to be said for this strategy. You can have a single master copy for your résumé and use it to generate whatever format is needed. The same master copy can generate a nice HTML for your Web site, a PDF for an employer that prefers a traditional format, or a Word document for employment agencies, which generally prefer that format. If you try to keep separate copies for each of these different formats, errors are sure to creep in and some formats will have the latest updates missing.

Both these posts discuss using Markdown for your master copy but exactly the same strategy works for Org-mode. You might not even need Pandoc with Org-mode because of Org’s powerful export engine. Either way, I think the Markdown/Org-mode method is the winning strategy. You have a single, portable source for your resume that can be exported to just about any desired format. One thing for sure, it’s a lot better than using Word or one of its demonic spawn. It’s also better, I submit, than writing it in TeX or LaTeX for many of the same reasons.

Like many (most?) Emacs users, I do all my writing with Emacs. This mostly involves Org-mode but even when it doesn’t I’m still in some sort of Emacs buffer. I just came across this old Stack Exchange post asking about Emacs configurations for creative writing.

If you’re looking for an excellent writing tool, you should check out this thread. Also be sure to follow the link to Randall Wood’s Woodnotes Guide to Emacs for Writers. It covers those aspects of Emacs most likely to be useful to writers. Wood doesn’t consider coding at all, only creative writing.

I know many writers like tools such as Scrivener for organizing their writing. While I’ve never used any of those special tools—let alone the horror that is Word—I find it hard to believe that an appropriately configured Emacs is not equally good or better. One of the nice things about writing with Emacs and Org-mode or Markdown is that you can export to Word format with Pandoc or Org’s export engine. That’s really handy because you can write with a decent editor and still provide your publisher with the Word document that most publishers insist upon.

It’s an interesting thread. If you do any writing, especially creative writing, you should check it out.

Update: Randal → Randall