John Weigley on Magit

Posted on 2019-01-03 by jcs

John Weigley has an excellent video on using Magit. It’s very comprehensive and the content is quite dense so you may want to watch it more than once. He covers the usual easy commands that everybody uses but also some of the more esoteric commands that you may not even know existed. Certainly, I learned a number of commands I didn’t know about.

Rather than provide a content list for the talk, here’s a link to the Org notes for the talk. You may want to download that first as it makes following the talk a little easier. The talk is long (an hour and 18 minutes) so you’ll need to schedule some time. If you’re a Magit user or think you should be one, you definitely need to watch this video.

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Blogging with Emacs Only

Posted on 2019-01-02 by jcs

As most of you know, I enjoy reading about other bloggers’ workflows. I especially like workflows that use only Emacs and Org mode without any third-party tools. In Yesterday’s post, I promised to write about Diego Vicente’s Emacs-only blogging workflow.

As I hinted at yesterday, his workflow is centered around the org-publish functionality. To a first approximation, he simply writes his post, calls org-publish and gets static web pages as output. I like that for a couple of reasons. First, everything is handled from within Emacs. He doesn’t have to worry about maintaining something like Hugo or any other third-party app and he has complete control of what his blog looks like and how it behaves.

Secondly, he’s generating static Web pages so he doesn’t have to worry about a third-party app on his hosting server either1. I use WordPress and have been happy with it but it’s a constant struggle to keep it updated and backed up. It’s written in PHP so I don’t know how it works and I can’t really make any changes to make it behave differently if I want to. If it weren’t for the pain of moving my thousands of posts over to a new system, I’d seriously consider adopting a system like Vincente’s.

If you’re looking for a simple blogging workflow that brings the ease and safety of static Web pages, take a look at Vincente’s post. The only thing missing is RSS and I have a post on handling that coming up.

Footnotes:

1

Well, other than a Web server, of course.

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Diego Vicente’s 2018 Wrapup

Posted on 2019-01-01 by jcs

It’s a new year and thumbing through the Emacs Blogger Manual I see that I’m supposed to offer a year end perspective on my Emacs use. The problem is that after more than a decade of Emacs use, my configuration is converging to a steady state. From my Git logs, I see that I made only 49 changes in 2018 and many of those were trivial bolt tightening. The rest I’ve already written about.

Still, not all is lost because Diego Vicente, who is a more recent Emacs convert, has provided an interesting year-end wrap-up of his Emacs usage. Except for the language modes, his configuration is much like mine and, probably, much like that of most developers. One exception is his blogging setup. I’ll be writing more about that later but the TL;DR is that he uses org-publish and doesn’t depend on any third-party packages.

It’s a nice overview of one Emacser’s configuration and Emacs workflow. If, like me, you enjoy reading this sort of thing, head on over to the link and take a look. You might even get some ideas for your own configuration.

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Notes for Karl Voit’s Talk at 35c3

Posted on 2018-12-31 by jcs

Karl Voit gave a talk about Org mode at the recent 35c3 conference. He argued the position that even if you’re a die hard Vim user—like he is—Org mode has a lot to offer and it’s worth learning a bit about it. One of his main takeaways was that Emacs is not just an editor but a Lisp interpreter that provides a framework for many (non-editing) functions such as calendars, email, and others.

Sadly, as far as I can tell, no video was made of the talk but Voit has made his notes available. The notes give an outline of the talk but more importantly provide links to all the material he was discussing. One of Voit’s major concerns is Personal Information Management (PIM) and that is one of his major uses of Org-mode.

I’m hoping that someone did capture video of the talk and will make it available later. In the meantime, we have his notes.

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How You Know the Copyright Cartel Is Out of Control

Posted on 2018-12-30 by jcs

I get that artists don’t want others ripping off their work but saying that a cartoon representation of a real person in a video game is a violation because the cartoon character shows (a cartoon representation) of the real person’s tattoos strikes me as ridiculous. Not that common sense has much to do with the practice of IP law these days.

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Org Mode 9.2

Posted on 2018-12-29 by jcs

A couple of days ago, Bastien tweeted that Org Mode 9.2 has been released:

I’ve taken to upgrading my packages on Sunday (only) so I haven’t installed it yet but there is one incompatible change that Org users should be aware of. The “structured template expansion” mechanism—expanding <e to #+BEGIN_EXPAMPLE … #+END_EXAMPLE for instance—is completely different. The change was a bit contentious but even Carsten admitted the new system is better. Regardless, it’s now the default system. You can revert to the old system by adding

(require 'org-tempo)

to your init.el. This change—along with other incompatible changes—is described at the top of the CHANGE file, so you should definitely take a look at it.

As usual, Thanks to Nicolas, Bastien, and all the others who worked to bring us this new release.

UPDATE [2018-12-30 Sun 18:28]: It’s Org-mode not Emacs that got updated.

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Writing and Publishing Emacs Packages

Posted on 2018-12-28 by jcs

NOTE: It turns out that I wrote about Scott’s post before but it has useful information so I’m going to publish this anyway.

Al Scott was annoyed that he couldn’t run his Mocha tests from inside Emacs. He knew it could be done because it was possible for other frameworks so he decided to write his own package. He wrote about his experience in Take Your Emacs to the Next Level by Writing Custom Packages.

Most of the post is about the mechanics of the using the Emacs compilation system. If you have a similar need, Scott’s post is an excellent go-by. The last part of the post concerns publishing the package to MELPA. Although that can seem mysterious, it’s actually very straightforward and easy to do: make the package file and open a pull request to MELPA. Someone at MELPA will check your code and if everything seems okay, your package will automatically be included in the next MELPA build. From then on, updates are simply pulled from your GitHub repository without any further action from you.

If you’ve been thinking about building your own package, Scott’s post is well worth a few minutes of your time.

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A Reminder about MELPA

Posted on 2018-12-27 by jcs

If you’re anything more than a casual Emacs user, one of your most important resources is almost certainly the MELPA package repository. I’ve mentioned this before but apparently a reminder is needed: MELPA is a voluntary operation run by Steve Purcell and whoever he can get to help out. He doesn’t get paid and, believe it or not, he has a family and job that also make demands on his time. Even so, he spends a lot of time and effort on MELPA. Follow that last link to see what I mean.

I’m posting this reminder because someone on the Emacs subreddit was whining that it was taking too long to get new packages approved. MELPA is curated and part of that curation process is reviewing each package to make sure it meets MELPA’s guidelines and is safe. This requires human scrutiny, which, again, means Purcell. As my previous post makes clear, he’s dancing as fast as he can.

I have to admit that I found the reddit post annoying. I can only imagine how Purcell will feel when he sees it. As I said, he doesn’t get paid but I’m sure he’d be happy to get a little gratitude instead of complaints for his efforts.

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Emacs for R Programming

Posted on 2018-12-26 by jcs

Although I’ve played around with it a bit and even written a few blog posts about it, I’m not really an R user and barely rise to the dilettante level. andyptt21 over at The Scientific Shrimper is an R user with several years experience. Like most R users he started out with Rstudio and used it for four years before he replaced it with Emacs and Org-mode.

In a blog post, Soapbox Rant: Why I use Emacs for R programming, he explains why he made the switch and why he thinks it was the right move. He finds that Emacs is more flexible with respect to window arrangement and is, of course, customizable so that you can make editing/experimenting experience just the way you like it.

He’s also discovered—as many of us have—that using keyboard navigation so that you never have to take your hands off the keyboard is a real win over using a mouse for the same tasks. This seems counter intuitive and always surprises people when they discover it.

He gives a few other reasons for the switch—including the integration with Org-mode through Babel. If you’re an R user, you should give it a read. Perhaps it will convince you to make the switch as well.

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Merry Christmas the Linux Way

Posted on 2018-12-25 by jcs

It’s Christmas and the Interweebs are quiet so I’ll just pass on this as your Christmas card from Irreal.

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