Irreal

In a comment to my Mathematics in a Blog Post post, Grant Rettke asked what versions of WordPress and org2blog/wp I was using. It turned out I had a pretty old version of org2blog/wp installed so I decided to upgrade. I had been maintaining a cloned version of its repository but I decided to see if I could get it to work from ELPA. I’d tried that before but it pulls in Org mode and there were problems with getting Org to work from ELPA then.

This time both Org and org2blog/wp worked fine when installed with ELPA so I got rid of my private cloned repositories for them. If you had a similar problem with Org and ELPA it appears to be working well now.

While I was cleaning things up, I decided to get rid of old files and subdirectories in my tools and tars directories. For example, I had half a dozen old copies of SBCL hanging around and even though I didn’t need the space (my iMac has a terabyte of disk space) I was in a housekeeping frame of mood so out they went. Normally when I do this type of thing, I use eshell to remove the files with

rm -rf ~/tools/sbcl-1.2.1

But then it occurred to me that even though I don’t edit any files in the tools directory, there was no reason I couldn’t bring it up in a dired buffer and just mark the subdirectories that I wanted to delete. That worked fine, of course, and was much faster than deleting each one by hand. Unless I’m already in a shell and just need to deal with one or two files, dired is faster and easier—even if it’s a directory that I don’t normally use Emacs with.

Emacs really is a wonderful environment. It is, as I’ve said many times, as close as we can come to using a Lisp machine. Not everyone, I suppose, wants that but I love it and don’t understand why anyone would use anything else.

Xah Lee just taught me something new about dired sorting. I mostly just sort the list by name but occasionally I want to see the newer entries so I toggle the sorting to “date” by typing 【s】. It turns out, though, that you can also sort by any of the fields supported by ls. This includes such things as displaying file sizes by kilo- or megabytes.

Head on over to Lee’s site for the details. If you’re like me, you’ll mostly want to sort by name or date but when you need it sorted another way, Lee shows you how. You can also set the variable dired-listing-switches to make your changes the default. Very useful post.

There are few things as ugly, typographically speaking, as the straight quotation marks that are the default in most fonts. When you’re writing something that’s going to be rendered with proportional fonts, it’s easy to do the right thing and use left and right rounded quotation marks.

Artur Malabarba has a nice post up with a bit of Elisp to insert correct quotation marks in a context aware way. If you want a set it and forget solution, Malabarba’s is a good one. Just add his code to your .emacs or init.el file.

I do something simpler that requires me to decide when I want round quotation marks. I use the key-chord package that allows me to bind commands to key chords. It’s not context aware but it works well for me. When I want to insert proper quotation marks, I just press 【"】twice rapidly. If you want to use this solution, all you have to do after installing the package is add

(defun dq ()
  "Insert double quotes in an org buffer."
  (interactive)
  (insert "“”")
  (backward-char))

(key-chord-define-global "\"\"" 'dq)

to your .emacs or init.el file. If you want to use this, the names of the proper glyphs are:

• “ – LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
• ” – RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK

Now you have two solutions so don’t let me see those ugly quotation marks in your writings anymore.