Irreal

Most Emacs users are probably aware of the current problem with using Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG) with Emacs. The TL;DR is that although you can open GnuPG encrypted files, you can’t edit and resave them. This problem was introduced in GnuPG 2.4.1 and is apparently hard to fix. As of this writing, it persists in all the GnuPG releases after 2.4.0.

A simple solution is to simply downgrade to GnuPG 2.4.0. It’s a simple solution, that is, unless you installed GnuPG with Homebrew. In that case, the solution is a bit more difficult but still not hard. I wrote about how to do it here. In a comment to that post, Michael Alan Dorman notes that another suggested—and far easier solution—is to simply add

(fset 'epg-wait-for-status 'ignore)

to your init.el. That seemed like an easy solution and I resolved to try it the next time I faced the problem.

I’ve just stumbled across a reddit post that suggests that solution will corrupt your encrypted files and make them unreadable. I haven’t had time to verify that yet but I wanted to get the warning out immediately. Hence the PSA. Until the issue is resolved, I’d avoid using that solution and downgrade to version 2.4.0 instead.

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) is continuing to add new features to the upcoming release of Denote. The latest changes are about sorted listings of Denote files. Back in November, I wrote about Prot’s work on another new feature: dynamic blocks. Part of his latest additions also involves dynamic blocks.

You can specify a dynamic block of files and populate it with a sorted list of all the denote files that match a regular expression or have a given keyword. The files can be sorted on a number of criteria and are presented as links to the files. Once the block is set up, it can easily be updated as your files evolve by simply reevaluating the block. The idea is that dynamic blocks are used in what Prot calls “metanotes”. These notes represent a summary of other notes so having an automatically produced listing of links to those files is very useful.

But wait. There’s more. You can also collect the file listing into a dired file. From there you can do any of the usual dired operations. Again, you can specify the files to be included by a regular expression or keyword.

These changes are already in the development version of Denote and Prot says that they will be officially released in Version 2.2 sometime in December. If you’re a Denote user, this is something to look forward to. If you’re not, this video may be the final nudge you need to try it out.

Emacs Elements has a new video on bookmarks out. I’ve written about bookmarks before—most recently here—but it bears repeating how useful they can be. I don’t have a huge bookmark list but I use those bookmarks several times a day. I hate entering long file paths or, worse, trying to remember them. Bookmarks eliminates all that. They can even remember where you were in a file so it’s easy to bookmark specific parts of specific files.

As the video points out, all the keybindings for bookmarks start with Ctrl+x r, which is the same prefix used for registers. Some people find the overloading of Ctrl+x r confusing. Emacs Elements’ suggested solution is to rebind those keys. My solution is to use a hydra to jump to bookmarks and let which-key remind me of the rest after I type the Ctrl+x r prefix.

For me, the most useful part of the video was a link to his previous video on Bookmarks+. That’s what I use and have for a long time. Among other things it allows you to bookmark Websites, which can be really useful. If you’re using bookmarks, and you should be, you should definitely take a look at Bookmarks+. You should also take a look at abo-abo’s headlong-bookmark-jump to make choosing bookmarks easy.