Irreal

Occur is, I think, an underappreciated command. At first glance, it seems sort of like grep except it works on buffers rather than files. You give it a regular expression and it opens a new buffer that lists the matches. So far, just like grep but each of those listed matches is actually a link to the line it matches.

Just this capability is very useful. I use it when I’m entering items from my monthly bank statement into my tax file. The tax file is an Org file with a headline or subheadline for each category of items I’ll need for my tax return. I run Occur with the regular expression "^\\*+ ", which lists all the headers of the tax file in an Occur buffer. That makes it easy to jump directly to the correct place in the tax file for each relevant item in my bank statement.

But wait; there’s more. You can also make the Occur buffer editable and every change you make there will be reflected back into the original buffer. As with the similar grep buffer capability, this is obviously a powerful feature.

All of this and more is discussed in the recent Emacs Elements video, All you need to know about the Emacs OCCUR command in 4 minutes. Occur is a simple but powerful tool. All you need to do is add is a little bit of imagination to enhance your workflow. A nice example of this is the comment from the reddit post for the video.

If you’re not already familiar with Occur, the video is a nice introduction. The video is only four minutes, ten seconds so it should be easy to fit it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a big fan of Emacs menus. That’s mostly because I’m much faster if I can stick to the keyboard and, of course, my general desire to avoid the mouse when I can. Still, I admit that often the menus are handy when I want to execute some obscure command for which I don’t remember the name.

Others, of course disagree. One of those people is Charles Choi who has previously schooled me on the the proper way to configure Emacs. Choi likes to use the menus but he’s not always thrilled with their content. In a recent post, he take a look at the Tools menu and what’s wrong with it.

The post isn’t so much about what’s wrong with the Tools menu as it is about how to change it to better serve your workflow. You don’t have to modify the Emacs source for the menu. You can simply specify that you want to delete an item, add a new command, or insert a separator line. There are commands to do this to an existing menu so it’s easy to configure menus to your liking.

Choi insists that using menus lowers the cognitive load of memorizing commands and there’s no doubt that’s true but I’m of the mind that, at least for commands you use more than once a month, it pays to spend the mental cycles to memorize them and keep your fingers on the keyboard.

This is another one of those questions where there can be reasonable disagreements. In the end, it doesn’t matter much which side you come down on as long as it works for you.

Michael Ashley wrote to tell me that System Crafters has released version 2 of their Crafted Emacs configuration. Irreal readers will be familiar with System Crafters from David Wilson’s System Crafters video series that I’ve written about many times.

It turns out, though, that they also produce the Crafted Emacs configuration, which can be described as a sort of Emacs starter kit with the emphasis on starter. Their idea is to provide a simple but effective Emacs configuration that can serve as a starting point for users to build their own bespoke configurations.

The base configuration is designed to provide reasonable defaults that result in a usable Emacs. They add a few packages to that base configuration but mostly leave the development of the configuration to the user. They believe that the end configuration should be uniquely the user’s and that Crafted Emacs is merely a jumping off point.

If you’re like me and already have a highly customized configuration, it’s still worthwhile taking a look at the repository to see the defaults they chose and some of their implementation strategies. For example, I learned that you can specify priorities for your ELPA repositories so that you get your packages from your preferred repositories, whatever they are. I was also impressed that they used customize-set-variable instead of setq for defcustom values.

If nothing else, you should take a look at their README to see what the project is about and their philosophy. It’s comprehensive but worth a few minutes of your time. I see lots of people wanting to migrate off, say, Spacemacs or Doom and develop their own configuration. Crafted Emacs is an excellent way of getting started.

Rob Streeting has a very interesting post on building the ideal Emacs journal. He was an Org-roam user but discovered that he never seemed to add links to the data he needed later. He began building the ideal journaling system in his head but discovered that org-journal did almost everything he wanted.

His original plan was to modify the source code to mold org-journal to fit his workflow but he soon realized that all he had to do was write a wrapper function around org-journal-new-entry. It was almost like advising the function except that he called his wrapper function directly rather than org-journal-new-entry to add a new entry.

He had four types of entries he wanted to make:

• Tasks
• Notes
• Meetings
• Breaks

His wrapper code takes care of clocking him into and out of events when he adds a new entry. It also insists that his cursor be on a TODO task when he chooses a Task event. That automatically creates a link from the journal entry back to the TODO and clocks him into the TODO task.

He includes the code for his wrapper function at the end of his post so you can see how he did it. It’s quite clear and easy to follow and could easily serve as a go-by for your own custom org-journal. He’s added some tweaks since but he provides a pointer his Github repository so you can his latest version.

I really like his system and am half tempted to replace my own system with something similar. I have a journal file but it’s more general and doesn’t use org-journal so it would be a major effort to migrate. Regardless, it’s a good post with some nice ideas so take a look.