Irreal

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.

Just a quick tip from Ruslan Bekenev: find-grep-dired. It’s a nice way of running grep directly from a Dired buffer. The nice thing, as Bekenev points out is that the result is a filtered Dired listing of all the files that contain the specified regular expression. That means that you can do any of the standard Dired operations on them.

The command is really easy to use. The starting directory is already filled in for you, although you can edit it if desired. Then you just specify the regular expression and Emacs takes care of the rest.

You should contrast this with the Dired dired-do-find-regexp command (A) that searches only the marked files and produces a standard grep output. The commands are different but both can be useful. They’re just another set of tools in your Emacs arsenal.

Mike Zamansky has returned from his European vacation and is jumping right back into his Learning Elisp video series. The current video is the start of a new project: automatically inserting an Emolji into an Emacs buffer.

This video is an easy introduction to the project. The idea is that the text :bird:, say, should be replaced by 🐦, the Emolji of that name. That’s not too hard. Zamansky starts with a short list of Emoljis and names arranged in an association list. The rest is easy. Simply look up the name in the association list and substitute the corresponding Emolji.

The first video is concerned with implementing a simple function to do this. Right now, you have to call the function manually to do the substitution but Zamansky plans to make this automatic by invoking a hook function. After that, he is going to use overlays to to display the Emolji but keep the underlying text the same. Finally, the plan is a capture all this in a minor mode.

You may or may not be interested in having this capability but that’s not the point. The point is to demonstrate how to do things like automating actions with hook functions, use overlays, and even implement a minor mode.

The video is 15 minutes, 32 seconds long so you’ll probably have to set aside some time but, as always, Zamansky’s videos are worth the time. If you already know some Elisp or have watched the previous Learning Elisp videos, you probably won’t learn much new from this one but it’s setting the stage for the more advanced techniques that are coming.

Eli writes to tell us that the Emacs 29.1.90, a pretest for Emacs 29.2, is available. It seems like 29.1 was just released and we’re already in the early stages of the Emacs 29.2 release. The point releases are mainly bug and bolt tightening fixes, of course, but they’re still a welcome addition to the Emacs family.

As always, thanks to Eli and all the other developers who have worked so hard on this new release. If you can, please help out the effort by using and testing the pretest. It will help the developers clean up any remaining problems.

One of the first things every writer learns—probably in high school—is to avoid using the same word repeatedly in close proximity to each other. I’m really strict about that to the point where I try to avoid using the same word close together even twice. For me at least, it’s hard to get this right the first time. When I first read a post right after reading it, there’s almost always some repeats that I have to fix up.

Marcin Borkowski has the same problem. Borkowski’s problem is even greater since he’s often writing in English, which is not his first language. To help with that problem he wrote a bit of code to find out how far away from a given word other instances of that word are. In addition, he highlights those words giving him a nice visual image of how close the collisions are.

The code is reasonably short so you can just suck it into your own init.el if you’re interested in a tool like this. A year and a half ago, I wrote about Albert Heinle who had a similar problem and also made his code available.

Other editors may or may not have a function to help with discovering repeated words but how many can let you add that functionality to the editor on your own? Even if an editor claims to be “extensible” how many have an extension language powerful enough to do the job easily? This is Irreal so you all know the answer.