Irreal

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has been doing more writing lately and has felt the need for a thesaurus. I very seldom use a thesaurus for reasons that I’ve written about previously but it’s sometimes convenient to have one. My typical use case is to avoid reusing the same word too often in close proximity. A thesaurus is good in that situation because I’m just interested in finding an alternative word, not shades of meaning.

Borkowski is trying to decide between two thesauruses, le-thesaurus and mw-thesaurus. Le-thesaurus provides a simple list of synonyms from which you can choose and it will automatically replace the word at point. Mw-thesaurus presents a nicely formatted buffer that gives synonyms and information about shades of meaning. It’s much more comprehensive than le-thesaurus but doesn’t automatically replace the word at point.

I have two thesauruses installed: mw-thesaurus and power thesaurus. Power thesaurus operates much like le-thesaurus but uses a community sourced thesaurus. I almost always use power thesaurus because it best fits my default use case and because when I want shades of meaning and context I turn to Websters 1913, most recently through the newly built-in dictionary-search.

Another problem with mw-thesaurus that I didn’t know about until I read Borkowski’s post is that it globally sets org-hide-emphasis-markers to t, which hides all Org emphasis markers in all buffers. That’s not something I want, and I’ve occasionally noticed it happening in the past but I didn’t know why. Borkowski solved that by editing the source code but perhaps there’s a better way.

Regardless of which one(s) you install, it’s often handy to have a thesaurus available without having to leave the comfort of Emacs. Any of those discussed here are fine and there are doubtless other good ones.

As many of you know, I’m fascinated by those who use Emacs for projects that don’t involve science or engineering. One such aspect that I always enjoy reading about is using Emacs for creative writing, by which I mean novels, short stories, poetry, and the like.

That may seem like an edge case but there are plenty of writers who write their novels with Emacs, including such A-list writers as Vernor Vinge and Neal Stephenson. There’s little reason to wonder why. Emacs has superb editing and linking capabilities that makes writing and organizing a piece of prose easier than it would be with most other writing platforms.

John Urquhart Ferguson is another writer who uses Emacs and he’s written a package, Org Novelist, to make the note taking and story organization easier. A full-blown novel can have several minor characters and locales that are hard for the author to keep track of. Similarly, ideas may occur to the author that don’t involve whatever part of the story is currently being worked on and a way of capturing those notes is needed. Ferguson’s package is intended to help with that. Best of all, the package let’s you write your prose in Org mode.

Ferguson has a short announcement on reddit but to really get a feeling for what the package is about and what it can do, take a look at the README on his GitHub repository. The package is not on MELPA or any of the other package repositories so you’ll have to download it from GitHub.

Ferguson stresses that the package was written for his own use with his particular workflow but he’s releasing it in case others find it useful. From the README, that seems likely to me so if you’re interested in a package to help you with your creative writing, take a look.

Beetle_b has an interesting short post, about scraping a Web site, that outlines a technique that may be useful to some Irreal readers. The TL;DR was that he wanted to capture and print the content from a Web page that had links to several subpages. There were about 20 subpages and they all had ads and lots of wasted space on them. That meant that he’d have to continually print pages and would have a lot of wasted space on each page.

His solution was to first capture the links (with the judicious use of a keyboard macro) and then use alphapappa’s org-web-tools to capture the content at each link (without ads) and insert it into it own Org heading.

Many of us try to remain digital as much as we can so we have no need to produce hard copy but most of us have occasionally wanted to capture and preserve the content from a series of Web pages. Beetle_b’s method is an easy way to do that but, of course, you’re going to need to load org-web-tools first. It’s definitely worth a couple of minutes to read and bookmark his post against the day when you want to capture some content.