The Horrors of Word

Posted on 2019-11-06 by jcs

From Eric Fraga we have this long and screamingly funny Twitter thread about the horrors of using Word.

I long ago wrote about my own experiences using a Word clone. It’s hard to overstate how much I hated having to use Word or any of its evil siblings. It appears from the thread that things haven’t improved much.

I’ve always had the uneasy feeling that maybe it’s just me and that no one else had these problems. But no. According those responding to the tweet, everyone has them and no one can figure out how to get a decently formatted list. I kept wondering as I was reading the tweets why, if people find it so hard to use, they don’t dump Word for a better tool. The answer, of course, is that for most people there is no other choice.

Unless you’re willing to learn Emacs/Org-mode or some other editor/Markdown and perhaps how to use Pandoc to convert your files to docx, you’re pretty much stuck. That’s too bad because it’s only increasing the rage in the world.

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Moving Icons Between Smartphone Screens

Posted on 2019-11-05 by jcs

A year ago, I wrote about a trick I learned from Karl Voit’s Twitter feed on how to move the iOS cursor. It’s been extraordinarily useful to me and, I’m sure, others. Now, Voit has retweeted another very useful trick:

I’ve always found moving an icon from screen to screen to be very frustrating and error prone, so of course I tried it out immediately. I’m happy to report it worked just as advertised. If you follow the conversation, you’ll see that Schroeder says it works on (at least some) Android phones too but I don’t have an Android phone to try it out with. There’s also a short video that shows the operation in action.

This isn’t earth shattering, of course, but it does eliminate one more annoyance in my life so I’m happy to have learned it.

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Searching Your Personal Data

Posted on 2019-11-04 by jcs

I’m an inveterate data collector and recorder. I keep records of everything to the point that my wife was making fun of me last week when I used my phone to recall a piece of obscure information that I’d stored away. If you’re like me, there are two problems to solve: capturing and retrieval.

First you have to have an efficient way of capturing information. For me, that’s mostly Org-mode although I do use the Apple Notes app too. I have keyboard shortcuts on my computer that take me directly to an Org-mode capture buffer so I can capture events or ideas as frictionlessly as possible even if I’m not in Emacs when I want to capture the data.

My searching strategies are not particularly sophisticated. I mainly search by tags or by using counsel-rg, an Ivy/Counsel interface to ripgrep. Using them, I can retrieve almost any piece of my information quickly and easily. Some folks, however, are more demanding.

Over at beepb00p, Karlicoss has a long and interesting post on how he searches his personal data. Like me, he uses tag searches and ripgrep but his system is much more comprehensive and he has several scripts that extract data from things like reddit, his twitter feed, and basically anywhere he comments or adds data. The extracted data is usually imported into Org for easy handling but he has other strategies as well.

If you’re interested in collecting, storing, and retrieving data, Karlicoss has a bunch of good ideas in his post. It’s a long post with lots of links but definitely worth spending a bit of time on.

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Emacs Markdown Cheatsheet

Posted on 2019-11-03 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago when writing about Mike Zamansky’s video on Markdown, I noted that Emacs had excellent support for Markdown. The other day I saw this Tweet pointing at a Markdown cheatsheet:

If you’re like me, you don’t use Markdown often enough to learn the Markdown markup. As the cheatsheet shows, Markdown mode has many shortcuts so that you don’t have to remember or enter the actual markup. Of course, you still have to learn the shortcuts and, sadly, they are not at all like those for Org mode but you do have this nice cheatsheet.

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Inline Tasks

Posted on 2019-11-02 by jcs

There an interesting thread on Emacs-Orgmode about the state of the art for using Org-mode to take minutes of meetings. That’s a need that many of us have so you may find it worthwhile taking a look at the thread. It’s currently very short (3 posts) so you can read it all in a couple of minutes.

What struck me about the thread was the mention of inline tasks. I’d never heard of them before so I did some exploring. The idea is that you can add a TODO item without starting a separate heading. That’s ideal when you’re taking notes in a meeting and you need to insert a TODO in the middle of the discussion. For example, suppose the discussion turns to bike sheds. You add a heading for Bike Sheds but in the middle of the discussion it’s decided that the committee needs to research colors. You don’t want to add a new heading because you’re still discussing bike sheds but you do want to capture the “research colors” task.

Inline tasks provide an easy way of doing that. Sadly, I couldn’t find them documented anywhere except in the code. The commentary at the start of org-inlinetask.el tells you everything you need to know so look there if you’re interested in using inline tasks. You can easily read the commentary using finder-commentary as I discussed here. Following Phil’s suggestion, I have it mapped to Ctrl+h Ctrl+c.

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A Suggestion for a New Smartphone Function

Posted on 2019-11-01 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago, I asked what new functions we could add to our smartphones. Kontra has a suggestion:

A spectrometer would be nice. If nothing else, it would finally satisfy the yearning that many of us have for a real tricorder.

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Light-Mode vs. Dark-Mode Again

Posted on 2019-10-31 by jcs

This is my third post on the burning issue of whether light-mode or dark-mode is better and, more importantly, what do we mean by “better”. Given the frequency of my revisiting the matter, you might think it’s something I care deeply about or are obsessed with. The truth is, though, I don’t really care one way or the other. I’ve always considered it an aesthetic choice that reasonable people can differ about, even if I did find it odd that some—okay, most—people prefer dark mode.

It wasn’t until the hipsters adopted the issue and tried to cast all us right-thinking light-mode people into the darkness that I ever thought about the matter in other than an idle way. Now, of course, the battle is joined.

Of my previous two posts, the first concentrated on research showing that light-mode is actually easier to read and “more natural” than dark-mode, while the second reported on Andrew Couts’ theory that the whole thing is really a fashion statement by the dark-mode adherents.

Over at Fast Company, they have an article that asks if dark-mode is really better for you. The article is more neutral than the other two and doesn’t energetically assert one position or the other but it does note that the research shows that light-mode is easier to read. On the other hand, some applications really are bettered served with dark-mode and the article mentions some of those and explains why dark-mode works better for them. Their conclusion, like Couts’, is that it’s mostly a matter of fashion.

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Emacs “Plugins”

Posted on 2019-10-30 by jcs

I’ve noticed a lot of Reddit posts and tweets recently that refer to Emacs packages1 as “plugins.” Perhaps I’m growing increasingly cantankerous in my old age or maybe I’m just tired and grumpy—waving your cane at those kids on your lawn can be surprisingly enervating—but this always sets my teeth on edge.

I think of plugins as something those other editors have: some code that uses a limited API provided by the editor’s author that can perform some predetermined, well defined tasks. Emacs isn’t like that. You can extend its code or even replace its code. The things we call packages are actually first class objects indistinguishable from the rest of Emacs except for the artificial distinction that they’re not part of “core Emacs.” They don’t depend on any extension mechanism other than the same Lisp interpreter used by the rest of Emacs.

This is, of course, what I refer to as a “first-world problem.” It’s simply a matter of terminology—like the window/frame distinction that often confuses n00bs—and doesn’t matter very much. Still, we insist on the window/frame distinction and I see no reason why this should be different. What do you think? Am I wrong to insist on the distinction? It doesn’t, after all, cause any confusion like misusing “window” when you mean “frame” but it does obscure one of the most important features and strengths of Emacs: true extensibility.

Footnotes:

1

I’m going to abuse terminology just a bit and refer to even code that’s contained in a single file and not packaged up for ELPA as a “package.”

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An Interview With Hal Abelson

Posted on 2019-10-29 by jcs

Many of you know that I consider Abelson’s & Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) one of the best Computer Science books ever written. Although I read it late in my career, it opened my eyes to a new way of looking at things and I learned a huge amount from it. It’s one of those books that everyone working in programming absolutely must read.

Over at Corecursive, Adam Gordon Bell has a really interesting podcast interview with Hal Abelson. In addition to being an MIT Professor and one of the authors of SICP, Abelson also cofounded the FSF and was a founding director Creative Commons. He’s an interesting guy with a lot to say.

Much of the interview was concerned with the point of view of SICP and what Abelson and Sussman were trying to accomplish by writing it. In a way, the book has been a victim of its foresight and success. These days, the notion of abstraction and how to accomplish it with programming languages are accepted dogma and SICP can seem like old hat. Back when SICP was being written, though, it was new way of thinking about and teaching programming. Abelson also notes that one of the main lessons in the book is that writing a program to solve a problem is best thought of as designing a language to solve the problem. That way you avoid the problem of writing a program that provides too narrow a solution. Abelson spends some time on this idea and it’s definitely worth paying attention to.

This is a great interview with a lot interesting history and insight. It’s just short of 56 and a half minutes so you’ll have to plan ahead but it’s well worth your time.

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Organice

Posted on 2019-10-28 by jcs

If you’re an Emacs user who has an iPhone or iPad, I’d be willing to bet that you’ve been yearning for an implementation of Emacs on iOS/iPadOS. I know I have. Sadly, I’ve haven’t seen any movement in that direction. What we do have, though, are various projects to bring Org-mode to our Mobile devices.

For many people, that’s probably what they really want. No one, I’m sure, is wishing they could edit files on their iPhones or Android-based phones. A better case can be made for Emacs on the iPad but, really, what many (most?) people want is a way of viewing their agenda, capturing new data or tasks, and closing out completed tasks on their phones.

The two projects that I hear the most about are Orgzly for Android and Beorg for the iPhone. Now there’s a third contender: Organice. Alain M. Lafon, who gave that excellent talk last year on Playing Emacs Like an Instrument, has another nice presentation, this time on using Org mode from the browser and smartphone. Organice is meant to be an implementation of Org-mode that’s independent of Emacs. You can use it on your desktop/laptop in the browser or you can use it on your mobile phone. It works with both iPhone and Android phones.

This looks like a really interesting project that may go a long way toward scratching that itch that all Org-mode users have: a desire to take Org with them when they’re away from their computers. Organice’s introduction gives everybody at least two choices for Org-mode on their phones. It also gives those poor souls not using Emacs access to one of our editor’s killer features.

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