Irreal

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a really great post about arranging for certain commands to prompt for verification before executing. Usually, those prompts are simply annoying but sometimes they’re actually useful. For example, you can arrange for Emacs to ask you for confirmation before exiting. Normally that would be really annoying but after I accidentally exited Emacs several times by fat fingering some shortcut, I began to appreciate its usefulness.

Some, dangerous, commands always prompt for approval. Others, like kill-emacs don’t ask for approval by default but can be configured to do so to help those like me who are prone to fat fingering. But, of course, most commands don’t ask for confirmation and don’t have a configuration option to enable it.

Mbork gives an example of a command where he wanted approval before it executed. I have another: Several times I fat fingered the command to print the current buffer—which always seemed to send my printer into a schizophrenic fit—and finally decided to do something about it. But what?

Mbork has two suggestions. He first thought about advising the function he wanted to protect—that’s what I did with print buffer—but then it occurred to him there was a builtin solution. He realized that he could simply mark the function in question as disabled and Emacs would automatically prompt before executing it. Even better, you can also specify what the prompt will be.

But wait! There’s more. While researching that solution he discovered the command command-query that does exactly what he wanted. You can check out his post for the details but the TL;DR is that if you want a prompt before executing a given command, command-query is the solution.

Jonas Bernoulli (Tarsius_) has just announced the release of Magit 4.0. The release, as he says, has been a long time coming: it’s been about 3 years since the last release. It’s great to hear about the new release and Bernoulli says that his goal is to make about 8 releases a year going forward. His announcement doesn’t list all the changes in the new release but you can take a look at the release notes if you’re interested.

Much of Bernoulli’s announcement discusses his plans for the future of Magit but he also mentions that he is a full time FOSS developer and community support is his only source of income. He says his income is about half of the median professional incomes in his area. That means two things for the rest of us:

• We owe Bernoulli a huge debt of gratitude.
• More importantly, we should try to support him as much as we can. For many of us, that probably means we are limited to occasional one time donations. Those all help, of course, but what he really needs is more significant, recurring corporate support. If you’re in a position to influence your company about this, please do.

Bernoulli has a list of several ways to support him at the end of his post. Take a look and please try to help him out if you can.

David Wilson over at System Crafters has an interesting video that explains his system for using tags on his Org tasks. The nice thing about his method is that it’s easy to implement. The hardest part is choosing a list of tags that makes sense for your workflow. Wilson has some suggestions that he used to pick his list.

Once you have the list of tags, everything else is mechanical. The best idea is to add the tags to the org-tag-alist variable so that you enter them easily—with a single key— when you’re adding a new task. Wilson’s example has 3 different files that contain his tasks according to what type they are. I use a template for entering my tasks but Wilson shows how to do it by simply adding a new line to the appropriate file.

When you want to work on tasks with a specific tag, you need only bring up the agenda and filter by the tag(s) you’re interested in. Take a look at the video for the details and to get a sense of how using tags can improve your workflow.

The video is 20 minutes, 36 seconds long so you’ll need to schedule some time but you’ll probably find it a worthwhile investment. As I said, the method is pretty simple and easy to implement. And using templates to enter your tasks will help even more.

Charles Choi has made another update to Casual Calc. This time it’s to provide a more contextual workflow. The idea is that that the Casual Calc menus should reflect the current context.

I haven’t yet had a chance to play with this latest update but I can say that Casual Calc has made it a lot easier to deal with calc. Instead of trying to remember a bunch of obscure calc commands, I can simply call up the Casual Calc menu.

If you aren’t familiar with calc, you really should be. I’ve described it as a sort of light weight Macsyma that is surprisingly powerful. The problem with it is that it’s virtually impossible to remember all the commands. Choi’s Casual Calc menu helps a lot with that.

I use Calc as my (only) calculator and have always been happy with it. The addition of Casual Calc makes it even better. You should really give it a try.