Irreal

Charles Choi has been writing a bunch of nice little apps lately—more than I can cover. His latest, Aquí, is sort of a niche application but is potentially useful for more than just its intended use.

The back story is that Choi really likes the sunrise-sunset command in Emacs that tells him the times that the sun rises and sets. The problem is that sunrise-sunset requires that you first specify the latitude and longitude of where you want to know the times. The standard way of doing that is to record them in your init.el, which is what I do. Choi, however, travels with his laptop but still wants to know when the sun is coming up or going down. There’s no automatic way of setting the information so he wrote Aquí to provide it. The only downside is that it works exclusively on the Mac platform.

Once installed, all you need do is call aqui to set all the appropriate information. I hardly ever travel these days so I wasn’t going to bother but it’s easy to use and can give you your current latitude and longitude as well as your address so I thought, “Why not?”. After I installed and ran it, it gave me my exact address as well as my latitude and longitude. That might sometimes vary a bit depending on the vagaries of GPS but it’s certain to be close.

If you decide to try it out, be sure to take a look at the user manual so see what commands are available. Mostly, though, you’ll just need to run aqui. Also be sure to check out the installation section because you need to install a shortcut. That’s just a matter of clicking on a link in the manual but Aquí won’t work until you do.

As I wrote back in July, although I’ve had Embark installed for some time, I’ve only just begun to really use it. Most of my uses involve following a link (of any type) and acting on a group of files, typically to delete several files at once. Of course, those uses are barely scratching the surface of Embark’s capabilities.

Those capabilities are essentially open ended. By that I mean you can define your own Embark actions. Stefano Rodighiero has a nice example of this. It’s a nice example for two reasons. First, it’s simple and easy to follow even though—the second reason—I don’t know anything about what he’s trying to do. The point is that Rodighiero has an obscure—to me—application that he wants to provide an action for but you don’t need to know the details of the application to follow the action.

This is incredibly powerful. Rodighiero let Embark do the hard work of identifying and parsing the target and merely wrote some simple glue to take that target reference and do something useful with it.

If, like me, you’re just beginning to feel your way around Embark, Rodighiero’s post is a useful read. You almost certainly won’t have a need to copy his action but it’s an excellent go by for your own.

One of the most common complaints I see from Les Misérables who are stuck in a corporate environment mandating the use of the horrific Outlook for email is that it’s very difficult or impossible to deal with it from within Emacs. For those of us who feel that doing any text oriented task outside of Emacs is an imposition, that’s intolerable.

Patient_Chance_3795 over at the Emacs subreddit has a hint on how to deal with one aspect of the problem: registering an Azure app. Check out his post for a suggestion on how to deal with the issue.

The sad truth is that the main difficulty in dealing with Outlook is not the emails but the other functions such as calendar invites. As usual, Microsoft has made a point of ensuring that you have to use their software if you’re unlucky enough to be find yourself in their ecosphere.

Regardless, every little bit of help in escaping their maw is welcome. If you’d like to at least deal with emails in an Outlook environment, take a look at Patient_Chance_3795’s post.

A quick look at a Quick Look for Emacs from Charles Choi. MacOS has the notion of a Quick Look to peek at a file without invoking a heavier weight application such as an editor. It’s more than just dumping text onto the screen. It can deal with text, PDFs, HTML, various video files, ODF, Microsoft file types, and many others.

Choi likes the Quick Look functionality but, of course, would like to have it in Emacs too. It’s not clear how to do this in general but it’s trivially easy to do it for Dired and Ibuffer. Choi solves the problem by binding dired-display-file and ibuffer-visit-buffer-other-window-noselect to the Space key. These commands open the file in another window so they’re more than just open the file as usual in Emacs.

If you like the idea of being able to peek at a file without abandoning your current window, take a look at Choi’s post for the details on how to do it from Dired and Ibuffer windows.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, Danrobi1 opines that since the advent of use-short-answers, confirm-kill-emacs should be a boolean. His idea is that confirm-kill-emacs should merely specify whether to ask for confirmation or not and let use-short-answers choose the the particular form of the question if one is requested.

00-11 notes that Danrobi1 is misunderstanding the purpose of the confirm-kill-emacs variable: it was never about whether to call yes-or-no-p or y-or-n-p to ask if quitting Emacs is really what you want. What its purpose is and was is to specify a predicate that will decide whether to quit Emacs or not. There’s no reason it even has to communicate with the user. It just has to decide whether to quit or not based on whatever logic is coded into it.

I’ve had it set to y-or-n-p for as long as I can remember and haven’t thought about it in all that time. But 00-11’s response got me thinking. I originally set it to y-or-n-p because I kept inadvertently quitting Emacs by fat fingering some other shortcut and I’ve never looked back but there is one problem.

If I don’t remember to quit Emacs before rebooting my MacBook Pro, the reboot will hang waiting for Emacs to quit. That usually happens when there’s an OS update that I start off when I go to bed expecting to have a new OS in the morning only to find the system still waiting for Emacs to quit.

What if I could detect if my Mac is being rebooted? If I can, I can easily code up a predicate function that quits Emacs if so and calls y-or-n-p if not. The thought just popped into my mind so I haven’t had a chance to research it yet but it seems promising.