Irreal

Over at Ray on Emacs, Raymond Zeitler has an interesting post on displaying the Org clocked in status. The default is to display it in the mode line but Zeitler wanted to display it in the title bar too. It turns out you can turn it off, display it in the mode line, display it in the title bar, or display it in both the mode line and title bar. These choices are controlled by the org-clock-clocked-in-display variable.

If you regularly clock in your tasks, having flexibility in where the status is displayed could be useful. The problem is I couldn’t find any reference to this variable in the help system or in timeclock.el, which handles the seemingly related timeclock-mode-line-display.

I updated my packages to make sure I had the latest Org Mode (I’m on Org 9.8.8) but I got the same results. I’m guessing that Zeitler is using one of the Emacs 31 prereleases, which implements this. If you’re interested in this feature and are on Emacs 31Try it on your system and see what happens. If it works for you, leave a comment.

Irreal, as you all know, is an em-dash friendly site. Irreal has always liked them and now we like them even more because it puts a thumb in the eye of those mentally challenged folks who claim, erroneously, that “real people” don’t use em-dashes and their presence in a document is a sure sign of AI generated text.

It turns out that JTR over at The Art Of Not Asking Why is also an em-dash aficionado and has been struggling with how to enter them, especially when using Emacs. His final solution involves expand-abbrev but seems to me overly complicated. He types --- then immediately calls expand-abbrev by typing Ctrl+x `.

We here at Irreal have the same problem, of course, but solved it in what seems to me a much simpler way:

(defun jcs-insert-em-dash ()
  "Insert an em-dash at point"
  (interactive)
  (insert 8212))

and

(global-set-key (kbd "H--") #'jcs-insert-em-dash)

I have Hyper bound to the right ⌘ Cmd key so it’s really easy to invoke it: thumb on Hyper and index finger on - and it inserts an em-dash directly into the source exactly as JTR wanted.

I don’t claim my solution is better than JTR’s, only that it suits me better. It’s just another example of Emacs letting you have it your way.

In the Apple ecosphere—especially in iOS—a convenient short cut is to type two spaces to end the current sentence and start a new one. Specifically, two spaces will delete the spaces, insert a period and a space, and capitalize the next letter. There’s probably something similar in the Android world; it seems like a natural thing to do.

Over at Bicycle For Your Mind, macosxguru has a post that describes three of the recent changes he’s made to his Emacs environment. Two of them—showing tabs and newlines explicitly, and fiddling with his mode line probably won’t interest most Irreal readers. The third is importing the two space shortcut into Emacs.

Emacs, of course, doesn’t have that capability but macosxguru added it with a bit of Elisp which he binds to the Space key with the text-mode hook. It looks for two consecutive spaces and repaces them with a period and space. The tricky part is capitalizing the next letter. He does that by reading the next character explicitly and capitalizing it if it’s a letter. He also checks for some special keys (like an arrow key) and “unreads” them so that Emacs can treat them normally. All the code is in the post so see it for the details if you’re interested.

I’m ambivalent about this change. On the one hand, I use it all the time on my iPhone and iPad but that’s because typing is such a pain on virtual keyboards. On a regular keyboard, I’m pretty sure that I could type the period, space, and next letter just as fast. The shift for the next letter might slow things down a bit but not by much. I haven’t decided yet whether I will adopt it but inertia will probably cause me not to.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) really likes being able to cycle folding in Org buffers. Of course, then he wanted to be able to do the same thing in any buffer. In particular, he wanted to be able to fold and unfold groups of functions as a set. He experimented with all sorts of solutions including the builtin outline minor mode.

None of them were quite what he wanted. Then he found outli. It was perfect for his needs. It’s a third party package but appears to be well maintained and is less than 400 lines of code. What he really likes, though, is the keybindings. Most important to him is that Tab cycles the folding just like in Org mode.

Although I like and use headline folding in Org mode, I’ve never been able warm up to code folding. On those rare occasions when I want to narrow focus to a single function—usually to delimit searches—I simply narrow to the function or region in question. Of course, others, like mbork, disagree and those folks may want to check out mbork’s post to get the details of his solution.