Irreal

Bozhidar Batsov has a handy tip in his latest post. He, like me, organizes the package management of his init.el around use-package. It works well for him but he has a complaint. He almost always wants to install the packages by default but has to specify :ensure t for each package that he wants loaded by default. He has, he says, more than 50 packages so this is a nuisance.

There is, however, an easy solution. You can simply set use-package-always-ensure to t and all packages except those with :ensure nil will be loaded by default. Batsov notes that some people don’t like loading packages by default because of version issues but that this has not been an issue for him.

It hasn’t been an issue for me either. But neither has specifying :ensure t for each package. I have, according to a quick check with keep-lines, 70 instances of use-packages. All of them specify :ensure t and I’ve never considered this an irritant even though I know about use-package-always-ensure.

Still, I understand and support the urge to make everything as simple as possible so if you’re an use-package user and want to load all or most of your packages by default, Batsov shows a way of doing that with a little less effort.

One of the Emacs powerhouses is Ediff. Every time I think I’ve found a better way of comparing files, it turns out that I just didn’t understand Ediff well enough. It can seem intimidating but as Prot informed me it really pretty simple if you ignore all the complications. I took his advice and can only agree with his assessment.

Now James Dyer has his own take on Ediff. His particular use case is comparing regions rather than whole files. It turns out that there are two functions, ediff-regions-linewise and ediff-regions-wordwise that will use Ediff to compare two regions in the usual Ediff way.

The documentation recommends that you use ediff-regions-wordwise for small regions and ediff-regions-linewise for larger regions. In either case, once you set up the regions to be compared you use Ediff in the usual way. Take a look at Dyer’s post to see how to set up the regions. It’s straightforward and easy to remember once you use it a couple of times.

It’s a nice post and well worth reading even if you don’t need to compare regions right now. You probably will in the future and even if you don’t remember the details, you’ll know what to look for when you do.

Mike Zamansky has a late Christmas present for us but, as they say, better late than never. This particular present is another video in his Using Emacs series. In this video he considers the problem of extracting all email address from an Emacs buffer.

The original problem was that Zamansky had several documents, including spreadsheets, that contained email address and he wanted to get a list of all those addresses for further processing. Being an Emacser, his first thought was to extract all the text into an Emacs buffer and work from there.

That extraction amounted to cut and pasting, which, while not particularly satisfying, is probably optimal considering the many types of documents involved and the fact that is was a one-off. Once he has all the text into an Emacs buffer, the rest is relatively easy. Zamansky’s solution was to put together a bit of Elisp to do the job. The value of the video is his walking us through the process of doing that.

One of the things I really like about Zamansky’s videos is that he doesn’t clean them up. You see his mistakes and fat fingering and that helps you understand the process much better than just viewing a polished video of the final result.

Accomplished_Will_31, in a reddit comment, notes that occur can do a lot of this more easily. That’s probably true but the real value of the video is seeing how Zamansky puts together his Elisp solution. His process is applicable to a wide range of problems whether or not occur offers a shorter solution.

The video is 17 minutes, 56 seconds so plan accordingly. Like all of his videos, this one is well worth spending the time on.

Kris Carta has a nice post on a problem we all have: handling grocery shopping lists. If you’re single and a geek, this is not a problem. All sorts of solutions suggest themselves. The problem comes when you have a significant other that is not a geek but still likes to organize things on the computer.

If one or the other of you does all the meal planning and shopping it’s not too big a problem but in most households, both partners are making suggestions and adding things to the shopping list. If, in addition, the technical partner is an Emacs geek, the problem becomes how to import the non-technical partner’s suggestion into Emacs and how to export a final list to a smartphone application that either or both can use while shopping.

I wrote about this eight years ago and not a lot has changed. Carta is an Apple user and wanted to produce a shopping list in the iOS Reminders app. That’s what we do at the Irreal bunker too and it works well. All of us here, geek or not, is perfectly capable of using Reminders and marking off items as we buy them.

Carta has a separate wrinkle. He and his wife have always planned their meals in Notion and they wanted to export the items on their meal lists to their shopping list. Even though Carta is new to Emacs, he was able, with help, to figure out how to get the Notion data into Emacs and from there to isolate the food items for the shopping list and export them to Reminders. This leverages Applescript, which is definitely a pain, but provides functionality not available on other platforms.

Here at the bunker, we just enter the list into Reminders directly. That’s easier but not as pleasing to our geek sensibilities.