Irreal

As many of you know, I’ve long been fascinated by those who can write LaTeX at speed. By “at speed” I mean, for example, being able to keep up with a math professor’s lecture in the classroom. It seems almost impossible but guys like Gilles Castel showed that it could be done. Castel did his work in Vim but, of course, the same thing can be done in Emacs as Karthink demonstrates.

Castel depended on the Vim equivalent of yasnippet. Karthink also used yasnippet but his main tool was CDLaTeX. Recently, I came across a post that suggested that laas was much more efficient than CDLaTeX. I haven’t tried it but looking at the builtin shortcuts, it seems like it would be very useful for entering LaTeX at speed.

If you, too, would like to take LaTeX notes in your classes or other real time situations, you should definitely take a look at laas. And, of course, you absolutely must read Castel’s and Karthink’s posts.

My days in the classroom are long over but I was trained as a mathematician and if I were back in school today, I would definitely want to be able to take my notes in LaTeX. As I say, it seems like an impossible dream but Castel and Karthink showed that it’s possible.

Charles Choi, as we know, likes to have things the way he likes to have them. Being an Emacs user, it’s easy for him to scratch many of those itches. In his latest post, he complains about the inconsistent navigation methods for various Emacs documentation commands. They all seem to behave differently and most of them don’t follow the standard Emacs navigation conventions.

He considers, Info, Help, Man, and Shortdoc. The worst, by far, is Info. The only thing I can think of that has a worse UI is the standalone Info utility, which I consider unusable. I never use Shortdoc so I won’t have much to say about it but Help and Man seem to me to be okay, if a little inconsistent.

Choi has his own ideas of what those interfaces should be and wrote some code to implement them. It’s easy to understand and adapt the code to your own preferences. My preference is that all these Emacs functions should follow the standard Emacs navigation conventions. Since these buffers are all read-only, I’d like n and p to behave like Ctrl+n and Ctrl+p.

Some of the documentation—Info in particular—have a complicated structure the needs additional commands to navigate them. For those, I don’t particularly care what they use as long as they’re at least semi-consistent among the different documentation types.

Choi’s ideas are different from mine so take a look and see what you think. One particularly nice idea is his paragraph movement commands. He uses highlight mode to mark the first line of the current paragraph. It’s a small thing but helps you keep your place.

As usual, Choi’s post is interesting and thought provoking. Take a look just to get some ideas as to what, if anything, you’d like to do about these commands.

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has an excellent short video that discusses how to use multilingual characters in Emacs. Prot, of course, is Greek and often wants to write Greek in Emacs. You can do that by switching keyboards at the system level but then—especially with languages like Greek—the Emacs keybindings break because the system is sending the wrong code to Emacs.

Happily, there’s another way: toggle-input-method bound to Ctrl+\ by default. This mode allows you to type with a non-English character set but still have Emacs perform correctly.

You can set a “default” input method that will become active when you type Ctrl+\ but if you add the universal prefix, Emacs will allow you to choose the input method you want. For example, I have my input method set to TeX so I can enter things like em dashes and various mathematical constructs but I’m currently learning Spanish so if I want to write in Spanish, I can toggle the input method to Spanish. Regardless of what input method I’m using, Emacs and its keybindings continue to operate.

Finally, there’s activate-transient-input-method, bound to Ctrl+x \, that allows you to switch to the default input method for the next character only. That’s nice for me when I simply want to add an em dash (—) but otherwise use my normal English input method. Prot uses it to add single Greek characters to his English text. As with toggle-input-method, adding the universal prefix will allow you to select the input method for the next character.

Prot’s video is 10 minutes, 59 seconds so it should be easy to fit it in. These are really useful commands even if you aren’t bilingual.

Good news for those of you who been following my posts [1, 2] on Protesilaos Stavrou’s Denote. The changes that I wrote about are now officially available in Version 2.2.0. The two main changes are the ones I wrote about—sorting in dynamic blocks and the denote dired buffer—but there are other significant enhancements as well.

One of those is a revamping of the rename functions to allow blank name components. You can read about these and the other changes in Prot’s announcement, which also links to some videos that describe and demonstrate these changes.

One of the really great things about this project is that Prot has taken pains to write a good manual and keep it up to date. As he says, the videos will eventually go out of date but the manual will always be the source of truth.

If you’re interested in a vaguely Zettelkasten-like note taking application, you should take a look at Denote. Its distinguishing feature is the systematic naming scheme that captures most of the significant metadata about a file in its name. That makes it easy to tell what the file’s about just from the name. If you want more information, take a look at the manual.

Just a quickie today. Tory Anderson has an interesting post illustrating something that I had no idea existed. You may—especially if you’re an old timer—be familiar with ’’cut marks“. They’re usually used to delimit code that an end user may want to cut out from longer text and use somewhere else. For example

Here is some introductory text that explains blah blah blah
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(defun do-things ()
  (do-something)
  (do-something-else))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
Some more blathering.  

As Anderson says, they’re not used as much as they were in the past but they can still be useful. Emacs, of course, has a way to insert them automatically. All you need do is mark the region you want to cut and call message-mark-inserted-region to insert the cut marks.

Historically, they were used in emails so Emacs has the keybinding Ctrl+c Meta+m in message mode to insert them but you can insert them anywhere by marking the region and calling message-mark-inserted-region directly. Note that Ctrl+c Meta+m works perfectly well in mu4e and probably all the other Emacs-based mail clients. If you find yourself using it more than once a month outside of email, you can bind your own key sequence to it.

Most Emacs users are probably aware of the current problem with using Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG) with Emacs. The TL;DR is that although you can open GnuPG encrypted files, you can’t edit and resave them. This problem was introduced in GnuPG 2.4.1 and is apparently hard to fix. As of this writing, it persists in all the GnuPG releases after 2.4.0.

A simple solution is to simply downgrade to GnuPG 2.4.0. It’s a simple solution, that is, unless you installed GnuPG with Homebrew. In that case, the solution is a bit more difficult but still not hard. I wrote about how to do it here. In a comment to that post, Michael Alan Dorman notes that another suggested—and far easier solution—is to simply add

(fset 'epg-wait-for-status 'ignore)

to your init.el. That seemed like an easy solution and I resolved to try it the next time I faced the problem.

I’ve just stumbled across a reddit post that suggests that solution will corrupt your encrypted files and make them unreadable. I haven’t had time to verify that yet but I wanted to get the warning out immediately. Hence the PSA. Until the issue is resolved, I’d avoid using that solution and downgrade to version 2.4.0 instead.