History of 2016-04-24 The conditional-save-excursion macro

2016-04-24
06:09 UTC Revision 1 . . . . Marcin BorkowskiOne day I was writing a library of helper functions for writing messages (I will definitely share them in due time!). One of the things there is (semi-)automatic insertion of salutations and closings. You know, all this “Dear Sir/Sincerely yours” stuff which is basically meaningless (and harmful in term of time spent – on both sides of the wire!) in an email, but many people expect it anyway. I am now in the process of moving to shorter email messages. This is one of the signatures I might recommend – based on http://two.sentenc.es Q: Why is this email so extremely laconic and has no courtesies? A: Because our time is more valuable than our egos. http://two.sentenc.es And one of my goals is to insert such a signature automatically, with the proper sentence count. By the way, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for “slow life”, and not succumbing to the rat race and the “do everything as fast as you can so you can take on even more insane amount of work”. But since the time I’ve been trying to measure time I spend on various things (and optimize it), I noticed that email handling takes up a considerable amount of my time. And even if automating writing emails seems not really worth the time spent on coding it, the linked table does not take into account two factors: first, if I share my code with others, the savings are basically multiplied by the number of people using the code (without the overhead of them coding it!). Then, it is not only the time which is involved: even if do not really save time (because of all time spent on coding), I have some fun doing it, I constantly larn something along the way, I share what I have learned and coded, and I remove the frustrating part from email writing. Coming back. When I launch an Emacs command to insert or change the salutation, I usually wouldn’t want to get distracted, so I don’t want the point to move. The save-excursion form is made for such a purpose. OTOH, sometimes I might want to edit the salutation (e.g., add a name to it). In such a case, I do not want save-excursion.