Recent Changes

2024-04-22

• 05:53 UTC (new) 2024-04-22 Next-Error-Follow mode . . . . mbork – A few weeks ago I wrote about Emacs’ Follow mode. It turns out that searching for follow-mode on my blog reveals an old post about Ibuffer which is very short and unfortunately a bit misleading. It seems that the mention of Follow mode there was really meant to mean Next-Error-Follow mode. It is a completely unrelated, but also useful concept.

2024-04-15

• 17:23 UTC (new) 2024-04-15 Improving recenter-top-bottom and reposition-window . . . . mbork – If one can be a fan of an Emacs command, then I am a huge fan of recenter-top-bottom (C-l) and reposition-window (C-M-l). I use them all the time to see the context of what I’m editing at the moment. However, they are not always that useful. They are rather crude – recenter-top-bottom only has three “settings”, as the name suggests, and reposition-window has only two (it either puts the first line of a function, or the first line of a comment preceding the function at the top). As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I sometimes work with rather long functions – and sometimes I am in the second of two shorter ones, but I want to see the first one, too. Also, I don’t only edit code – I edit prose, too, where paragraph play the role of functions, and Org files, where there are even other structural elements – headlines, tables and source blocks in addition to paragraphs, for example. I decided to write a variation on the theme of reposition-window, which – instead of putting the first line of the function I’m in at the top, it tries to put the first line of a “section” I’m in at the top.

2024-04-08

• 06:30 UTC (new) 2024-04-08 Even more Magit tips . . . . mbork – Almost five years ago I wrote a short post with some Magit tips. Well, why not write some more? Magit is slowly but constantly evolving, and recently I discovered something very useful I didn’t even know existed.

2024-04-01

• 06:14 UTC (new) 2024-03-31 Easter 2024 . . . . mbork – Christ has risen from the dead! And so shall we all. I wish you the best for Easter! And of course, as the tradition dictates, I will pray a decade of Rosary for all readers (of both of my blogs). Happy Easter, rejoice!

2024-03-18

• 16:52 UTC (new) 2024-03-18 Follow mode . . . . mbork – It is a fairly common opinion that a function should not be larger than your screen. The reality, though, is often different. And even if your functions are shorter, you may want to see more than one at a time. The problem is that our screen are usually not that high. (My laptop gives me 66 lines of text with normal font settings.) You can have an external monitor rotated vertically (I have that at work to see as much of the logs of the application I’m working on as possible), but Emacs gives us another solution – the Follow mode.
• 16:51 UTC (new) 2024-03-16 Follow mode . . . . mbork – Deleted 2024-03-16_Follow_mode
• 16:43 UTC (new) 2024-03-16 Follow mode . . . . mbork – It is a fairly common opinion that a function should not be larger than your screen. The reality, though, is often different. And even if your functions are shorter, you may want to see more than one at a time. The problem is that our screen are usually not that high. (My laptop gives me 66 lines of text with normal font settings.) You can have an external monitor rotated vertically (I have that at work to see as much of the logs of the application I’m working on), but Emacs gives us another solution – the Follow mode.

2024-03-11

• 05:35 UTC (new) 2024-03-11 More psql tricks . . . . mbork – As I mentioned many times, I am a PostgreSQL fan. I wrote several times about psql, the default PostgreSQL terminal client. A few days ago I gave a short talk in my company about the virtues of psql, and in preparation for that I looked at its manual (again). As is often the case, I discovered a few hidden gems I didn’t know about.

2024-03-02

• 05:09 UTC (new) 2024-03-02 Some tips about Emacs keyboard macros . . . . mbork – Some time ago I had to create some rather repetitive code. These days I often use multiple cursors for such things, but for some reasons this time I decided to go the traditional route and use the built-in keyboard macros. Here’s the catch, though. When you want to use keyboard macros and insert an (incremented) number for every occurrence, you can type f3 (kmacro-start-macro-or-insert-counter) while recording the macro. What I needed, though, was to insert that number twice for every execution of the macro.

2024-02-28

• 04:08 UTC (diff) Comments on 2024-02-26 A simple trick with URL parsing in plain text emails . . . . mbork – Thanks again! I'm all for hackish solutions!

2024-02-27

• 06:34 UTC (new) Comments on 2024-02-26 A simple trick with URL parsing in plain text emails . . . . jeski – If you're ok with hackish solutions - dot-segments are allowed in URIs, hence this will work as well https://mbork.pl/. Source: . . .

2024-02-26

• 17:48 UTC (new) 2024-02-26 A simple trick with URL parsing in plain text emails . . . . mbork – Today I only have a very short tip I thought up a few days ago. If you sometimes send URL via emails (like me), and you absolutely hate HTML emails (like me), there is a common and annoying problem. If the URL you send is the last thing in a sentence, and you want to be correct and end that sentence with a period (or other punctuation), a lot of email clients will treat that punctuation as part of the URL, and of course such “modified” URL won’t work for the recipient. I usually solved that by putting a space between the URL and the period – not 100% correct, but I could live with that. A few days ago it occurred to me that there is another, slightly hackish way to solve my issue. From now on I’m using a hash instead of a space. Assuming that the website I link to doesn’t have any element with the id~ of a period (or any other weird thing like an exclamation mark, of a period followed by a closing parenthesis etc.), the punctuation will be ignored by the browser, but I won’t need to put any space before the end-sentence period. You’re welcome!

2024-02-17

• 16:30 UTC (new) 2024-02-17 Opening external drives in Dired . . . . mbork – I use external drives pretty often – for backups, for moving files between machines, and for storing mp4 files, for example. I’ve been using UDisks for quite some time now. It automounts an external drive under the /run/media/$USER/VolumeName directory (where VolumeName is different for each drive, of course). I also use Dired as my main file manager. As most Emacsers know, it’s far from shiny, but it’s incredibly powerful, especially combined with some other Emacs features. One problem I have is that when I insert a drive into one of the USB ports, I’d like to be able to open it in Dired.
• 16:29 UTC (diff) Comments on 2024-02-12 Finding Bible quotes . . . . mbork – Ha, that's *very* interesting, thanks! I'm wondering if it's documented anywhere...

2024-02-12

• 10:16 UTC (new) Comments on 2024-02-12 Finding Bible quotes . . . . jeski – I played a bit with the Millenium Bible site and it seems that you are able to achieve something similar using their otworz.php API: . . .
• 05:39 UTC (new) 2024-02-12 Finding Bible quotes . . . . mbork – I often have the need to find some particular quote of the Bible – either I am reading some religious text or I want to link to some passage on my blog. What I miss is the ability to quickly see the relevant passage, open it in a browser and create an Org mode link to it.

2024-02-05

• 05:45 UTC (new) 2023-02-05 From the kill ring to a register revisited . . . . mbork – Two weeks ago I wrote about my little command to move the topmost (or some other) kill ring entry to a register. It turned out that this particular post – which I thought was rather niche – spurred more interest than apparently more useful posts I have. Go figure.

2024-01-26

• 04:13 UTC (new) Comments on 2024-01-22 From the kill ring to a register . . . . 202.78.240.10 – See also: C-h f truncate-string-to-width

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