Recent Changes

2019-07-15

• 18:31 UTC (new) 2019-07-15 Batch Org agenda . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Org-mode agenda is a notoriously complex system. It is really great from a user’s perspective, but a nightmare for a programmer wanting to tap into its generation. A long time ago I have had an idea for a productivity tool which would compute my “agenda score” (for lack of a better name), where each task not yet done would contribute to a total of some kind of “penalty” points – and more of them depending on how long the task is overdue. However, I am probably too stupid to be able to understand what is going on under the hood of org-agenda, and I started to look for better ways. There do exist some tools which might help with that – org-super-agenda being one of them, but there are probably others. Still, I felt this is not the best way. I decided to drop my idea (at least until I have more time and motivation to get back to it). After some time, however, I came back to org-agenda, this time from another direction.

2019-07-08

• 21:02 UTC (new) 2019-07-08 Pausing an Emacs keyboard macro . . . . Marcin Borkowski – As I promised last week, I’d like to describe something I probably knew a long time ago, but completely forgot about. You can pause an Emacs keyboard macro during its execution. But wait, there’s more!

2019-07-01

• 18:31 UTC (new) 2019-07-01 Syntax-aware navigation, keyboard macros, sleeping Emacs and interactive functions . . . . Marcin Borkowski – A few days ago I had an interesting Emacs-related problem. I wanted to record and use a keyboard macro which would find a certain TeX one-parameter macro (say, \todo) and comment it out. The tricky part was that it was not at all guaranteed that this macro would be on a line on its own, so “finding the string \todo, going to the beginning of the line and inserting a percent character” won’t work.

2019-06-24

• 04:56 UTC (new) 2019-06-24 org-agenda-todo-ignore-timestamp vs org-agenda-todo-ignore-with-date . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Org Agenda is a legendary feature. One of its selling points is customizability (as is usual in Emacs in general). This, however, comes at a price: agenda generating is slow, even though it is reportedly heavily optimized. (At the worst moment, my agenda took about half a minute to generate. A naive benchmark convinced me that the reason was a rather large Org file, weighing almost a megabyte and containing several thousand headlines (a.k.a. capture.org). No surprise, and a good candidate for optimizing (most of its entries do not really need to be even considered for agenda, so those which do can be moved to another file, and this one can be excluded from agenda generation). But today, I’d like to talk about something else – two of the many options governing agenda generation, namely org-agenda-todo-ignore-with-date and org-agenda-todo-ignore-timestamp.

2019-06-15

• 18:21 UTC (new) 2019-06-15 Debugging Node.js programs in a Vagrant virtual machine . . . . Marcin Borkowski – One of the very nice things in a programmer’s toolbox is a debugger. Coming from Emacs, I am accustommed to Edebug, which allows to step through the code, install breakpoints (conditional ones as well as unconditional ones), watch variables etc. Programming in JavaScript is (or at least should be) no different. Indeed, both Firefox and Chromium have a debugger in their DevTools (although Chromium’s one seems a tad more confusing). This is all good when I’m debugging front-end code, but I often work on some backend code in Node.js. Fortunately, it can be debugged, too.

2019-06-09

• 16:09 UTC (new) 2019-06-09 Defining custom TikZ fill patterns . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago I had a need to define my own filling pattern in TikZ. It turned out to be quite simple, although I had to learn a few things. While the manual (as usual) does a pretty good job at teaching that, I felt that the explanation was a bit too short in one place, and hence this blog post.

2019-06-03

• 18:50 UTC (new) 2019-06-03 Undoing without redoing . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Emacs has a somewhat atypical undo feature – if you undo some changes (possibly more than once), and then break the sequence of undo commands (for example, by moving the point), any subsequent undo will, well, undo the previous undo – in other words, Emacs’ undo doubles as redo.
• 18:49 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-05-27 Programmatically checking for uncommitted changes . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Wow, thanks for all these comments! As for the if-then-else stuff, I obviously have other things inside - {{{exit 0}}} and {{{exit 1}}} were just . . .

2019-05-29

• 12:58 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-05-27 Programmatically checking for uncommitted changes . . . . Akira Komamura – You can also use `git diff` or one of its variants to for the same purpose: git diff --exit-code --name-status HEAD With `git-diff`, you . . .

2019-05-28

• 09:23 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-05-27 Programmatically checking for uncommitted changes . . . . Anonymous – A remark: I am a big fan of Emacs & Magit, however for these kind of problems (checking for uncommitted changes etc.. .multiple repos) I use this . . .

2019-05-27

• 18:47 UTC (new) Comments on 2019-05-27 Programmatically checking for uncommitted changes . . . . Anonymous – This does rather more than it needs. A form of `if ... ; then exit 0 ; else exit 1 ; fi` can be replaced by ` ... ` as shell scripts exit . . .
• 06:04 UTC (new) 2019-05-27 Programmatically checking for uncommitted changes . . . . Marcin Borkowski – One problem that I encounter over and over again is checking if a Git repository is “clean”, i.e., if it doesn’t contain any uncommitted changes. This post serves as an easy way to remind myself how to accomplish that.

2019-05-24

• 12:40 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-05-05 A few Magit tips . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Wow, thanks for sharing this!

2019-05-23

• 21:13 UTC (new) Comments on 2019-05-05 A few Magit tips . . . . christian.koestlin – Its not the best, but I use https://github.com/gizmomogwai/magit as a quick and dirty standalone magit... you still need emacs installed, but it does . . .

2019-05-20

• 16:37 UTC (new) 2019-05-20 Converting BibTeX files to AMSrefs . . . . Marcin Borkowski – It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything TeX-related here. But I’m still working with LaTeX (though less often than I used to), and here is a problem I encountered a few days ago – and a solution. I received a file with BibTeX-encoded bibliography. Obviously, I wanted to convert it to AMSrefs. Being lazy, I started to search for an automated solution – and I was not disappointed at all! It turns out that AMSrefs itself has a feature I needed.

2019-05-11

• 06:27 UTC (new) 2019-05-11 Toggling modeline clock display . . . . Marcin Borkowski – As I mentioned a lot of times, I use Org-mode clocking all the time. Among others, I integrated it with two external services, I have a few dedicated keybindings to it in my Org-mode hydra. It’s no wonder that I work hard to make clocking as smooth as possible.

2019-05-05

• 04:15 UTC (new) 2019-05-05 A few Magit tips . . . . Marcin Borkowski – A month ago I wrote about merging in Git without actually comitting the changes, and mentioned that you probably can’t do that from within Magit. It turned out that I was wrong – in fact, Magit can do it. More recently, I wrote about another Git tip, which is staging an empty file. Then, Nicolas Petton asked whether it’s possible in Magit, and lo and behold – it is, in a quite intuitive (and documented in the docstring) way I just didn’t think about.

2019-04-29

• 18:34 UTC (new) 2019-04-29 Multiple timestamps in one Org headline . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago I learned that you can put multiple timestamps under one Org-mode headline, and that it is then displayed in multiple places in the agenda. This can actually be quite useful for things happening more than one time, but when repeating timestamps somehow don’t fit (for instance, things happen irregularly or a finite number of times).

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