Recent Changes

2019-08-11

• 19:18 UTC (new) (history) 2019-08-11 A console.dir hint . . . . Marcin Borkowski – As everyone knows, console.log is the ultimate debugging tool. ;-) Joking aside, it is genuinely useful (together with console.error) in scripts. I often write small (and sometimes not so small) CLI utilities in Node.js, and they are really indispensable. Sometimes, however, you want to output a complicated structure.

2019-08-05

• 17:04 UTC (new) (history) 2019-08-05 datefudge and agenda testing . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago, a question was asked on the Org-mode mailing list about a specific kind of task in Org agenda. This made me think about debugging one’s agenda settings. I’ve already written about batch agenda, but one problem with agenda testing is that it is inherently stateful, in one of the worst ways – it depends on the notion of now. Debugging time-related stuff is hard. (Well, time-related stuff is hard, after all.) It would be great if you could just manipulate Emacs into thinking that the time is some day in the future (or in the past)… Well, actually, it can be done – and it’s easier than I thought.

2019-07-29

• 18:29 UTC (new) (history) 2019-07-29 Git commands as separate executable files . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Today we are going to talk about git commands and how they are implemented. Don’t worry, I won’t get too technical – if only I have not studied Git sources (I do not speak C well enough for that anyway). It is enough for us to read the manpage of the git command itself (which I did, along with some experimentation).

2019-07-22

• 18:43 UTC (new) (history) 2019-07-22 Increasing timeout in nginx . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Today’s is a short follow-up to the post about debugging Node.js programs in a Vagrant virtual machine. It turns out that it lacked one important piece. It’s all and good in an artificial environment of an isolated script – but when we debug a real Node.js application, the server will timeout while we are slowly stepping through code.

2019-07-15

• 18:31 UTC (new) (history) 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) (history) 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) (history) 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) (history) 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) (history) 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) (history) 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) (history) 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) (history) 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 . . .

2019-05-27

• 06:04 UTC (new) (history) 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) (history) Comments on 2019-05-05 A few Magit tips . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Wow, thanks for sharing this!

2019-05-20

• 16:37 UTC (new) (history) 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.

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