Recent Changes

2019-12-24

• 14:14 UTC (new) 2019-12-24 Christmas 2019 . . . . Marcin Borkowski – So, it’s Christmas Eve again! Thanks be to God for His mercy and coming to us as the Child! This year, I have special reasons to be thankful, since my family got through a difficult time of serious illness of one of us. I am sure every one of my readers has something to thank for – don’t hesitate to kneel before God the Almighty, his Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and thank! As usual, my Christmas present to all my readers is a decade of Rosary for you.

2019-12-23

• 15:01 UTC (new) 2019-12-23 Counting sentences in emails . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago I wrote about sentence counting in Emacs buffers (or regions). I promised a sequel, and here it is. The real reason to count sentences is that I wanted to be able to automatically put a signature in my email referring to one of the http://sentenc.es/ webpages. It turns out, however, that counting sentences in email messages is much more difficult than it seems.

2019-12-16

• 21:56 UTC (new) 2019-12-16 rot13 and other Caesar ciphers in Emacs . . . . Marcin Borkowski – A few days ago I saw a friend’s message on the Internet. The message looked like a bunch of random characters. Of course, I suspected a simple substitution cipher. What do I do?

2019-12-07

• 10:06 UTC (new) 2019-12-07 Dollar-quoted strings in Bash . . . . Marcin Borkowski – As we all know, bash is a terrible but ubiquitous thing. Nowadays I usually avoid writing bash scripts as much as I can – but sometimes I really need to do something bash-y, for instance in the command line. One thing I encountered some time ago is putting newlines into bash strings, e.g. in parameters. My use case was that I wanted to make a Git commit from command line with a multiline commit message.

2019-12-01

• 22:00 UTC (new) 2019-12-01 A simple trick with selecting rows created today . . . . Marcin Borkowski – For today, I only have a short but useful (at least for me) trick. When I test some new feature involving saving something to the database (PostgreSQL in my case), I often want to see what was actually written into the database. For that purpose, the best query is a short one.
• 21:58 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-11-04 Starting Emacs with custom configuration directory . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Wow, thanks! I'll definitely look into this!

2019-11-30

• 20:24 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-11-04 Starting Emacs with custom configuration directory . . . . alphapapa – Hi Marcin, With a bit of scripting, it's easy to set the user-emacs-directory at runtime, before any packages are loaded, which avoids having to . . .

2019-11-25

• 20:41 UTC (new) 2019-11-25 Using inotifywait to generate files on the fly . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Sometimes I want to edit some file which is then transformed to some kind of “target” format, suitable for watching. It might be a LaTeX file, a Markdown file converted to HTML, or a HTML file converted to PDF (as it was the case for me some time ago).

2019-11-20

• 17:56 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-11-11 Diffing buffer fragments . . . . Mat tPrice – Interestingly, at least on my system, if `select-enable-primary` is set to t, this command will fail when used as described because `kill-ring-save` . . .

2019-11-17

• 10:28 UTC (new) 2019-11-17 Diffing buffer fragments, continued . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Apparently, my last blog post about diffing buffer fragments sparked a small discussion on Twitter. Most comments fell into one of two categories: some people wanted to use ediff (which I explicitly mentioned I didn’t want), and some people complained about the temp files (which do not bother me that much). Well, it turns out that I really did not have to create the temp files after all!

2019-11-13

• 16:04 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-11-11 Diffing buffer fragments . . . . Joost – Why not use `ediff-buffers`? That way you can avoid the temp files, just create a pair of temp buffers.

2019-11-12

• 02:39 UTC (new) Comments on 2019-11-11 Diffing buffer fragments . . . . Anonymous – > There is the little-known compare-windows command, which ... has a > major drawback of not displaying any “report” ... sometimes I’d like . . .

2019-11-11

• 18:49 UTC (new) 2019-11-11 Diffing buffer fragments . . . . Marcin Borkowski – While working on a certain project, I needed to check the differences between two text fragments. We all know and love diff, but it operates on files, and what I had was two fragments of two files (or sometimes even of one file) which I wanted to compare. There are a few solutions to this problem, but they seemed too complicated for me.

2019-11-06

• 17:21 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-11-04 Starting Emacs with custom configuration directory . . . . Marcin Borkowski – That's a nice idea, but what about a situation when you want to have two Emacs instances running at the same time: one "workhorse", normal one and . . .
• 07:50 UTC (new) Comments on 2019-11-04 Starting Emacs with custom configuration directory . . . . Anonymous – Hello, perhaps I did not understand what you are trying to do but why do not use .emacs.d as a link whose destination you could change according the . . .

2019-11-04

• 20:12 UTC (new) 2019-11-04 Starting Emacs with custom configuration directory . . . . Marcin Borkowski – The usual thing people are told to do when debugging/isolating Emacs problems is to say emacs -Q, that is, start Emacs without reading in any configuration. Sometimes, however, this may not be a good idea. When there is some problem with packages, however, we may actually want to load some things, like a minimal set of packages if we suspect they do not work together. Of course, what we don’t want is changing our configuration.

2019-10-28

• 17:00 UTC (new) 2019-10-28 PostgreSQL, jsonb each and cross joins . . . . Marcin Borkowski – A few days ago I stumbled on a PostgreSQL query I didn’t really understand. I asked a question on Stack Overflow and learned something I would have known if only I had read the manual…

2019-10-21

• 18:59 UTC (new) 2019-10-21 Clearing the Eshell buffer . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Since I’ve been quite busy recently, I only have one short tip today. I sometimes use Eshell, and sometimes want to clear it so that I can e.g. isearch through the result of running some command and not be bothered by the output of previous commands. In such a case, I can say clear, but it does not really clear the Eshell buffer – it only makes the part above point scroll past the visible part (and it seems that it doesn’t even take into account the font – if I make it smaller, clear does not scroll enough). But I can also give clear any argument (e.g., say clear t), and then the previous contents of the buffer are really deleted. Handy.

2019-10-12

• 11:58 UTC (new) 2019-10-12 Challenge accepted - a Node.js grep . . . . Marcin Borkowski – An old friend of mine posted a challenge on Twitter to implement a grep-like utility in one’s language of choice. Instead of complaining that he’s got an unfair advantage – he is a Pythonista, and Python is almost as well-suited to that kind of tasks as Perl – I decided to accept the challenge. Of course, I had to start with Emacs Lisp.
• 11:53 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-10-07 A tip with diffing (and committing) program structure changes . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Yep, I tried to be comprehensive. :-)

2019-10-11

• 08:45 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-10-07 A tip with diffing (and committing) program structure changes . . . . ruanda – I didn't see you mentioned -b already ;)
• 08:43 UTC (new) Comments on 2019-10-07 A tip with diffing (and committing) program structure changes . . . . ruanda – {{{ $ diff -ub a b --- a 2019-10-11 10:40:06.023072617 +0200 +++ b 2019-10-11 10:40:13.254971828 +0200 @@ -1,4 +1,6 @@ -module.exports = { . . .

2019-10-07

• 20:23 UTC (new) 2019-10-07 A tip with diffing (and committing) program structure changes . . . . Marcin Borkowski – As I mentioned last week, the fact that diff works on a line basis is sometimes a source of trouble. Consider this case. Assume that we have a simple JavaScript module greets (I guess that a very similar case could be made for Java classes, Python modules etc.).

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