Recent Changes

2018-12-16

• 11:46 UTC (new) (history) 2018-12-16 A simple tip on using destructive functions . . . . Marcin Borkowski – This is something fairly obvious to every seasoned Lisp programmer, but let’s not forget that there are novices, too. Many Elisp functions are noted to be “destructive”, which means that they can change their arguments. For instance, if you want to sort a list, you may use the sort function, which is said to modify its argument by side effects (this is exactly what “destructive” means). This does not necessarily mean, however, that after executing (sort some-list), the variable some-list will magically contain a sorted version of it previous self! Let’s consider two examples.

2018-12-10

• 05:00 UTC (new) (history) 2018-12-10 Lesser known Dired stuff . . . . Marcin Borkowski – It is not a secret that I am a big fan of Dired. Recently I learned about a thing introduced relatively recently into Emacs

2018-12-03

• 08:46 UTC (new) (history) 2018-12-03 looking-back-p . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Emacs has a very useful function looking-at, which says whether the text from the point on matches a given regex. Unfortunately, it modifies the match data, which are global state referring to the last search. Because of that, I often prefer to use looking-at-p, which takes care not to mess with the match data.
• 08:42 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2018-11-19 Font-locking diff blocks in Org-mode . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Well, this is what my Emacs outputs when I use commands such as {{{dired-diff}}}, which is what I probably did, and then copied that to a src block.

2018-11-26

• 16:56 UTC (new) (history) 2018-11-26 format-seconds . . . . Marcin Borkowski – If you’ve ever done anything UI- and time-related in Elisp (or whatever language), chances are that you did stuff like (defun format-minutes (minutes) "Format MINUTES in a human-friendly way."

2018-11-19

• 08:38 UTC (new) (history) 2018-11-19 Font-locking diff blocks in Org-mode . . . . Marcin Borkowski – I sometimes miss a feature in Emacs where I could make a diff of two files (using Emacs built-in dired-diff command, bound to = in Dired, or abo-abo’s diff trick, which I have bound to e in Dired), but have the diff persist (as in, save it to a file). Technically, I can do this, of course, by just calling write-file and saving it to a file (preferably with a .diff extension so that it will open in Diff mode automatically), but sometimes I prefer to save things in my Org-mode file, along with my notes related to the project I’m working on. It turns out that Org-mode has me covered, although there is one minor caveat here.

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