Recent Changes

2021-07-26

• 06:10 UTC (new) (history) 2021-07-26 Binding a command to every key bound to another command . . . . mbork – For today, I have an extremely specific Emacs Lisp tip – this is definitely not something you would use every day, but when you need it, it’s there. Assume that you are writing a mode (call it cool-mode), which should support some general Emacs command (call it do-something) – only the workings of this mode are so specific that this command should be basically written from scratch instead of using Emacs’ own do-something. You could (of course) advise do-something, but it seems cleaner to define cool-do-something instead. How do you bind it to the same keys it is normally bound to in Emacs? For bonus points, the user might have its Emacs customized (with global-set-key, for example) to bind do-something to a key of their choice.

2021-07-19

• 17:56 UTC (new) (history) 2021-07-19 Sorting crontab chronologically . . . . mbork – On one of the computers I work on there is a pretty extensive crontab file, with many tasks carefully scheduled so that they run every day in a specific order. No wonder I would like to be able to sort all the crontab entries chronologically, i.e., in the order of the time they should be called. (I don’t care about the dates, since most of these tasks are scheduled to run every day.) The problem is that (for some mysterious reason) the crontab file format requires putting the minutes first and the hours next.

2021-07-12

• 21:18 UTC (new) (history) 2021-07-12 Counting business days . . . . mbork – A need that I sometimes have is to know how many business days are there in a given month. It is not difficult to code a suitable function, but it is probably worth knowing that you really don’t have to: Emacs has you covered! Well, almost…

2021-07-03

• 17:10 UTC (new) (history) 2021-07-03 Emacs Lisp book - contents . . . . mbork – As you probably know by now, I am writing an intermediate textbook on Emacs Lisp, entitled Hacking your way around in Emacs. Last time I mentioned that I’d like to write something about the contents of the book. So, here it is. (Keep in mind that things may still be subject to some changes, though – the newest of them came to my mind today in the morning!)

2021-06-28

• 18:03 UTC (new) (history) 2021-06-28 Going to where you were when visiting a file . . . . mbork – I don’t close my Emacs very often. Basically, I start it right after I turn my computer on and log in, and usually the only reason for me to close Emacs is when I update the system (given that use Arch Linux, this is actually pretty often, say once every week or two). Usually, after a few days’ worth of work, I have most of files I work on open, and I’m accustomed to just switching to a suitable buffer to continue something at the point I left it a day (or several days) ago. Of course, I lose that information when I close Emacs.

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