Recent Changes

2025-07-10

• 08:07 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2025-07-07 Mass resetting Org mode checkboxes . . . . Karl Voit – Hi, Here's an alternative idea in case you also want to keep the history and minimize your effort: You can use . . .

2025-07-07

• 15:47 UTC (new) (history) 2025-07-07 Mass resetting Org mode checkboxes . . . . mbork – I’m a big fan of checklists. There are many cases where I need to follow some procedure containing many steps, and I really do not want to forget about any of them. This is especially challenging when it is something I need to do not very often, say, once a month, since it is very easy to forget about one or more steps, and properly memorizing the procedure would take many months. One example is preparing and sending invoices, which I need to do at the beginning of every month. Another (slightly less typical) example is packing for vacations – it’s very easy to forget to take something, and very important not to. In fact, I prepared a generic list of things to take with me on vacation more than fifteen years ago, and I use it several times a year, sometimes adding some new item, sometimes removing some no longer needed item. Me being me, I keep these checklists in Org mode, and they consist of one or more headings with a bunch of checkboxed lists.

2025-06-30

• 15:46 UTC (new) (history) 2025-06-30 Interacting with an external process via stdin and stdout . . . . mbork – For a project I’ve been recently working on, I needed Emacs to interact with an external process, sending things to it via its stdin and receiving responses via its stdout. I never did anything like that before, so I started with checking my options.

2025-06-23

• 06:20 UTC (new) (history) 2025-06-23 Making functions interactive . . . . mbork – I have to admit that I probably have a bit of OCD, and when I finish my work, I like to put my Emacs in a sort of “clean slate” state. By that I don’t mean closing it or killing all buffers (although when I leave the office, I do kill all work-related buffers). Instead, I mean going back to displaying just one window with the *GNU Emacs* buffer (the one with the logo and links to the tutorial etc.) The problem is, I sometimes accidentally kill that buffer, and then I have no place to go back to;-). Well, some time ago it occurred to me that something in Emacs must create that buffer, and I can find that something and learn how to do that whenever I want.

2025-06-14

• 13:26 UTC (new) (history) 2025-06-14 Automatically converting timestamps in Emacs . . . . mbork – This is a third post in a short series of posts about code which helps me deal with numerical timestamps in Emacs. Last time I wrote a function which decides if a number is a Unix timestamp or a JavaScript Date and converts it to a human-readable ISO-8601 timestamp. What would be even more useful is to see the ISO representation of the timestamp at point without even doing anything. Emacs already has support for showing stuff related to the thing at point in the modeline – ElDoc. Several years ago I had some thoughts about using the ElDoc machinery to do something for me, but I found it too complicated then. Well, either they modified ElDoc to make it easier to program, or I matured as a programmer, or both. It turned out that it took me about 15 minutes to come up with a working prototype, which is extremely cool!

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