Recent Changes

2020-05-18

• 20:19 UTC (new) (history) 2020-05-18 entr, a wrapper around inotify . . . . mbork – Shortly after my post from last year describing how I use inotifywait to start programs on file change, one of the readers emailed me about an utility called entr. It is an extremely simple-to-use tool which just gets the filelist to watch on stdin and a command to execute when any of the files changes as CLI arguments – and that’s pretty much it. (That does not imply it is simplistic – according to its website, it performs some non-trivial stuff under the hood.) Thanks!

2020-05-11

• 20:37 UTC (new) (history) 2020-05-11 Diffing and font-lock . . . . mbork – I often work with diffs in Emacs. I usually do that within Magit, which highlights diffs in the usual way (highlighting deleted lines with reddish background, inserted lines with greenish background, and the deleted/inserted characters within these lines with slightly more prominent versions of the same colors). However, I sometimes use plain Emacs diff (e.g. to compare two fles not kept in Git), and I noticed an annoying thing: diff’s font-lock is applied on top of the usual font-lock, depending on the files’ syntax. While in general this seems resonable, in the case of LaTeX files in AUCTeX (where the font lock colors are especially diverse) this makes the diff completely unreadable. I was pretty sure that disabling the syntax font-lock would reduce the visual noise of the diffs.

2020-05-03

• 07:08 UTC (new) (history) 2020-05-03 Help in read-string . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Last week I wrote about making Emacs ask for parameters for lp when printing from pdf-tools. The only thing missing was some kind of help for lp, which is far from intuitive. I figured that it would be best if I could somehow make read-string display some help string when some key was pressed, even in the midst of editing in the minibuffer. (Preferably, the key would be C-h, which is Emacs’ default for “help”.) And guess what? This is Emacs. Not only is such a feature possible, it is actually built-in!

2020-04-27

• 09:39 UTC (new) (history) 2020-04-27 Printing from pdf-tools . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago I studied the command-line interface to CUPS. Of course, my goal from the beginning was to use Emacs, not the terminal. It turns out that setting the default printer using lpoptions is not enough for pdf-misc-print-document (bound to C-c C-p in pdf-tools) to work. This command tries first to locate one of three tools for command-line printing: gtklp, xpp and gpr. Frankly, I’ve never heard about any of them, and I just wanted to use lp. This is easy to accomplish – you just need to set the variable pdf-misc-print-programm (sic!) to "lp" and you’re good to go. However, what about my 2-up printing?

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