Recent Changes

2025-08-11

• 15:37 UTC (new) (history) 2025-08-11 Using Eldoc to show entities with given uuids in the echo area . . . . mbork – This is the culmination of my series of posts on customization variables, timestamps, ElDoc, PostgreSQL and interacting with potentially unreliable external processes via stdin and stdout. All the time, my goal was to be able to show the database row corresponding to a uuid when the point is on that uuid. Since most of the hard work was already done in the preceding six posts, this one will be rather short (not including the code itself).

2025-08-04

• 04:20 UTC (new) (history) 2025-08-04 org-copy-visible . . . . mbork – I have a short tip for today. Sometimes I want to send myself my Org mode agenda for today in an email so that I can open it on my phone. (Yes, I know, this is not the optimal way – I’m currently experimenting with Organice, I’ll check Orgzly, too – but sending an email to oneself and opening it on one’s phone is not as bad as it seems.) One problem I had was that Org links were not very legible in a plain text setting. Of course, one of the promises of Org mode is that it is plain text – but still, I don’t really need to see the URLs when I just want a quick reminder of my tasks so that I can do some of them on the go.

2025-07-26

• 07:10 UTC (new) (history) 2025-07-26 Finding entities with given uuids in the current project . . . . mbork – One of the Node.js projects I work on has some fake/seed data in JSON files. These data are inserted into the local database during development. (Your mileage may vary – you might use Knex for seeding, or you might have your seeds as csvs or even sql files with a bunch of insert​s.) Of course quite a few tables contain some foreign keys. Sometimes I open one of the JSON files of such tables in Emacs, for example to edit some data – but it is often the case that the related data (pointed to by the foreign key) should also be changed. In cases like this it is very useful to be able to find those related data quickly. Some time ago I had the idea that it would be great if I could easily see all the data about some entity when the point is on its id.

2025-07-21

• 06:33 UTC (new) (history) 2025-07-21 Artist mode and Venn diagrams . . . . mbork – I mentioned Artist mode two years ago, but I’ve always treated it like a curiosity without too many actual uses. Well, it turns out it proved pretty useful after all (though you might call my case a bit contrived).

2025-07-14

• 06:48 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2025-07-07 Mass resetting Org mode checkboxes . . . . mbork – Thanks for your comments! I knew about org-checklist but it doesn't fully work in my case - I have several checkbox lists in the same file, and I . . .
• 05:58 UTC (new) (history) 2025-07-14 Interacting with an unreliable process . . . . mbork – Previously, we learned how to send some input to an external process via its stdin and receive its output from its stdout. The process, however, was simple and very reliable. In the real world, an external process can take its time (especially if it uses a database or a network to operate), die or even hang, and it’s good to support such cases.

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