Recent Changes

2025-09-29

• 17:49 UTC (new) (history) 2025-09-29 Improving dired-show-file-type . . . . mbork – It is not astonishing at all that many people (including me) use Dired as their main file manager. The default look of Dired – just the output of ls -l – is deceptively crude, but underneath there is an immense power. Many Dired commands are just frontends to GNU Coreutils, but with much improved user interface, like reasonable default arguments (accessible via the “future history” of the minibuffer). But Dired is more than just a wrapper around Coreutils. For example, it has the dired-show-file-type command (bound to y by default), which runs the file command on the file at point. The file command is a great way to learn the basic information about any file. Besides telling the filetype, it often provides some information about its contents. For example, it guesses the encoding of text files and shows the resolution of image files. There are some information it does not give, however.

2025-09-22

• 17:39 UTC (new) (history) 2025-09-22 Faking today's date in Org . . . . mbork – A long time ago I wrote about the datefudge tool, which can be very useful to test time-related code (not only in Elisp). Today I’m going to write about another way of solving a similar problem.

2025-09-19

• 21:04 UTC (new) (history) Comments on 2025-02-10 Running one own's commands . . . . piyo – Thanks for the tip. I like to also see my commands in a menu so I use the builtin easymenu.el (and a lot of diy code). I would use the toolbar if . . .
• 20:45 UTC (new) (history) Comments on 2025-09-15 Entering dates in Emacs Calc . . . . piyo – Thanks for the tip. Consider using "<%s> day" instead so that you can unit calc and simplify. eg. <ts> day + 12 wk + 0.75 day or . . .

2025-09-15

• 16:41 UTC (new) (history) 2025-09-15 Entering dates in Emacs Calc . . . . mbork – I perform date arithmetic pretty often in Emacs Calc. One problem I’ve always had with that is that entering date forms is very far from ergonomic. (To be fair to Calc, once you get used to how Org mode allows to enter dates, basically any other way of entering them feels slow and inconvenient. This is what Org manual says about it: “The actions of the date/time prompt may seem complex, but I assure you they will grow on you, and you will start getting annoyed by pretty much any other way of entering a date/time out there” – and boy, is it true!) So, it occurred to me that it would be great to be able to use the Org date prompt in Calc. Of course, this is Emacs, so it shouldn’t be difficult, right?

2025-09-08

• 17:24 UTC (new) (history) 2025-09-08 Emacs Artist clock . . . . mbork – A few months ago I mentioned Artist mode. It seems that at least one person liked that post enough to mention it (thanks!), even if indirectly. That very post also mentioned svg-clock, which is a cute analog clock displayed directly in Emacs. Of course, my immediate thought was, why not create an ASCII-art analog clock using Artist mode?

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