Recent Changes

2025-10-20

• 19:13 UTC (new) (history) 2025-10-20 A class register in Org Mode . . . . mbork – My 9-year-old son loves playing school. He’s got a whiteboard, Mom, Sister and Dad are his pupils and he teaches them various real or made-up things. At the beginning he checks attendance, using a long list of made-up pupils’ names. Some time ago he decided that he’d like to keep the attendance data in a digital form. Mom helped him make a MS Word document (I know, I know…), where he puts little minuses for absentees and pluses for the attendees.

2025-10-13

• 05:43 UTC (new) (history) 2025-10-13 Grouping rows by values in a column . . . . mbork – A few days ago I needed to analyze some tabular data where some rows where grouped in a natural way. Imagine for example a database table which stores events, and every event is related to a user. For example, it could have a user_id column, a timestamp column and an event_type column. I want to see all the events, but events related to different users should be visually spearated (as they are completely unrelated). A natural way would be to sort the data by user_id first and by timestamp next. Ideally, groups of events related to different users would be separated by e.g. an empty row.

2025-10-06

• 18:51 UTC (new) (history) 2025-10-06 A debug helper in Elisp . . . . mbork – A few days ago I was writing a pretty complex Elisp function which didn’t work correctly. My usual tool to use in such cases if of course Edebug – but in this case, it didn’t help much. One of the things my function did was messing around with buffers and windows, and this interferes with Edebug insisting on showing the source code in a specific window. In such cases, I miss the old-school “printf debugging”.

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.

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