Recent Changes

2019-01-20

• 19:47 UTC (new) 2019-01-20 Filling and version control . . . . Marcin Borkowski – It has been said a lot of times that when writing some (natural language) text with version control in Emacs, filling is a bad idea. Any change involving adding or deleting a significant number of characters and then refilling can result in all subsequent lines in a paragraph changed, and the diff looks really ugly then. The solution usually proposed is putting each sentence on a separate line, and then just use visual-line-mode to wrap your lines on the screen without putting any hard newlines in. Well, I sort of dislike this idea.

2019-01-14

• 05:23 UTC (new) 2019-01-14 Some Org Agenda keybindings . . . . Marcin Borkowski – This post is just a friendly reminder that it may be a good idea to look in the manual from time to time, just in case there are some gems hidden there you don’t remember (even if you read it once). It turns out that you can do a lot of things from the Org Agenda buffer.

2019-01-06

• 21:14 UTC (new) 2019-01-06 Emacs server and other Emacs instances . . . . Marcin Borkowski – A few years ago, I mentioned indirectly that I use emacs-server. For some time, I just had (emacs-server) in my init.el. This, however, had an annoying side effect of giving an error when I started a second instance of Emacs.

2018-12-31

• 08:26 UTC (new) 2018-12-31 An info about the size of message attachments . . . . Marcin Borkowski – I have been using mu4e for quite a long time as my email client now. I would never switch back to Claws Mail again (maybe mutt, with emacsclient as the editor;-)). However, mu4e has some rough edges. One of them (which is really a problem with Emacs’ message-mode) is displaying of attachments when writing the message.
• 08:23 UTC (diff) Comments on 2018-12-24 Merry Christmas . . . . Marcin Borkowski – You're welcome!

2018-12-29

• 15:33 UTC (new) Comments on 2018-12-24 Merry Christmas . . . . Anonymous – Thank you for this post, and thank you for the whole site. God bless you! Miklós

2018-12-24

• 22:01 UTC (new) 2018-12-24 Merry Christmas . . . . Marcin Borkowski – As usual at this time of year, I have best Christmas wishes for everyone reading this. I wish that you all discover the beauty and truth of the . . .

2018-12-16

• 11:46 UTC (new) 2018-12-16 A simple tip on using destructive functions . . . . Marcin Borkowski – This is something fairly obvious to every seasoned Lisp programmer, but let’s not forget that there are novices, too. Many Elisp functions are noted to be “destructive”, which means that they can change their arguments. For instance, if you want to sort a list, you may use the sort function, which is said to modify its argument by side effects (this is exactly what “destructive” means). This does not necessarily mean, however, that after executing (sort some-list), the variable some-list will magically contain a sorted version of it previous self! Let’s consider two examples.

2018-12-10

• 05:00 UTC (new) 2018-12-10 Lesser known Dired stuff . . . . Marcin Borkowski – It is not a secret that I am a big fan of Dired. Recently I learned about a thing introduced relatively recently into Emacs

2018-12-03

• 08:46 UTC (new) 2018-12-03 looking-back-p . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Emacs has a very useful function looking-at, which says whether the text from the point on matches a given regex. Unfortunately, it modifies the match data, which are global state referring to the last search. Because of that, I often prefer to use looking-at-p, which takes care not to mess with the match data.
• 08:42 UTC (diff) Comments on 2018-11-19 Font-locking diff blocks in Org-mode . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Well, this is what my Emacs outputs when I use commands such as {{{dired-diff}}}, which is what I probably did, and then copied that to a src block.

2018-11-28

• 11:40 UTC (new) Comments on 2018-11-19 Font-locking diff blocks in Org-mode . . . . Dave F – Hey Marcin, just curious how you got the diff command and the results of the command within a single src block. Did you run it and then manually copy . . .

2018-11-26

• 16:56 UTC (new) 2018-11-26 format-seconds . . . . Marcin Borkowski – If you’ve ever done anything UI- and time-related in Elisp (or whatever language), chances are that you did stuff like (defun format-minutes (minutes) "Format MINUTES in a human-friendly way."

2018-11-19

• 08:38 UTC (new) 2018-11-19 Font-locking diff blocks in Org-mode . . . . Marcin Borkowski – I sometimes miss a feature in Emacs where I could make a diff of two files (using Emacs built-in dired-diff command, bound to = in Dired, or abo-abo’s diff trick, which I have bound to e in Dired), but have the diff persist (as in, save it to a file). Technically, I can do this, of course, by just calling write-file and saving it to a file (preferably with a .diff extension so that it will open in Diff mode automatically), but sometimes I prefer to save things in my Org-mode file, along with my notes related to the project I’m working on. It turns out that Org-mode has me covered, although there is one minor caveat here.

2018-11-11

• 21:13 UTC (new) 2018-11-11 Poland gained independence 100 years ago . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Today we [[http://mbork.pl/2017-09-25_The_Unconquered|again]] [[http://mbork.pl/2018-02-05_The_death_camps_in_Poland_issue|depart]] from the usual topics of my blog. We have a very important day today in Poland – [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnbULDJAWeI|one hundred years ago my country gained independence]] after more than a hundred years of political nonexistence.

2018-11-03

• 08:54 UTC (new) 2018-11-03 A few remarks about defining minor modes . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Today’s post is extremely technical and niche, but I just wanted to share an interesting story I had a few days ago.

2018-10-27

• 14:46 UTC (new) 2018-10-27 Launching terminal in current directory . . . . Marcin Borkowski – I am a bit ashamed that I do not always use Eshell – I sometimes rely on a “proper” bash in a terminal. (One possible reason is when I ant to run something that does not play too well with Eshell, like top or watch. I know it is possible to do that in Eshell, using eshell-visual-commands, but it seems I’m too lazy (or still too much accustomed to my usual terminal) to change that. Anyway, it is feasible to want to run a terminal (or any other program) in the current directory from Emacs. It turns out that it is easy to do using async-shell-command.

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