Recent Changes

2021-06-07

• 03:52 UTC (new) (history) 2021-06-05 Emacs Lisp book update – what the book is going to look like . . . . mbork – About a month ago I decided to write about the book on Emacs Lisp I am writing. I also made it available on Leanpub where you can download the first chapter and pay me to get the (roughly) 40% of the book that is already written. This post is the first in a series of updates I plan to publish about once per month. Read on if you are curious about the process of writing a book, or want to learn if it is for you, or want to actually help me to write it! First of all, I’d like to thank all the people who trusted me so far and say that I was surprised and humbled to have so many of you. Now I feel even more encouraged to stick to my writing schedule.

2021-05-30

• 16:55 UTC (new) (history) 2021-05-30 Extending subed-mode . . . . mbork – Some time ago I mentioned the subed-mode, Emacs mode for editing srt files with movie subtitles. Well, I’ve been using it regularly for more than half a year now, and I used it to translate more than 20 hours of material into Polish, spending more than 100 hours on it altogether. (And before you ask, this is – again – a hobby/amateur project for my family, not even published.) I think I can safely say that I know quite a bit more about subed-mode now – for instance, I now know that it supports playing the video and actually syncing it to the subtitle at point (with some margins, of course), which is absolutely great. It had some shortcomings, though.

2021-05-24

• 04:37 UTC (new) (history) 2021-05-24 Ivy and ignoring the order of tokens . . . . mbork – Emacs function naming is strange. I rediscovered that fact a few weeks ago when I tried to find a function giving me the position of the beginning of the current line. I tried to look for a function whose name would match begin.*line, and there was none. I concluded that there is no such function (which was strange, but I learned not to be surprised that often), and proceeded to write my own. After some time I found out that such a function obviously exists, and that it is called… line-beginning-position. Oh well.

2021-05-17

• 19:43 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2021-05-01 Emacs Lisp book revived . . . . pkd – The RSS feed is great, thank you!
• 19:33 UTC (new) (history) 2021-05-17 Updating an Emacs buffer in real-time . . . . mbork – I am in the process of writing some Elisp code which needs to provide feedback to the user about a certain aspect of the state of the buffer. (This is a bit vague, I know, but the whole thing is not yet blog-ready – sorry for that. And since it is a fair amount of code, I won’t be blogging about it in detail when it’s done, so I decided to share one or two things if they are potentially interesting.) The point is that every change to the buffer’s content may change that aspect, and computing it may be a bit expensive. The problem is, how to do that efficiently?

2021-05-10

• 16:54 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2021-05-08 Disabling distractions . . . . mbork – Interesting, thanks! I used to use LeechBlock, which (for some reason) scaled poorly (in terms of RAM consumption) with the number of tabs open, so I . . .

2021-05-09

• 13:37 UTC (new) (history) 2021-05-08 Disabling distractions . . . . mbork – Like many other people, I have to fight with distractions a lot. The main distractors (at least when I work on my computer) are a few websites that rhyme with “litter”, “space crook” and “poo cube”. Some time ago I decided that I need to take brutal action against them, and I put this in my /etc/hosts file:

More...