Recent Changes

2021-08-02

• 04:15 UTC (new) (history) 2021-08-02 Reordering sentences in Emacs . . . . mbork – I’m probably in a minority, but I am a heavy user of Emacs’ transpose-* commands, most notably transpose-words and transpose-chars. This is probably because I have spent a lot of time editing texts in Emacs – not writing, but editing, and wrong order of words is a very common mistake I often needed to fix. One problem with transpose-words, though, is that it can only swap two words, usually two adjacent ones

2021-07-26

• 06:10 UTC (new) (history) 2021-07-26 Binding a command to every key bound to another command . . . . mbork – For today, I have an extremely specific Emacs Lisp tip – this is definitely not something you would use every day, but when you need it, it’s there. Assume that you are writing a mode (call it cool-mode), which should support some general Emacs command (call it do-something) – only the workings of this mode are so specific that this command should be basically written from scratch instead of using Emacs’ own do-something. You could (of course) advise do-something, but it seems cleaner to define cool-do-something instead. How do you bind it to the same keys it is normally bound to in Emacs? For bonus points, the user might have its Emacs customized (with global-set-key, for example) to bind do-something to a key of their choice.

2021-07-19

• 17:56 UTC (new) (history) 2021-07-19 Sorting crontab chronologically . . . . mbork – On one of the computers I work on there is a pretty extensive crontab file, with many tasks carefully scheduled so that they run every day in a specific order. No wonder I would like to be able to sort all the crontab entries chronologically, i.e., in the order of the time they should be called. (I don’t care about the dates, since most of these tasks are scheduled to run every day.) The problem is that (for some mysterious reason) the crontab file format requires putting the minutes first and the hours next.

2021-07-12

• 21:18 UTC (new) (history) 2021-07-12 Counting business days . . . . mbork – A need that I sometimes have is to know how many business days are there in a given month. It is not difficult to code a suitable function, but it is probably worth knowing that you really don’t have to: Emacs has you covered! Well, almost…

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