Recent Changes

2021-08-30

• 04:14 UTC (new) (history) 2021-08-30 How I avoid deleting large parts of Org buffers accidentally . . . . mbork – For today, I have a kind of obvious trick, but one that saved me a lot of trouble at least once. As many Emacs users, I am a heavy Org-mode user. However, one of the strengths of Org-mode is also one of its weaknesses. By default, it hides a lot of stuff from the user, in the sense of rendering them invisible (property drawers, folded parts of the tree etc.). This means that if I e.g. clock in and then accidentally call undo (effectively deleting my clock entry), it’s possible that I won’t notice that something is missing. Another thing I happen to press accidentally is C-c ;, which toggles the COMMENT keyword of the current entry – when I’m editing a long section of my book on Elisp, for instance, pressing C-c ; instead of C-c , (which is used to e.g. edit a source block) is pretty easy. Almost a year ago I decided to do something about it, and I came up with a primitive but working solution.

2021-08-23

• 04:22 UTC (new) (history) 2021-08-23 grep and context lines . . . . mbork – Sometimes (well, actually pretty often!) I need to search text files with grep. By default, it displays all the lines that are matched by some regular expression. As is usual with heavily-used and battle-tested shell commands, it has numerous well-though arguments, like -H and -h (print or suppress the filename prefix in every line), -n (print the line number along with the matching line) and many others. A few weeks ago, however, I had an extremely specific need, and I was very pleasantly surprised that grep supported precisely my use-case. I wanted to grep a log file having a particularly annoying format, and I wanted grep to display every match together with one preceding and two following lines. Well, it turns out that grep has such a feature, too.
• 04:21 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2021-08-16 Remapping commands . . . . mbork – Well, you're right – but still, they solve a very similar problem. At least I couldn't think about a real-life situation when only one of them would . . .

2021-08-16

• 16:49 UTC (new) (history) 2021-08-16 Remapping commands . . . . mbork – Several weeks ago I wrote about a nice feature of Emacs where you can bind some command to every key bound to another command in some (other) keymap. Since then, I found another feature solving the same (or at least a very similar) problem – command remapping.

2021-08-09

• 07:37 UTC (new) (history) 2021-08-09 Linking to manpage sections . . . . mbork – Some time ago I was looking for some advice on StackOverflow, and one thing caught my eye: someone provided a shell command which apparently started man already showing some section. It is very simple, but still nice.

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