Recent Changes

2021-11-20

• 09:14 UTC (new) (history) 2021-11-20 Tricks with GNU date . . . . mbork – Date- and time-related computations are hard – we all know this. Sometimes the problem is that there are many edge cases, sometimes the issue is conceptually hard, and sometimes both. Recently, I had an instance of a problem which was conceptually hard (at least for my little brain).

2021-11-13

• 04:44 UTC (new) (history) 2021-11-13 y-or-n-p but with RET meaning yes . . . . mbork – Today, I had an extremely specific need. I wanted the Elisp function y-or-n-p (which asks the user a yes-or-no question, expecting a one-key answer of y or n), but I wanted to interpret RET (or “Enter”) as “yes”. It turns out that by default it means “exit”, which is because y-or-n-p-map has no binding for RET, and y-or-n-p falls back on query-replace-map (in a rather convoluted way). So, here is one way I could change it:

2021-11-06

• 05:05 UTC (new) (history) 2021-11-06 The Emacs Lisp book is finished . . . . mbork – So, it’s done! I am very proud to say that after about 10 months of work I finished writing my Emacs Lisp book. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s called “Hacking your way around in Emacs” and it is an intermediate-level textbook on Emacs Lisp, showing a lot of useful things on about 100 pages.

2021-11-01

• 19:23 UTC (new) (history) 2021-11-01 Org timer with sound . . . . mbork – For today I have another tip. I often need to know when some amount of time has passed. I know about org-timer-set-timer, but I never got to using it because it only gives a screen notification, so it’s useless when you don’t look at the screen. Or so I thought. It turns out that you can set the variable org-clock-sound and have Org play the given file when the timer runs out. Great!

2021-10-25

• 17:56 UTC (new) (history) 2021-10-25 debug-on-variable-change . . . . mbork – Yet another short tip for today. (Don’t worry, longer, more involved posts will still happen here;-)!) A few years ago I wrote about a few useful debugging features of Emacs. A few days ago I learned that there are more of them now! About two years after I published that post, Emacs learned how to invoke the debugger every time some variable changes its value.

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