Recent Changes

2023-12-25

• 21:26 UTC (new) (history) 2023-12-25 Merry Christmas 2023 . . . . mbork – As usual at this time of year, let me wish all of you Merry Christmas! And also as usual, I promise to say a decade of the Holy Rosary for everyone reading my blog.

2023-12-11

• 17:05 UTC (new) (history) 2023-12-11 Replacing TeX control words behind the point . . . . mbork – Two weeks ago, a friend from Polish TeX Users’ Group mailing list asked about an Emacs tool to replace control sequences with their Unicode counterparts. I also have this need from time to time, and I usually go with the TeX input method. He is not satisfied with it, though, because it replaces too much for him – for instance, he doesn’t want a_1 to get translated to a₁. He remembered some utility (written by another Polish TeX user) which replaces a TeX sequence with a Unicode equivalent, but only on demand. Since that one seems to be lost in the depths of time, he was left without a solution.

2023-11-27

• 08:33 UTC (new) (history) 2023-11-27 Clocking in to parent entries . . . . mbork – Like many, many Emacs users these days, I’m a heavy user of Org mode. In fact, both of my blogs are written in Org. And while this very blog usually has fairly short entries, my other blog has much longer posts, divided into subsections. This creates a minor problem for me. I track time I spend on writing, but I don’t want to track time spent on individual sections of a blog post. In other words, even if I am in some lower-level heading, when I clock in, I want Org to clock in in the parent heading. Emacs being Emacs, I figured there must be a way to make that happen automatically.

2023-11-13

• 06:24 UTC (new) (history) 2023-11-13 Coloring CamelCase . . . . mbork – Some time ago one of the members of the Emacs mailing list asked about coloring CamelCase identifiers. His idea is to define two faces and have all “even” words in a camel case indentifier colored with one of them, and the “odd” words colored with the other one. The question suggests using some code from Glasses mode, which is a lesser-known Emacs feature which inserts undescores between words in camel case identifiers (and it does it using overlays, so the underscores are not really part of the buffer, they just look like this). My general rule is to avoid camel case whenever I can, but I sometimes use Glasses mode, especially when I have to deal with jsx files, where camel case is the standard. It turns out that Glasses mode already has (almost) what is asked for.

2023-10-30

• 18:52 UTC (new) (history) 2023-10-30 My plans for 2023 - October update . . . . mbork – It’s been another two months since my last update, so here we are again! It’s been a busy two months for me, though some plans still are not brought to the forefront (which is a shame, I know, but I can’t do everything).

2023-10-14

• 05:04 UTC (new) (history) TODO 2023-10-14 Avoiding repetitions . . . . mbork – Deleted TODO_2023-10-14_Avoiding_repetitions
• 05:03 UTC (new) (history) 2023-10-14 Avoiding repetitions . . . . mbork – I write a lot of prose. That does not mean I’m good at it nor very creative – I haven’t written any novels or even short stories. By “prose” I mean writing in a natural language (mostly English nowadays). In fact, most of the writing I’ve done in my life is technical in nature (usually either about technology or about mathematics). And (as you obviously know) I’m also a technology geek and an Emacs user. An immediate thought is: how to make Emacs help me write better?

2023-09-30

• 19:17 UTC (new) (history) 2023-09-30 Confirming potentially dangerous actions . . . . mbork – A common situation is when I want to do something on my computer with possibly destructive consequences, like deleting a file, truncating a database table etc. One common approach to making sure this won’t happen accidentally is to require the user to press y or even type yes (this is what Emacs does with its y-or-n-p and yes-or-no-p functions). Some time ago I had a similar need in a shell script. I was afraid, however, that even requiring the user to type yes is not enough – it is easy to condition oneself to type a three-letter word without much thinking, after all.

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