I’ve never updated my Emacs packages until recently, because Emacs is where all my writing happens, and so I’m justifiably paranoid.
But then some packages stopped working, due to various circumstances¹ and an update solved it.

So I’ve decided to update my packages once a quarter, so that I don’t lose days yak shaving when something goes wrong and I handle breakage on my terms and not the machine’s.

As far as package management goes, I want to keep things simple.
In fact, I still haven’t graduated to use-package or straight.el because my package needs are few and conservative². And so, while there are automatic update options out there, I’ll just stick to updating them manually, every quarter.

Ergo, this is the checklist I’ll use next time onwards …

1. Stop emacs user service, systemctl --user stop emacs
2. Backup emacs folder in ~/.config
3. Start emacs manually (not the service).
4. M-x package-refresh-contents
5. M-x package-upgrade-all
6. Problems? Quit emacs. Revert backup folder.
7. In the end, start emacs user sevice, systemctl --user start emacs

There’s an Org mode task, scheduled quarterly, so that I won’t forget.

Like Dale Carnegie says,

Shut off the past! Let the dead past bury its dead. Shut out the yesterdays which have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. Shut off the future as tightly as the past.

The future is today. There is no tomorrow. The day of man’s salvation is now.

Waste of energy, mental distress, nervous worries dog the steps of a man who is anxious about the future. Shut close, then the great fore and aft bulkheads, and prepare to cultivate the habit of life of day-tight compartments.

So I want then, my Org Mode to do show me, only the things, I have on my plate today.

And Org is nothing if not adaptable. org-agenda-span is the variable that controls what the Agends shows me. According to the docs,

This variable can be set to any number of days you want to see by default in the agenda, or to a span name, such a day, week, month or year.

So that’s what I did. This little snippet went into my init file

;; Set Agenda to show a day as the default timespan, instead of a week
(setq org-agenda-span 'day)

Et voilà!

Now that I use my local machine to draft all my posts, desktop Emacs makes everything easier … with one exception. It swallows up a lot of my Espanso expansions.

My current bugbear is that it will not render a = when expanding.
I know this is entirely something that I brought on myself, and neither Emacs or Espanso in isolation will have issues.

My workaround after rummaging through Espanso’s documentation was to set the backend to use xdotool, in my config. (~/.config/espanso/config/default.yml)

x11_use_xdotool_backend: true

One downside now is that it no longer jumps back to a predefined location in the snippets where I’ve defined such a thing. No matter. I use them rarely and I’ll figure something out later. (Alongside why desktop emacs won’t render markdown expansions sometimes as well)

For now, most of my expansions work. Hurrah!

I finally went ahead and read about what Emacs Diary S-expressions were.

Going back, a bit.
I make heavy use of Org Mode’s deadline and scheduling features.
I put schedules and deadlines in lots of tasks across my ten or so org files, so that I can look at them every week, to decide what I’ll be doing this week as well as to review at the beginning of every month.
To wit, there are plenty of tasks that repeat on a weekly and monthly cadence, and Org’s repeaters.

But¹, there’s one kind of event I have, that Org doesn’t support quite well.
If I want something on, let’s say the second Friday of every month, there’s no easy way to describe / do that with Org.
Org defers to Emacs’ native Diary Mode to do something like this.. Ok, not defers, but it supports Diary expression entries with a few caveats.
Now those were scary when I first saw them, which is why I kicked the can down the road, and decided to just live with manually making entries for the second Friday of every month.
A year of doing this, and I’ve finally had enough. So I finally went ahead and read about what Emacs Diary S-expressions were.

Only to realise, that they were not as scary as I feared, after close to a year of messing around with my Emacs config files. They look² just like Emacs functions with arguments.

I scribbled one out the way, Org needs them written, by referring to the Emacs help.

<%%(diary-float t 5 2)>

I marked the sections out in the scrawly figure above.

• diary-float seems to be the function that does all the magic and then I have three arguments
• The first one, refers to the month by number. 8 will mean August. t will make things repeat every month.
• The second argument is day of week. 0 being Sunday, and 6, Saturday.
• The third one refers to which week of the month. 2 in my case, means the second week of the month.

So …

* My super important task
  DEADLINE:  <%%(diary-float t 3 2)>

shows up in my agenda as a task for the second Wednesday of every month!

There are a couple of caveats to this approach.

• This is not as task, even though I write it as one. It behaves more like a calendar entry. It more or less, just shows up in the agenda and I have to look at it.
• I can’t mark it as done and expect it to repeat, like a normal Org repeater. If I do that, the task is, uh done and then that’s that.

Neither of these things bother me, because of the idiosyncratic way I drive my day.
I normally review my daily agenda, and create a day plan for myself.
Which means that I copy the repeater task into my daily agenda as a single task and mark the repeater as done. So with the weird way I work, writing it out as a diary sexp, actually saves me a step ❤️
And my cranky brain can now heave a sigh of relief.³

After which I go to the file which needs to contain my link, and select my text that I’ll want converted into a link (“inserting a link” in org speak. In my case, the top file in the screenshot below).
I select the Misc Brain Dump part of the “Look at the Misc Brain Dump” task and hit
C-c C-l
It then switches me to a buffer that shows the links that Org currently has stored, with the minibuffer prompting me to choose one

I use the arrow keys to choose the one I want, hit return and it creates the link for me.

Here, I’ve switched away from my brain dump. (I’ve closed the file in fact)

I click the link in my tasks file and …

It opens right up, at the exact location I want. Woohoo!

And just like everything else with Org, it’s plain, simple, elegant, text functionality.
I examined the link and it was a borg standard Org link, with the link having the header tacked on the end, like so …
file:brain-dump.org::*Misc Brain Dump¹

I have a folder (called syncbox) full of files, that Org Mode looks at to generate the agenda for me.
Now these files are also synced via Syncthing over to my phone, where another program called Beorg looks at them too and shows them as entries in my calendar, so that I don’t miss the really important things I need to do.

Functionally, all is well with this setup, except for one teensy thing.
Every once in a while, when certain files are in use on both, my desktop and my phone, Syncthing will create conflicting copies of said files in use.
This happens most often, with my tasks.org file.
Once it conflicts, my syncbox gets full with files like,
tasks.sync-conflict-20240408-041556-2TQWENY.org and
tasks.sync-conflict-20240516-101335-2TQWENY.org and
tasks.sync-conflict-20240520-053451-2TQWENY.org

What happens then, is that Org Agenda happily reads those files too, and I end up with lots of duplicated tasks.¹

As usual, tackling it by writing lisp, was an idea fraught with terror for me. I tried quite a bit and failed.
My next plan of attack was that Org Agenda had a regex², that it would process. My regex is better than my lisp, but even that was to no avail.
Emacs regex does not support lookaheads / lookbehinds and I did not want to have some complicated pattern, that even I would not recognise, a few months down the line.
In the meanwhile, Ihor told me to stop faffing about and just write a function³

So I asked Claude to go do the work for me and I ended up with …

(defun mjb/set-org-agenda-files-from-syncbox-directory ()
  "Set `org-agenda-files' to all Org files in the 'syncbox' directory, excluding files with '.sync-conflict' in the name."
  (let ((syncbox-dir (expand-file-name "syncbox" my-org-directory)))
    (when (file-directory-p syncbox-dir)
      (setq org-agenda-files
            (mapcar
             (lambda (file) (expand-file-name file syncbox-dir))
             (seq-filter
              (lambda (file) (not (string-match-p "\\.sync-conflict" file)))
              (directory-files syncbox-dir t "\.org$")))))))

(mjb/set-org-agenda-files-from-syncbox-directory)

which I dutifully dumped into my init file.
And that did the trick!

What did strike me, is that now that I am using this approach, my chicken and egg struggle is finally at an end. I don’t have to struggle to learn lisp to hack emacs which needs me to learn lisp.
I realise it takes only a short time of dedicated effort. But right now, it is time I don’t have, and don’t know when I’ll get.
So the new fangled LLM AIs can help me sort my Emacs pain points and I can learn Lisp at leisure.
And I’ll use, friend on the fediverse, Vincent Dardel’s excellent course to do just that.

Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, Vol. 2
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
185.4 MB
EPUB
105.4 MB
PDF
439.9 MB
Queen Sonja - Issue. #2
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
17.7 MB
EPUB
16.6 MB
PDF
137.2 MB
Vampirella: Throne of Skulls Vol 03
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
229.3 MB
EPUB
135.9 MB
PDF
438.6 MB
Red Sonja and the Ballad of the Red Goddess
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
132.9 MB
EPUB
50.2 MB
PDF
376.8 MB
Vampirella Strikes Vol 01
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
106.4 MB
EPUB
118.7 MB
PDF
351.7 MB
… really long list elided

And I go, Ugh! It’s Saturday! I’m too lazy to go selecting and deleting that cruft between my titles. Isn’t there something in Emacs that can help?
Spoiler Alert: Of course there is! Meet flush-lines

M-x flush-lines asks me for a regex pattern.
I gave it \ MB¹ et voilà! Every line that had a space followed by MB disappeared!

Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, Vol. 2
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
Queen Sonja - Issue. #2
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
Vampirella: Throne of Skulls Vol 03
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
Red Sonja and the Ballad of the Red Goddess
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
Vampirella Strikes Vol 01
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
… long list elided

And so a few, rapid commands to excise lines with Dynamite Entertainment, CBZ, EPUB and PDF later …

Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, Vol. 2
Queen Sonja - Issue. #2
Vampirella: Throne of Skulls Vol 03
Red Sonja and the Ballad of the Red Goddess
Vampirella Strikes Vol 01

… still a long list, but exactly what I wanted :)

I love you, Emacs!

Lisp is on the list of things to learn someday.¹
And in the meanwhile, I need to be able to hack Emacs to do the stuff I want.
But also, there are a ton of other things, that are currently much, much higher on my list of priorities.²
And while the community is extremely kind and generous, the expectation is that you need to put in the time and the work.
Which I currently don’t have and can’t do.

And so, it finally happened.
I signed up for a Claude account and told it to write me some lisp.

I am heavily Org Mode task driven, these days and I have a manual workflow that I need a teensy bit of help with.

1. I start work on a task
2. I mark it as WORKING (and clock in manually)
3. I want to switch to another task
4. I mark my original task as WAITING (and clock out manually)
5. I then mark my new task as WORKING (and clock in manually)
6. After a while I switch to the original task, and clock in manually (after marking the current task as WAITING and clocking out there manually)

What bugs me, is the clocking in and out, because …

1. I tend to forget it, messing up all my clock times and …
2. because it is now becoming painful on my middle aged fingers³,

So, like I said, I prompted Claude to give me code that would clock me in automatically, whenever I changed state to WORKING and clock me out when I switched to WAITING⁴
It spat out some code.
I tried to reasonably guess and verify what it did.
It looked ok.
I tried it.
It worked!
And that’s that.

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(defun mjb/org-clock-in-when-task-state-changes-to-working ()
  "Clock in an Org mode task when the status is changed to 'WORKING'."
  (when (and (eq major-mode 'org-mode)
             (member (downcase (or (org-get-todo-state) "")) '("working")))
    (org-clock-in)))


(defun mjb/org-clock-out-when-task-state-changes-to-waiting ()
  "Clock out an Org mode task when the status is changed to 'WAITING'."
  (when (and (eq major-mode 'org-mode)
             (member (downcase (or (org-get-todo-state) "")) '("waiting")))
    (org-clock-out)))

;; These lines make the functions above, hook to Org’s state change mechanism.
;; So that everytime a task’s state changes, these functions are called
(add-hook 'org-after-todo-state-change-hook #'mjb/org-clock-in-when-task-state-changes-to-working)
(add-hook 'org-after-todo-state-change-hook #'mjb/org-clock-out-when-task-state-changes-to-waiting)

Now that life’s getting busier and busier, with lots more things on my plate, ye olde system of writing the day’s tasks down on paper does not work any more. Specially since, I’ve begun logging clock times¹. Writing them down by hand is a giant pain.
This is what the plan’s begun to look like.

I wanted to see, if Org would let me replicate what I did my hand, natively.
Which in a nutshell was to look at the day sheet (on paper) for the nitty gritty and my organiser (currently my tasks.org file) for the big picture view.
I bounce between the two often. And discrete focus is something I wanted to keep.

The focus from wide …

to narrow. And back …

A bit of searching and this is the result! Woohoo!

Like I mentioned above, I hit C-x n s next to my day’s headline to narrow the scope to just today. And a C-x n w gets me back to the thirty thousand foot view.
I think of them as, s for slim and w for wide, to keep them straight in my head.
I’m intuiting this is Org’s Sparse Tree Magic at play here. But learning that wizardry is a thing for another day.

The important bit for me, is that I can focus when I working, without getting distracted.
And then when I need to, zoom out to review what progress looks like and make changes, if I need to.

I feel a bit sad though. I’ve given up book notes on paper. I’m giving up planning my day on paper. It feels like I’m losing something tangible. I miss paper.

Collection of various little things I find handy when I am lost in Emacs

• Truly lost and need help about help itself? C-h C-h or C-h ?
• C-h m should bring up a list of all the shortcuts available to that mode.
• Want to find out what the docs mean when they refer to something? C-h o and then type in that name.
  For e.g. when the Org Mode docs refer to org-hide-leading-stars, a C-h o => Return => org-hide-leading-stars will give me details about what it is. (According to the docs: org-hide-leading-stars is a variable defined in ‘org.el’. Its value is nil.) Alternatively if you know the type of object, you’re looking at, C-h f will give you help on a function and C-h v will do the same with a variable.
• If you want to know what function is behind this crazy shortcut you’re typing, a C-h k followed by giving it the shortcut your typing will lead you to the culprit command that powers it.
  For e.g. I blanked out on how to toggle multiple checkboxes in Org Mode today and I was hitting C-c C-x b to on avail. Running C-h k told me that it was bound to org-tree-to-indirect-buffer. So I was madly mashing the wrong keys. A little digging (with C-h m) revealed that what I needed was C-c C-x C-b which ran org-toggle-checkbox which indeed did what I wanted! :)

The bot page has a nice preview of what the colours look like (like this), while my little note just had bland hex RGB values.
So I was wondering if I could somehow see what they looked like. Preview the values themselves in the colours they represent.
I didn’t have to dig too deep. Ofcourse Emacs does this. With Rainbow Mode.

All I had to do was install it. Activate it in the buffer. And tada! Look! How Pretty!

Emacs 29.0 was the first version I compiled from source, because I wanted the latest release as soon as it was out and I no longer had the patience for the kindly distribution folk (or third party packagers) to give me a binary.
The first time was a nightmare.
I didn’t have various bits and bobs that were needed. Stuff that the guides say should work a certain way wouldn’t.
But it did happen eventually and I learnt a lot along the way about what I wanted compiled in, in my Emacs.
I also appreciated just how much easier it is now to compile stuff and recover from errors. I tried this last in the late 90s¹ and it scared me off.

But like I was saying … now that I have it all set up, 29.1 and 29.2 have been a breeze.
I’d never have guessed, updating software, by compiling from source, would be so painless.²

1. Use Emacs as my primary editor nearly everywhere.
2. Not just as an editor. In fact, I would stop thinking of it as an editor and come to see it for what it really is. A whole computer with an editor bolted on.
3. Use Emacs not just for writing, but also have it serve as the cornerstone for two other extremely important activities in my life, organising my life (with Org Mode) and tending to my commonplace book (with Org Roam)
4. Come so far as to scrape a web page, set it up as a connected node in my Zettelkasten, strip close to fifty superfluous lines, edit the rest to my liking, change the title to title case, and then file it way within minutes, and learn do all this by osmosis and research over the years, just by using it daily and being curious¹
5. Have a kind community support all my crazy attempts to bend Emacs to my will

I would have told you, you were off your rocker.
But I do, do these things (which, I’m ridiculously pleased with) and have this wonderful community (which, I am earnestly grateful for).
Here’s to three and a half decades!

Every time I move though, it goes there and sits, right next to the last branch, instead of under it. So I would grumble a bit, and then go hit the return key as required, to get it all right and proper. And I’m tired, so at least one time out of three, I mess the older day too, and then I grumble even more and fix that too.

Until today morning, when I realised I had not done my fix the day dance, yesterday…
And the day was correctly positioned at the bottom!
So, was this was just a purely cosmetic issue?!
I tried it with a couple of test days.
I saved, closed, and opened up my file. Fixed!
Then I tried some more tests days and I expanded all my tasks Shift-Tab and and closed them. Fixed! 🙂

I guess, I have to go find something else to be grumpy about now 😂

Update: 2023-11-27

A friend on the fediverse, encouraged me to try filing a bug report with the Org folk.
To which I retort, this is more a PEBKAC problem, than an Org Mode problem.
Most likely I am doing something dumb or I have something misconfigured, or some of my Org helper packages (Org-contrib, Org-ql, Org-Web-Tools, Org Superstar) are trampling over one another.

Spoiler alert: It did.

I run Emacs as a daemon, and use EmacsClient to connect to the Emacs process.
Makes it really ease to launch, work on, sling around and close lots of Emacs windows.¹

Which brings me to the hiccough. I launch EmacsClient and a window (frame) does indeed launch, but it just … stays there in the background.

Repeated attempts to launch EmacsClient are to no avail.
The pesky little windows just pile up in their corner.

Ergo, this little bit of Bash/xdotool shenanigans …

#!/usr/bin/env bash 

export EMACSWINID=$(xdotool search "\*scratch\*" | tail -n1)

if [ $EMACSWINID ]; then
    xdotool windowactivate $EMACSWINID
else
    sh -c 'emacsclient --create-frame --no-wait --alternate-editor="" && export EMACSWINID=$(xdotool search "\*scratch\*" | tail -n1) && xdotool windowactivate $EMACSWINID'
fi

• Check to see if an Emacs scratch buffer is open. If it is, switch to it.
• Otherwise, just launch EmacsClient, get the id of the scratch buffer window (frame) and raise it, so that I can work on it. In peace.

It’s yet another way that Emacs adapts itself to its users rather than insisting those users adapt themselves to Emacs.

Read irreal’s entire post here.

P.S. I also managed to power my workflow with elisp, like Jon’s first impulse told him to. And that was because of Emacs’ second (or rather biggest) strength.
The kindness and warmth of the Emacs community at large.
@laotang from the fediverse, reached out and gave me the gift of an elisp function, that did what I needed :)

Nearly everything I write is in Emacs.¹
It’s been slightly more than two years, since I made the move to using it as my everyday text editor.
I have a spartan Emacs config, with only a few customisations, that I found by watching David Wilson aka System Crafters’ Emacs From Scratch #1 video and the rest by searching on the web and asking around on the fediverse.

I’ve touched my config only about three times; basically every time I’ve found a new use for emacs.

1. When I started editing text
2. When I start using it as my Organiser (Org Mode) and
3. When I began using it as my Zettelkasten (Org Roam)

Which is to say, I know only the bare bones of how Emacs configuration and Elisp work.

And yet … and yet …
I have this itch that rankles.
You see, every morning I sit at the computer with my cup of coffee, and pull up my tasks and notes and the agenda for the day.
Now I don’t use the agenda much, but the tasks and notes are a must.
So I open the tasks file and maximize my window and then I split my frame and I open the notes file, and then I go back to my tasks and I have it all ready just the way I like it.
Thing is, I’m grumpy in the morning and doing all that grates on me.

There’s gotta be a better way!

So I tried looking around, and came to the conclusion that creating a function, that did all this for me, would be the best thing.
But I know no Elisp.
And right now, I have no time to put into learning it. I did spend close to a day looking at what I could whip up, to no avail.²

So the next best idea I came up with, was recording my actions, doing the file opening, window arranging dance, as a macro and then assigning a keyboard shortcut to it.
That turned out to be iffy.
It’d work fine when I created it, but when I restarted my Emacs daemon (or my system) and then call it again, Emacs would freeze.

My intuition told me that it could be the fact, that a recorded macro³ could not handle opening files and switching buffers.⁴
Then I realised that I could outsource that part to the command line or my application launcher⁵ and leave the rest of it to the macro.

So I did just that. I created a Ulauncher shortcut.
It binds the keyword etn to the command:
emacsclient -c --no-wait ~/path/to/tasks.org ~/path/to/my/notes.org
so that Emacs opens both my tasks and notes files as it fires up.

And in Emacs I bound a keyboard macro, to the rest of the recorded macro code that would

1. Maximise the frame
2. Split the frame into two windows, with my tasks on top and the notes in the bottom
3. Have the cursor be ready at the place I needed it to be.

(defalias 'mjbtn
   (kmacro "M-x t o g g l e - f r a m e - m a x i m i z e d <return> 
   C-x 2 C-x o C-x b n o t e s . o r g <return> C-x o M-g g 3 6 <return>"))

;; Assign a keyboard shortcut to the macro above: C-c z
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c z") 'mjbtn)

Update: 2023-11-17

One advantage of writing about what you do and putting it out there, is that really kind souls come along and teach you new things!
One of them is @laotang, over on the Fediverse.
Remember when I said, the best solution would be to write an Emacs function that would do what I wanted?
Well, laotang loved my tinkering and then went on to give me just that!
I raise my cup of coffee to you, Sir! You made my day! Thank you, so much!

Here’s the code he suggested.Worked like a charm!

(defun getting-ready ()
  "Getting ready for work."
  (interactive)
  (toggle-frame-maximized)
  (split-window-below)
  (find-file "~/path/to/notes/notes.org")
  (find-file-other-window "~/path/to/tasks/tasks.org"))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c r") 'getting-ready)

Oh, and if you liked how Org-Roam worked in the past? When it was all just text files?
Well, if you want something like that, check out laotang’s feature-complete⁶ replica, ORGRR

What this note is for however, was the pleasant realisation that Emacs can transparently work with gpg encrypted files.²
I wanted to keep my calendar user/password credentials in a file, because the to and fro between my Baikal caldav server was generating too many requests for my password.
The org-caldav README suggested that I save it all in an .authinfo file, like so.

machine www.google.com:443 port https login username password secret

which for me translated as

machine my-caldav-server:443 port https login <my-username> password <my-password>

And the connection worked! Without me putting my password in every two seconds.

I was still a bit leery about putting my password into a plaintext file, so I looked it up and it told me to specifically use an authinfo.gpg not the plaintext version. The magic still didn’t strike me, until I tried to save the file. Emacs called up my gpg agent, which popped up a box asking me to unlock my key, and then Emacs went ahead and encrypted my file. Just like that! I tried opening it and the same thing happened in reverse. No mussing around with the command line.

If I save a file with a .gpg extension, Emacs will automatically encrypt it!
If you want to learn more, the great Mickey Petersen knows all!³

;; * subtree expansion/collapse (org-cycle) with the left mouse button

Which I accidentally triggered today …

After an (accidental) click opens up to …

Org Mode continues to delight! Hurrah!

Did log my usual weekly, books and fitness entries though.¹

Urdu

• Did the “ain” / “gain” group.
  Had fun, trying to pronounce the fricative gh (/ɣ/) sound.

Emacs

• Just a little note of gratitude to the community over at Emacslife Me, thinking out aloud in the last part of this section, led to several folks emailing me with kind and encouraging words.

  • Jon Snader mentioning yours truly on Irreal
    It gives me a slight thrill everytime, he boosts one of my posts (as I’m sure all the others do too!)
  • M— generously shared a link to the Bernt Hansen’s awesome Orgmode post as well as reassuring me, they did the same thing as I :)
  • D— had this to say, Lean in on it and be comfortable “borrowing code”. Many of us do it. As long as you understand it, it should be fine. […] The gains obtained from not having to cold-start from zero are worth considering.

• Thank you all very much. Makes me happy when I realise, I’m not shouting into the void and that I’m a part of a warm, welcoming group of kinfolk.

Emacs

• It works! Yesterday’s little hack, to clock in and out when I change state works well! It doesn’t seem to have broken anything.

• Also I added a WORKING state, and tagged my function to that. The clock in and out happen when I switch in an out of the WORKING state. Because I want my parent task to show IN_PROGRESS and the current subtask to be what I am working on. Like so …

** IN_PROGRESS Emacs
*** WORKING Learn about Org
*** TODO Write about what you learnt

• Here’s an image of an actual task …

• Except for one more thing.¹
  When I switch another task to WORKING, it does clock me out of the old task, but it leaves the TODO state at WORKING. I want the old task to switch to WAITING. I’ll look at doing this as soon as I get some breathing time.

Devops

• Spoke to a friend about some how and what and why for close to an hour
  Helped me clear my mind lots!

Urdu

• Did “toey” and “zoey”

• Did I mention three letters for the same S sound yesterday?
  Ha! Z has four! Zaal, Ze, Zuaad & Zoey

• Also tutor’s note:

the word “zan” (ज़न) when written with ‘zoey’ means “presumption” whereas, the same word, when written with a ‘ze’ instead, means “woman”.

• Which means? Lots of practice and reading ahead :)
  Also coming from the madness that is English, I keep telling myself, this is not so bad 😂
  Like Lizzo doing crack.

Physical Fitness

Rest day!

Thoughts

• The meta need / theme of learning and working, as I am doing now, is that I need to work to a time budget
  • Here’s the problem, try and solve it in an hour (or whatever time I budget)
• I need to have no shame if I cannot get it done
• I need to ask for help / look up solutions faster
• I also need to budget the time to understand the solutions.
  • If I cannot fix it one day and the solution is taking time to “get”, be ok with spending time the next day
• It’s just me. There is no one else. There is no need to pressure myself more than necessary.
• Work to the spec. Generalising (at least for now) is taboo. Now, I understand what my friends tell me about me perfectionism. I keep spending way too long about what if this? and what if that? I need to get something working first. Refine / expand / refactor it later
• Get better at logging times
• Get better at taking breaks between tasks
• Writing these logs has helped gain insight and understanding. I need to keep at it. It’ll help with the “what now? what next?” questions

Emacs

• Since I was playing hooky with my time and attention anyway, I decided to see, if I could tackle this little thing, I wanted to happen with my Org Mode.
• Everytime I move my TODO status for a task to IN_PROGRESS, I want Org to automatically clock in for me. And everytime I move out of the IN_PROGRESS state, I wanted it to clock out. This is because I want a one step process. I don’t want to change state and then clock in too. And I want it this way, because changing states and telling my program, that I’m going to work on this, here, task now is more natural to me, than clocking in and out.
• A whole day of reading and searching later, I stumbled across this gem on the Emacs StackExchange site which did exactly what I was looking to do.
• I stole it, twiddled a bit with the variable and function names and added it to the file that handles my Org config. This is it, in its entirety

(add-hook 'org-after-todo-state-change-hook
          'mjb/org-clock-todo-change)

(defun mjb/org-clock-todo-change ()
  (if (string= org-state "IN_PROGRESS")
      (org-clock-in)
      (org-clock-out-if-current)))

• And this works! For now. If something comes up, I’ll figure it out.
• Which brings me to the figuring out part. Doing this today has left me conflicted. In the old life, this is exactly how I’d do it. But ever since I’ve been learning to write code, I feel like this is something I should be able to do. But there’s only so much life and so much I want. I want the results today, and learning and writing Lisp is not going to happen in a jiffy. Right now my priorities are Devops related tasks. So I’ve just taken the pragmatic way out for now, and used code I found.

Urdu

• Learnt about the “suaad” group.
  And also learnt that Urdu is just as crazy as English.
  There are three, count ’em, three ways of making the S sound and no particular rhyme or reason to them, save history :)

• “Proficiency in using the correct letter in a word can only come with practice”, according to the site 😂
  It’s still much better than English, I think :)

Physical Fitness

• Had a sit down with my trainer and explained what I wanted.
• He got it. I also understood his approach and we worked out a happy medium
  Today’s session was much better.
• I can now say, after these days, that I’ve gotten over those early gym aches.
  It still hurts, but I no longer drag my feet, and crawl home like a zombie.

Little things. Everyday things. Important things.

And at those times, the keyboard gets in the way.
I don’t want to arrow to get to some task and C-c C-c to tick it off.
Besides my hands are nearly always messy with something or the other and I don’t want to get gunk into my keyboard.¹
Easier to just mosey the cursor to said task and click to done!
But click to done, would not done! What?! Org Mode would not let me click to complete my checkboxes?

So, off to the documentation I went and did a search for mouse, and stumbled across this line.

Piotr Zielinski wrote org-mouse.el, proposed agenda blocks and contributed various ideas and code snippets.

Well, Piotr understands my pain!
Some more spelunking led me to org-mouse.el, which seems to be really well documented. Its commentary begins with …

;; Org-mouse provides mouse support for org-mode.
;;
;; http://orgmode.org
;;
;; Org-mouse implements the following features:
;; * following links with the left mouse button (in Emacs 22)
;; * subtree expansion/collapse (org-cycle) with the left mouse button
;; * several context menus on the right mouse button:
;;    + general text
;;    + headlines
;;    + timestamps
;;    + priorities
;;    + links
;;    + tags
;; * promoting/demoting/moving subtrees with mouse-3
;;    + if the drag starts and ends in the same line then promote/demote
;;    + otherwise move the subtree

Line 101, was what put a smile on my face though.

;; Version 0.17
;; + toggle checkboxes with a single click

All it took, to get it working was to put (require 'org-mouse) into my init.el et voilà. I can clicky-clicky-to-done to my heart’s content.

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So I was really happy when I read Jon Snader’s post telling me I could have my beloved Webster’s dictionary in Emacs! This sounded too good to be true! I didn’t believe it!
Because why would I believe some old, wise wizard who’s only been writing about Emacs on a near daily basis for close to fourteen years?!
I had to try this out myself!

So I whipped up this tiny bash script

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#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [[ $(( $(pidof -s emacs) )) -le 10000  ]]; then
	systemctl --user restart emacs; 
else
	:;
fi

It just arbitrarily checks for the Emacs service’s PID and then if it’s lesser than or equal to 10000, it goes ahead and restarts the service.
This is just some superstitious thing I did, because when I was troubleshooting all those months ago, I assumed that if Emacs started at an ID in the low thousands, it must not have been loading something and restarting it to get a higher process ID meant what ever it needed must have loaded.

I learnt a couple of things doing it this way too.

1. The output of a bash command is a string.
2. I use $(( some_numerical_string )) to convert said string into an integer
3. : means pass in bash-speak

What I ought to do is to check for the existence of a PID and if there is one, to then go ahead and restart emacs. I’ll do that some other time. Because right now, I put this script into my system startup and it just works.

Update 2022-09-28

I obviously am incapable, of leaving well enough alone.
As I was in the bath this morning, it struck me that I was restarting the service using systemctl restart …
So I could just check for the exit status of a systemctl status command, and then depending on what I got, do something. If it was running, I could just restart it.
I checked on the command line and sure enough, if a service is running, the exit status is 0 and if it isn’t, the status is 3 .²
So … then I monkeyed with the script to this

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#!/usr/bin/env bash

if systemctl --user status emacs > /dev/null; then
    systemctl --user restart emacs;
else
    :;
fi;

If the emacs service is running, restart it, else do nothing.
This ought to quiet the monkey brain for a while.
I hope 🙂

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The only thing I did remember were code blocks.
And that I needed to do a #+begin_src and then a #+end_src and put my code in the middle. And all this while, I would keep typing it in, by hand.

Until I tired of keeping on doing that shit, because there are more and more notes that are now going into my zettelkasten and decided well, the computer can do that for me.
So, I went back to the Org Mode documentation and discovered Structure Templates.
And now, I am at peace!

Turns out, all I needed was (org-insert-structure-template) aka C-c C-,
Here’s some code I’ve selected in a document

Now I hit C-c C-,, which brings up a whole host of options, with a prompt!
Do I want this block of text to be a quote? Or some verse?
Well, this is just boring code, so I choose source with the s key

And tada! The block is surrounded by the begin and end tags, and is now a source block! I could add the programming language after #+begin_src to get highlighting as well, but that’s a story for another day.

I’m practicing this, so that I get C-c C-, into my muscle memory, because be it verse, quote, code, example or exports, I know I will be making heavy use of Structure Templates.

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I figured out, looked up how to fix it

1. Hit C-x d to flip into a dired buffer
2. Find my filename in the list. (C-s can help search and narrow stuff)
3. Then C-x C-q to go into Wdired mode
4. Change the file name to whatever I want it to
5. C-c C-c to be done with it.

Et voilà!
(If you are editing an Org Roam node, M-x org-roam-db-sync to keep everything shipshape)¹

Update, 2022-09-17: Antón responded to my post on Linkedin to suggest that step 3 could also be done alternatively by just hitting R at the filename, which would let me rename the file (using dired-do-rename)

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I have a stuff-to-do.org file, that serves as an inbox for most long term tasks that I want to tackle. Stuff that needs doing, books that I want to buy, books that I want to read, courses that I want to learn, movies or tv shows that I want to watch, stuff on the web that I want to catchup on, etc. etc. etc.

And all this while, I have been moving tasks into my daily-tasks.org as and when I tackle them. This meant I needed to open both files, and then cut said task out of one and paste it into the other. And as usual, I am now doing this often enough, that it’s become bothersome. Because there are a couple more files as well, that serve as inboxes.

And the same question arises, as usual. Can Emacs help with this?
The answer as it almost always is, is a big, resounding, Yes!

I know it had to do something with what Org calls a refile, since I keep using C-c C-w to move items between different headings in my daily tasks file.
So after a bit of reading the manual, reading blog posts, spelunking through the emacs stackexchange, stalking the Org Mode reddit and an hour of head scratching, I roughed up something that does what I want :)

In a nutshell, what I am doing is what Org calls, a Refile and Copy. The manual page let me know that I could do this across files too. This was exactly what I wanted. It also told me that I needed to configure org-refile-targets variable to tell Org a list of locations, that it would then let me refile my tasks to.

Having split my emacs init.el file into a set of logical files, I opened up the file that held my org settings (very imaginatively called emacs-org-mode-settings.el) and then thought a bit about what files I would want Org to pop up when I wanted to file tasks to.
Would just my daily tasks file do? What if I wanted to file something out of my daily tasks file? Or what if I wanted crisscross transfers between all my task inboxes and daily task file?

I then realised that I was already telling Org Agenda to scan my tasks folder (which holds all my productivity system files) for tasks and dates and schedules and deadlines. I decided to use the same set of files as my targets for refiling. And this turned out to be easier to do than expected. I just had to tell Org to use org-agenda-files as the value for org-refile-targets

It looks a little bit like this.

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(setq org-refile-targets
      '((nil :maxlevel . 1)
	   (org-agenda-files :maxlevel . 1)))

I’m telling org-refile-targets on line 1, to look for targets in two locations.
Line 3, is what we were talking about above. Org will look to the same location that org-agenda-files points to, for its refile targets.
Line 2, is where I tell Org to include my current file, the one I am working on, as a target. It helps me move stuff in my daily tasks file from one day to another.
The maxlevel bit is to tell Org the level of headlines to show as targets. Org has headlines and sub-headlines and sub-sub-headlines.¹ I just need the first level, which is why it’s set to 1.
It seemed to work, until I ran into a small stumbling block. Org would not let me refile my task at level 0, i.e. the root of the file as a level 1 headline. It could only nest under an existing headline. So, line 4 below, fixes that for me.

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(setq org-refile-targets
      '((nil :maxlevel . 1)
	   (org-agenda-files :maxlevel . 1)))
(setq org-refile-use-outline-path 'file)

And tada! It works! You can see it in action below.
Click any of the images below to view them, larger.

I may not know Emacs, but I do know what I want out of a general purpose text editor.
And bending Emacs to do my will, to do what I want it to do or behave in the manner I want it to behave. And Emacs to my eternal gratitude, is flexible to do all I want, thanks to the last forty six years worth of hard work and ideas of people from all over.

Want your screen to be a certain width, because you miss CGA screens? Emacs can do that.
Want your font to be monospaced, because it helps you write? Emacs can do that.
Want to tweak the space between your lines, because your font looks better that way? Emacs can do that.
Want to save your place in the file, so you can come back to where you were? Emacs can do that.
Themes? Want your editor to look a certain way? Emacs can do that.
Love Markdown? Emacs does that.

That’s just the core editor and that’s just me setting up my writing environment.
That’s just me scratching the surface.
I haven’t scratched the universe that is setting it up as an IDE, or using it as a Git frontend, or to read mail, or be an IRC client or play games or the million other things it can do.

As, for me, I have slowly branched out my use of Emacs too.
In addition to its use as a daily general purpose text editor, I use Emacs in three specific domains.

1. As an editor for all my blog posts, and prose writing. I use Markdown Mode to accomplish this.
2. As a second brain. To write down notes and references and ideas and to link them all together. A syntopical sort of linking. A Zettelkasten, in fact. Org Roam is the tool I am using to build this edifice.
3. And as a tool to manage my productivity, my day and my sanity using the awesome Org Mode.¹

Which brings me to my current conundrum.
All those tweaks I mentioned above?
They are all in a file called the init.el, which Emacs reads everytime it starts up.
And given my propensity to be a control freak, while at the same time verbosely documenting every change I make, my file had already grown to 300 lines and counting.
Going back to read stuff and change existing things meant scrolling up and down or searching across 300 odd lines.
And I quickly tired of that.

Which is when I learnt Emacs let me organise my init files too!
Between learning to load lisp files and how to organize my init files, I quickly divided my main file into a total of four files.

1. The base init.el file, containing things I thought were absolutely needed²
2. A miscellaneous file, that would hold everything else Emacs.³
3. A file to hold my Org Roam Zettelkasten settings.
4. A file to hold my Org Mode settings.

And then, within my base file, I called the other three, like so … ⁴

(load "~/.config/emacs/emacs-misc-settings.el")
(load "~/.config/emacs/emacs-org-mode-settings.el")
(load "~/.config/emacs/emacs-org-roam-settings.el")

And that gave me space to breathe :)
Everything is now properly organised.
I can just go look in the appropriate file (or add one) for the appropriate setting.
And life is peachy again.

Of course, once again, I am barely scratching the surface, compared to other folks’ vastly elaborate setups.
But this works for me, and I’m really happy!

Org mode is slowly spreading its tentacles increasingly becoming something, I cannot live without, to manage my day.
And I’m getting pretty consistent with it too!

Like you see above, I use dates as my headlines, below which I list the various tasks for the day.¹
And that’s where I run into my current itch to scratch.

I don’t want to keep typing out the date daily.
The computer can do that for me.
But how? Of the millions of ways possible, what do I want to do?
My first thought was to figure out some way to insert a date into Emacs.
And then I thought, why only emacs? I want it systemwide, across all my programs.
So I checked if Espanso, my friendly text expansion program, would do that for me.
Turns out, Espanso does!
I could just type :dtx wherever I wanted and Espanso would happily insert the date in there. And so I did that for a few days.
Problem solved? Well, that’s when the itch got stronger.

See my evening tasks above?
I use Cal Newport’s idea of a shutdown ritual, to empty my mind and plan the next day, every evening.
Which, for the past couple of weeks meant using my little expansion snippet to put in today’s date for the next day’s headline, as I began planning it. And I’d just manually change the date part to the next day’s date.²

Until today.

I typed in :dtx and I got 2022-07-31.
And then the lazy bum inside me groaned. What? I need to the change the month too?
The computer can do that for me!

So I went back to Espanso to see if it did support date expansions for tomorrow.
Turns out it does!
Only for some reason, it just wouldn’t play ball with the way I want my dates expressed, (YYYY-MM-DD). It would throw weird yaml errors.
And then I recalled Emacs just called the shell to do it.
So I went looking to see, if Espanso could call the operating system shell³ to do expansions ala Emacs.
Turns out, it can!

Finally, I looked up how the date command worked with past and future dates, and jigged up a small expansion snippet and put that into Espanso’s match/base.yaml

  - trigger: ":dttx"
    replace: "{{output}}"
    vars:
      - name: output
        type: shell
        params:
          cmd: "date  --date='tomorrow' +'%Y-%m-%d'"

Et voilà!
No more backspacing and struggling with Espanso undos and date calculations.
:dttx turns into tomorrow’s date:2022-08-01!
And the monkey brain is happy again :)

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