Emacs

Various things, when rooting around for help in Emacs

I must admit to stealing … quite a lot … from a bot at that! Zoetrope’s, “random color contrasts” gets colours from Adam Morse and John Otander’s Randoma11ly and posts them a few times a day. I’ve been writing down the ones I love and find interesting, in an Org note, in the hopes I’ll use them someday. (I know I’m just hoarding colours 😂. But hey, I used one1 out of the thirty-odd colours, I’ve jotted down so far) ...

Updated to Emacs 29.2, just now. Took me and my four core workhorse about fifteen minutes tops, from start to finish. 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. ...

If someone had told me three and a half years ago, that I would: Use Emacs as my primary editor nearly everywhere. 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. 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) 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 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 evening, after my shutdown ritual, I move my current day’s branch to the bottom of my Org Mode file, so I begin the next day at the same fixed place, at line 36.1 The day is done; moving it to the bottom of the pile ...

Figuring out my webapps problem yesterday made me ask myself if I could somehow repurpose that little xdotool script to solve another niche itch that I had. 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. ...