Emacs

Decided to play hooky today, because I got up reallly late and then I got stuff at home to do. 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 :) ...

While I mostly use the keyboard when doing everything Org related, there are a few times in the day, when I cannot. These are mostly mornings and evenings when I bustle about home, doing this thing and that. Things that are part of my routine. Things that are checkboxes in my routine.org file. It helps me get through the day without thinking of whether, I gave the better half her meds or whether I remembered to call my mum or if I drank enough water by the end of the day or whether my stretches for the day are done or if the plan for the next day is made. ...

I wrote the other day, about switching to Noah Webster’s dictionary everywhere, I possibly could. Now I did that after reading this lovely James Somers post. And that post seems to be resounding through the web, with folks integrating it into their workflows in different ways. 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 whip out ye, old, trusty scratch buffer, type crap into it and select it.1 And then I fire up M-x dictionary-search, like Snader tells me to This is the moment of poop … err truth! I hit return and … How now brown cow?! It actually works! ...

This post was originaly published on 2022-09-27. Updated 2022-09-28, to include the improved script. It’s been a year, since I figured out the hack that finally let me use my Compose key in Emacs.1 Without it, I am unable to type any kind of quotation marks or umlauts in emacs. A year in, and I’m tired of restarting the service everytime the machine comes on. The computer can do that for me. ...

I remember, when I first learned it, the Org Manual mentioning I could have code, quotes, poetry and sundry self structured blocks of text, where the text in that block would flow like I wanted it to. I could have indentation or line breaks as I pleased. And then I promptly forgot about it. 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. ...

I often fat fingered the file name / buffer name / Org Roam link name when launching something new. And then when I am busy and knee deep in work, I glance up to see the error glaring at me. I figured out, looked up how to fix it Hit C-x d to flip into a dired buffer Find my filename in the list. (C-s can help search and narrow stuff) Then C-x C-q to go into Wdired mode Change the file name to whatever I want it to 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 ...