pages tagged emacs

imenu for Markdown

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

For a while, I've been envious of some of the project and file navigation features in emacs for browsing bigger projects/programs, things like imenu and tags have always seems awesome but given that I spend most of time editing restructured text and markdown files (I'm a technical writer), these tools have been distant and not a part of my day to day work.

It's not that it would be impossible to write interfaces for imenu or etags, for the formats I use regularly, but more that I've never gotten around to it until now.

We're still a ways away on the question of etags, but it turns out that when I wasn't looking rst mode got imenu support, and with the following little bit of elisp you can get imenu for markdown.

 (setq markdown-imenu-generic-expression
     '(("title"  "^\\(.*\\)[\n]=+$" 1)
       ("h2-"    "^\\(.*\\)[\n]-+$" 1)
       ("h1"   "^# \\(.*\\)$" 1)
       ("h2"   "^## \\(.*\\)$" 1)
       ("h3"   "^### \\(.*\\)$" 1)
       ("h4"   "^#### \\(.*\\)$" 1)
       ("h5"   "^##### \\(.*\\)$" 1)
       ("h6"   "^###### \\(.*\\)$" 1)
       ("fn"   "^\\[\\^\\(.*\\)\\]" 1)
 ))

 (add-hook 'markdown-mode-hook
           (lambda ()
             (setq imenu-generic-expression markdown-imenu-generic-expression)))

Pretty awesome! I hope it helps you make awesome things.

Day 23-25

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I had a moment at the end of the day where I was deeply confused that it was only Tuesday and not Thursday. This is the second week in a row where I've made this mistake. To complicate matters, the coworker I was meeting with was conversely convinced that it was Monday. This sums things up pretty well.

Other than that, I'm mostly staying ahead of my own email/queue curve, which is close enough to winning that I'm happy.

Side projects/things I've been thinking about:

Emacs:

I've been trying to figure out how to more effectively combine emacs buffers into groups so I can have fewer emacs sessions open to reduce context switching (or confusion with lots of windows,) on small screens while also preventing bleed-over. This is really only a problem on my laptop(s,) and there are a bunch of different solutions. Thoughts include:
- having some sort of way to save "workspace/window layout" state so that I could go back to it when I need to. That way, I can avoid having a million open windows and just have a list of named "sessions" that I can toggle between. I think you can hack this using registers, but nothing I've tried seems to approximate what I have in mind very well.
- Using Projectile more, and/or something like elscreen to divide up the never ending number of open buffers. Elscreen seems to be less than effective with emacs24...
- Figure some better idea out for managing large numbers of ERC buffers in a sane way, particularly for machines that disconnect from the internet regularly.
Something else that a reader might be able to point out to me.
Cell phones:
- I'm considering getting the Blackberry Bold in a few months, if I don't make peace with my current cellphone, given the following logic: 95% of my cell phone use can be summarized as, email, calendar stuff, trivial web browsing, google maps, reading kindle and epubs. Everything else is unimportant. Blackberrys would do this without problem, and the keyboard/build quality is amazing. I've also had pretty good luck hacking Blackberry's to tether.
- Alternately, I've thought about both iPhone or getting an unlocked Galaxy Nexus, or waiting till the successor to the Galaxy Nexus
Or really anything. It's not so much that my current phone is awful, as it's a frustrating object: it has a keyboard, but the build quality is awful so it's hard to use, and the keyboard is OK, but not, which ends up being lose-lose. It's also not particularly peppy, which only compounds matters.

First world problems.

Day 22

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400

For those of you new to this series, I've started doing end-of-day reports of what I'm working on, after being inspired by Joey Hess' log for git-annex-assistant.

My last project yesterday evening was rejiggering my email system so that emacs could send email directly (with the help of async-emacs), where previously it'd only been using sendmail. Well that didn't really work. Also extensive testing seems to have gmail thinking that mail from me is Spam, at least in my account. Super frustrating, and the solution isn't terribly clear. I guess sendmail isn't so bad, even if it is a bit slow, and I thin my messages are mostly going through.

Acomplishments

I've spent the morning working on the following projects: he morning

catching up on RSS reading and the rest of the email backlog. I still have some things
repeatedly breaking and fixing my cell phone. A much delayed Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade that's bricked 2 phones (thank god for warranty?) is pushing me pretty much to the edge on this. The phone isn't old, but I got it on the promise of the upgrade (partially,) so this is mega frustrating.

Part of me is like "whelp, iPhone?" and another part of me is like "whelp, my Blackberries were less functional but for everything I use the phone for... totally awesome," and other part of me thinks the Nexus S looks cool, but knows that will have all the same problems of my current phone which is also Samsung. I find the entire experience tiring.
Writing and tweaking a blog post about contemporary readability and publishing.
My desktop usage is trending away from having a large(er) number of task-specific work areas (i.e. virtual desktops for email/web/personal-writing/work-writing/task tracking/etc.) to having a more moderate number of task-based work areas (i.e. a few generic virtual desktops for writing, email, and web, with the possibility for combining email and web.)

I have three different emacs sessions: one for work, one for personal projects, and one for IM/IRC/Sauron, though Sauron is still a pipe dream for me/my workflow at the moment. The seperation within emacs is taking care of the process speration that I'd previously been doing with virtual desktops and that's a good thing.

My work box, has one virtual desktop, but enough screen space (through heroic means, to support 9 different windows at once,) the happy medium, particularly for a laptop with an anemic screen, is somewhere else.

The shake down:
- Pro: Less confusing virtual desktops: 4 or 5 is considerably more manageable than 7 or 9. Big win.
- Con: Less work/personal separation, which is probably dangerous. Process seperation (i.e. emacs) or even system seperation (having machines that are more exclusively used for work/home tasks,) will probably help more. It's hard to have your "go eveywhere laptop," not get bleedover, though. Unsovled problem.
- Pro: Things won't get lost in unused virtual desktops.
- Con: Things will get lost as more windows stack in any given virtual desktop.
- No-op: Having three distinct emacs processes makes things more complicated, both in terms of overall number of buffers, having to store context for which kill ring you're tapping, and the incidence of "I'm in the wrong emacs," syndrome.
This is a difficult to address problem, and one that isn't really related to this other change.

Next projects:

(We see how well "tomorrow," worked, I'm going to try and outline the next things I want to do on the projects I've written about here:)

My default writing layout has three windows: traditionally this is: chat, and a terminal or something tailing an notification log, plus a main "working window." Given small screens this isn't really particularly viable, but the solution needs more work.
Continuing the above, my notification/alert system (for lack of a better term,) needs a little work and some thought.

Emacs Thoughts + Some Lisp

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

In no particular order:

Org Mode Guilt and a Lisp Function

I have some guilt about having mostly forsaken org-mode,1 in particular because I was watching Sacha Chua's chat with John Wiegley, and I think both are such nifty hackers, and have done so many things that are pretty darn nifty.

I liked what I heard about johnw's org mode setup so much that I might give it a try again. But in the mean time, I wanted to make my "recompile my tasklist function" to be a bit more clean. The result is follows:

(defun tychoish-todo-compile ()
  (interactive)
  (if (get-buffer "*todo-compile*")
      (progn
        (switch-to-buffer-other-window (get-buffer "*todo-compile*"))
        (recompile))
    (progn
      (compile "make -j -k -C ~/wiki")
      (switch-to-buffer-other-window "*compilation*")
      (rename-buffer "*todo-compile*")))
  (revbufs))

Notables:

This is the first time I've used progn which is somewhat embarrassing, but it's a great thing to have in the toolkit now. Link: progn
I hadn't realized until now that there wasn't an else-if form in emacs lisp. Weird, but it makes sense.
Compilation Mode is pretty much my current favorite thing in emacs.
revbufs is this amazing thing that reverts buffers if there aren't local modifications, and also reports to you if a buffer has changed outside of emacs and there are local modifications. So basically "does everything you want without destroying anything and then tells you what you need to do manually." Smart. Simple. Perfect.

I might need to "macro-ize" this, as I have a lot of little compile processes for which I'd like to be able to trigger/maintain unique compile buffers. That's a project for another day.

Emacs Thoughts

I'm even thinking about putting together a post about how, although I'm a diehard emacs user, and I've spent a fair bit of time learning how to do really great things with emacs, there are a lot of vim-ish things in my workflow:

I read email with mutt and I've tried to get into GNUS, and I try it again every now and then, but I always find it so unbelievably gnarly. At least the transition. Same with Notmuch, which I like a lot more (in theory,) but I find the fact that Notmuch and mutt have this fundamental misunderstanding about what constitutes a "read" email, to be tragic.
I use a crazy ikiwiki + deft + makefile setup for task tracking. As (obliquely) referenced above.

I might give org another shot, and I've been looking at task warrior, but the sad truth is that what I have works incredibly well for in most cases, and switching is hard.
I tend jump to a shell window to do version control and other things, even though I'm familiar with magit and dired, my use of these tools is somewhat spotty.

It's not that I think org-mode sucks, or anything. Far from it, but how I was using org-mode was fundamentally not working for me. I'm thinking about giving it a try again, but we'll see. ↩

Assisted Editing

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I learned about artbollocks-mode.el from Sacha Chua's post, and it's pretty freaking amazing.

Basically, it does some processing of your writing--while you work--to highlight passive sentences and affected jargon.1 And that's all. There are some functions for generating statistics about your writing, but I find I don't use that functionality often. You can enable it all of the time, or just turn it on when you're doing editing.

After a few weeks, I've noticed a marked improvement in the quality of my output. I leave it on all the time, but I'm pretty good at resisting the urge to edit while I'm writing. Or at least I'm pretty good at picking up again after going back to tweak a wording. In general it's hard to keep more than a few things in an editing pass at any time.

It turns out that the instant feedback on passive sentences, even though it's not perfect, is great for improving the quality of my content the first time out. And it's even better for doing editing work. It's harder to ignore a passive sentence when the editor is highlighting you see a screen full of them for you.

It's of course important to be able to ignore its suggestions from time to time, and it's no harder to ignore than "flyspell-mode" (the on-the-fly spell checker in emacs.)

This is perhaps the clumsiest part of the default distribution, as jargon is terribly specific to the kind of writing you're doing, and it turns out that one of the "art critic"/post-modern words (i.e. "node") is a word that I end up using (acceptably, I think) in a technical context when describing a clustered system. And there's a difference between a technical lexicon and a jargon, and regular expressions aren't terribly sensitive to this, so the actual list of words that you need to call yourself out on, varies a bit from person to person. But once you customize it, it's great. ↩

Persistent Emacs Daemons

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I've been subject to a rather annoying emacs bug for months. Basically, when you start emacs with the --daemon switch, and the X11 session exits, and any emacs frames are open, then the emacs process dies. No warning. The whole point, to my mind, of the daemon mode is to allows emacs sessions to persist beyond the current X11 session.

This shouldn't happen. I think this is the relevant bug report, but I seem to remember that the issue has something to do with the way that GTK interacts with the X11 session and emacs's frames. It's something of a deadlock: the GTK has no real need to fix the bug (and/or it's a behavior that they rely on for other uses,) and it might not really be possible or feasible for emacs to work around this issue.1

I also think that it's probably fair to say that daemon mode represent a small minority all emacs usage.

Regardless, I've figured out the workaround:

.. don't use GTK.

Turns out, it's totally possible to build GNU emacs without GTK, by using the "Lucid" build. Which is to say, use the windowing system kit built for Lucid Emacs (i.e. XEmacs,) rather than GTK. I was able, using the code below, to get an emacs experience with the new build that seems identical2 to the one I used to get with GTK, except without the frustrating crashes every time that X11 spazzed when I decided to unplug a monitor or some such. A welcome improvement, indeed.

The following emacs-lisp covers all of the relevant configuration of the "look and feel" of my emacs session. Install the Inconsolata font if you haven't already, you'll be glad you did.

 (setq-default inhibit-startup-message 't
               initial-scratch-message 'nil
               save-place t
               scroll-bar-mode nil
               tool-bar-mode nil
               menu-bar-mode nil
               scroll-margin 0
               indent-tabs-mode nil
               flyspell-issue-message-flag 'nil
               size-indication-mode t
               scroll-conservatively 25
               scroll-preserve-screen-position 1
               cursor-in-non-selected-windows nil)

 (setq default-frame-alist '((font-backend . "xft")
                             (font . "Inconsolata-14")
                             (vertical-scroll-bars . 0)
                             (menu-bar-lines . 0)
                             (tool-bar-lines . 0)
                             (alpha 86 84)))

 (tool-bar-mode -1)
 (scroll-bar-mode -1)
 (menu-bar-mode -1)

Hope this helps you and/or anyone else that might have run into this problem.

I'd like to add the citation and more information here, but can't find it. ↩
To be fair, I mostly don't use the GUI elements in emacs, though having emacs instances outside of the terminal is nice for displaying images when using emacs-w3m, and for having a little bit of additional display flexibility for some more rich modes. ↩

Back to Basics Tasklist and Organization

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I'm a huge fan of emacs' org-mode on so many levels: as an IDE for knowledge workers, as a task management system, as a note taking system, and as the ideal basic mode for so many tasks. However, I've been bucking against org-for a number of tasks recently. The end result is that I'm becoming less org-dependent. This post is a reflection on how I've changed the way I work, and how my thinking has changed regarding org-mode.

Fair warning: this is a really geeky post that has a somewhat specialized context. If you're lost or bored. check back later in the week.

The Perils of Org

The problem I keep running into with org is that I really don't prefer to work in org-mode.1 Org is great and very flexible, but I don't like that it means that all text-based work is dependent on emacs. My brain is already wired for Markdown and reStructured Text from years of blogging and work projects respectively.

And then there's this organization problem. There are two ways you can organize content in org-mode. The first is to just dump every thing in one org-mode file and use the hierarchical outlining to impose organization to organize everything. The second is to have every project inside of it's own file and use outlining incidentally as the project needs it. Content aggregation happens in the agenda.

The problem with the "large files" approach is that you end up with a small handful of files with thousands of lines and imposing useful organization is difficult (too many levels and things get buried; not enough and inevitably your headings aren't descriptive enough and you get confused. Furthermore, I end up living in clone-indirect-buffer-other-window'd and org-narrow-to-subtree'd buffers, which is operationally the same as having multiple files it just takes longer to set up.

The problem with the other approach, having lots of different files, is that I have a hard time remembering what is in each file, or in logically splitting big projects into multiple files. The agenda does help with this, but the truth is that the kinds of org-headings for organization and tasks are not always the same kinds of headings that make sense for the project itself. I often need more tasks than organizational divides in a project. I tried this approach a couple of times, and ended up with useless mush in my files.

Typically, I can never make the "lots of file approach" really work, and the big files problem lead me to general avoidance of everything. Not good. The key to success here is good aggregation tools.

Hodgepodge

In response, I've made a couple of tweaks to how I'm doing... pretty much everything. That is:

I've moved most of my open projects into a locally ruining and compiling ikiwiki instance. Both laptops have this setup, and there's a central remote to keep both (all?) machines in sync.
I'm using ikiwiki-tasklist to basically replicate the functions of org-agenda. Basically this crawls the entire wiki looking for lines that begin with certain keywords and generates a "todo" page based on these notes. Really simple, incredibly useful and it solves much of my aggregation needs.
I still have some stuff in org-mode: notes for the nearly-finished novel, lots of random old (legacy) data, 12 various open tasks, and org-capture. I'm thinking of pointing various org-capture templates at files in the wiki but haven't gotten there yet.
I've basically taken the "lots of little files," approach to my writing and work. I've not over-leaded the system yet. Each major project gets a page in the root level of the wiki for overview and planing, and then sub-pages for all related project files (if/as needed)
It turns out that the markdown-mode for emacs has gotten a few improvements since the last time I downloaded the file, including better support for wiki-links that are mostly compatible with ikiwiki. Also from the same developer deft which implements a pretty nifty incremental search for text files in a given directory. So between these tools, ikiwiki, and the ikiwiki-tasklist there's support for the most important things.
In terms of publishing, beyond ikiwiki for tychoish.com and the personal organization instance, I have a couple of other smaller wikis (also ikiwiki powered,) and I've been playing with Sphinx as publishing for more structured documents and resources (i.e. documentation, novels, and collections,) particularly those that need multiple formats and presentations.

I'm sure there will be more shifts in the future, I'm sure. I think this is a good start. ?Thoughts, suggestions or discussion?

This has pretty much always been the case. I think of it as a personal quirk. ↩

Writing Software Beyond Emacs

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The ideal writing application is emacs, at least for me. In the absence of emacs (as on a tablet,) I've been thinking about what features I actually need in a writing application. While I've grown to admire the power of a full Lisp machine in my text editor, I accept that it's not, strictly speaking required. Here's a first stab at the list of requirements. Feel free to edit this page in the wiki or or discuss:

Simple, primarily full screen editing.
The ability edit very large files, 100kbs should present no issue.
Some sort of syntax highlight during the editing process, preferably support for LaTeX, Markdown, and org-mode.
Word count generation for the entire files and for current selections.
Auto-save as crash protection.
Undo/Redo last typing action.

Nice to have (but not crucial) features:

The ability to edit one file and reference another (or potentially edit) at the same time. Bonus points for being able to switch between to parts of a single file at once.
The ability to hide or collapse some sections of a file.
Optional spell checking.
Parenthetical and double-quote matching.
Soft and hard line/word wrapping.

Other than that I don't think there's anything that I really need to have to get writing done 90% of the time. How about you?

Org Mode and Mobile Writing

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

This post is adapted from a post I made to the org-mode email list a few weeks ago. I proposed an application to compliment MobileOrg for writing. Where MobileOrg collects the core bits of org-mode's task planning functionality in a form that makes sense for smart phone users, the parts of org-mode functionality that people use to for writing and organizing the content of larger form projects isn't particularly accessible.

I spend (or should spend) 70% or more of my time in front of a computer writing or editing something in org-mode. Most of my org files have tens of thousands of words of blog posts, notes, drafts of articles, and so forth. While I can store that data on an android device with only minor problems using a little script that I put together, and I can [capture content into my org-files using email and some nifty filters, and there are text editors that can let me edit these files: it could be better.

The proposal is simple. Can we build something like Epistle for org-mode? It might just render org-mode text to HTML, and frankly that would be enough for me. If the editing interface had an org-indent-mode equivalent, org-syntax highlighting, and even collapsing trees or org-narrow-to-subtree, that'd be kind of like heaven.

I'm not a mobile developer, so I can't promise to start making an app this instant if there's interest but if anyone's bored and thinks this might be a good idea (or knows of something that might work better for this.) I'd love to hear about it. If someone wants to start work on this, I'll do whatever I can to help make this a reality.

Onward and Upward!

Update Rhythm

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I wonder if, at some point, this constant state of overload and flux in my world will begin to seem normal and I'll just adjust to that normal. In the mean time, exciting things are happening and I'm not quite sure of the best way to write about them. Perhaps soon. For now, I'm trying to get better about updating more regularly and I have a bunch of links of stuff that have happened on the wiki in the past couple of weeks that I'd like to share. Here we go:

Discussion of Rhizomes

jfm and I had a good exchange about an old post that I wrote on "Ideology and Systems Administration." Basically the posts says, "systems administrators have a unique approach to solving technological problems," and discussed the implications of systems administrators background on technology development. I think our clarifications were useful.

There are a couple of comments on my recent series on a productivity. First, I wrote a post about task planning and creating task items, and madalu posted a comment. Second, a number of us had an ongoing conversation on mobile productivity in response to the "Mobile Productivity Challenges" post (link,) that touched on emacs (of course!) input, and context switching.

Site Tweaks

This is a pretty minor point, but I've been subtly tweaking the design a little in the site. There are now links to the tags page and the site-map in the upper right hand corner. I've also made links to as-of-yet-uncreated wiki pages red (according to wiki-convention.) I think (and hope) that red links are easier to spot when they're red. Feedback on the design would be most welcome. My goal is to make the site welcoming, easy to use, and to minimize the amount of "fussiness." It might be time for a full refresh, but ?feedback on the subject might be good.

Critical Futures and Wiki Fiction

As a build on top of my"Wiki Fiction" post, I've moved the pages that had been located on the critical-futures page to previous/critical-futures. Eventually the story will move to the Critical Futures domain, but that's a bit down the road. Right now I'd rather focus my time/energy on writing some stories, for now (on this wiki.) Infrastructure can come next.

I hope to work on a series of posts that explore collaborative fiction organizing over the next few weeks. If people are interested, that is.

External Links

I came across a blog from the comments on the make emacs better post that I wanted to offer as a link The Babbage Files is a great cyborg/emacs/free software blog.

This is probably not news to anyone, but from John Wiegley I learned about the following two emacs gems that merit mention:

paredit which makes handling all of the parentheses in Lisp coding much easier.
redshank, which basically adds a number of tempting systems and associated tools for

And in another direction, I've been playing with pylookup. This emacs add on makes it possible to access python documentation from within emacs, from a local copy. The interface is a little bit fiddly but it's pretty much heaven. More things should work like this.

Onward and Upward!