Emacs on vxlabs

Charl's super hacky but often working automatic Emacs font size setting

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 17:20:00 +0200

The blurb

Below is the emacs-lisp code I’ve evolved over the years to setup reasonable font sizes on all the machines where I use Emacs.

The main goal is to get the physical / apparent size of the font, in millimetres, to be more similar across all displays and display systems (Different screens across macOS, Windows with and without display scaling, WSL). This sounds like it should be easy, but setting font point size to the same number is in fact interpreted differently on various display systems.

Fixing hunspell 1.7.0 for Emacs 29 on Windows

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 14:23:00 +0200

Install and configure hunspell

Imagine this: For intricate reasons, you have decided to get your Emacs setup working on Windows as well, although you have a perfectly fine and working WSL2 configuration.

You’re surprised by how well this goes (winget install GNU.Emacs FTW!), until you decide to setup the hunspell spell checker…

It starts pretty well, when you are able to install hunspell with a simple winget install FSFhu.Hunspell, after which you download a set of English dictionaries from the LibreOffice extension, and then set your DICPATH environment variable to point to the directory containing all of the unpacked .aff and .dic files.

Open message:// links with mu4e or fastmail

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 12:15:00 +0200

This is a small variation of the 2019 post on linking to emails from Org mode using Thunderbird, where instead we show how to open the message:// links with mu4e if active, or the fastmail web-app if it is not.

You might remember that message://msg-id-here links represent one of the better ways to link to emails from your PKM systems.

Code

Below is the code. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

Modify md-roam for frontmatter-less operation

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:04:00 +0200

Background

My notes database consists primarily of Emacs Org mode files, interspersed with a small number of markdown files, some of them from previous note-taking systems (for example, I went through a Gollum stage early in 2014, according to my notes then), and some of them for easier mobile consumption and production.

I recently discovered nobiot’s md-roam Emacs package which makes it possible for these markdown files to show up (in sheep’s clothes, as it were) amongst all of my usual org-roam nodes.

TypeScript development with Emacs, tree-sitter and LSP in 2022

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 22:00:00 +0200

In this post, I show how to setup Emacs for TypeScript and React (tsx) development, with tree-sitter for syntax highlighting and indentation, and LSP with the TypeScript compiler (including a plugin for faster eslint), via eglot, for code intelligence.

Update on 2022-12-27: emacs 29 has tree-sitter built-in!

Tree-sitter was merged into Emacs core on November 23 of 2022.

The post below is for the situation BEFORE the merge.

If you’re running Emacs 29 or later (as I am at the end of 2022), you should be using the built-in tree-sitter. Let me know if you would like to see a new post dealing with the new merged situation.

Convert Org Mode files to docx with CMake and Pandoc for mobile accessibility

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 10:08:00 +0200

The wonderful Emacs Org mode is the basis for the largest part of my personal knowledge management system.

However, as I’ve mentioned before, mobile accessibility is its weakest point.

In this post, I’m going to explain my possibly unconventional new solution to the important requirement I mentioned in that note-taking post:

Ideally, I would have easy access to my complete org database and any related files.

As you can easily deduce from the title of this post, the solution involves converting all of my org database into docx files, with the main motivation that the Dropbox mobile app has excellent support both for the fast previewing and searching through the contents of docx files, while it has none of that sort of support for .org or .md files.

Configure org-roam v2 to update database only when idle

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 22:31:00 +0200

This post is reproduced here with permission from The OrgMode ExoCortex.

org-roam v2, which was recently released, removed the update database on idle functionality (which I coincidentally contributed) as part of its simplification.

I agree with this removal, as I think it makes the most sense to keep the org-roam core as simple as possible.

That being said, being able to have the org-roam database update only when Emacs is idle can be helpful for some folks, like me, who C-x C-s quite often and notice a few hundred millisecond blocking delay on files of a thousand or more lines.

Always activate CopyArrivalDate for mbsync

Sun, 21 Mar 2021 12:44:00 +0200

Recently the great support folks at FastMail helped me to debug a rather irritating issue where emails that had languished in my inbox for too long, and were then processed by me to end up in the Archive folder, would get the date of archival assigned as the main email date, instead of the date of arrival.

For example, an email with a date in November of 2020 would get a new date of say February 21, 2021, if that’s the date that I finally got around to it and moved it to the Archive folder.

GnuPG pinentry via the Emacs minibuffer

Sun, 21 Mar 2021 10:12:00 +0200

On the various and different platforms where I use Emacs and GnuPG encryption, I’ve traditionally always had a bit of a struggle setting up a suitable mechanism for private key passphrase entry, or pinentry.

Recently, I landed upon this extremely easy-to-setup and reliable solution where Emacs and GnuPG can be configured so that Emacs requests the passphrase via its standard minibuffer password entry mechanism, and then passes this through to GnuPG.

Fix non-display of ivy-rich switch buffer directories in Emacs

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 12:36:00 +0200

Recently, as I replaced more of my Emacs-helm configuration with counsel and ivy, I noticed that ivy-switch-buffer, when augmented by ivy-rich, was not showing the directories of the buffers it was listing.

After some Lisp spelunking, I discovered that it was because ivy-rich relies on the presence of either the projectile package, something I do not wish to have in my Emacs configuration, or on project.el, which I also do not use.

In this post, I show how you can get full buffer filenames and project names with the lighter-than-projectile and more-robust-than-project.el find-file-in-project, or how you can bypass the project name functionality completely and just get buffer filenames with no extra packages.

An Emacs Lisp function to convert attachment: links to file: links for ox-hugo exports

Sat, 25 Jul 2020 22:38:00 +0200

You might have noticed the side-note in yesterday’s blog post where I mentioned that exporting Orgmode notes with org-download attachment-style screenshots to blog posts using ox-hugo required one to convert [[attachment:...]]-style links to [[file:...][file:...]]-style links.

Because the barrier from private note to possibly useful blog post should be as low as possible, I made the below function that will do the required conversion for the link under your cursor.

(defun cpb/convert-attachment-to-file ()
  "Convert [[attachment:..]] to [[file:..][file:..]]"
  (interactive)
  (let ((elem (org-element-context)))
    (if (eq (car elem) 'link)
        (let ((type (org-element-property :type elem)))
          ;; only translate attachment type links
          (when (string= type "attachment")
            ;; translate attachment path to relative filename using org-attach API
            ;; 2020-11-15: org-attach-export-link was removed, so had to rewrite
            (let* ((link-end (org-element-property :end elem))
                   (link-begin (org-element-property :begin elem))
                   ;; :path is everything after attachment:
                   (file (org-element-property :path elem))
                   ;; expand that to the full filename
                   (fullpath (org-attach-expand file))
                   ;; then make it relative to the directory of this org file
                   (current-dir (file-name-directory (or default-directory
                                                         buffer-file-name)))
                   (relpath (file-relative-name fullpath current-dir)))
              ;; delete the existing link
              (delete-region link-begin link-end)
              ;; replace with file: link and file: description
              (insert (format "[[file:%s][file:%s]]" relpath relpath))))))))

This Stack Overflow answer gave me a great basis using the org-element API.

Set severity override of Visual Studio Code Pylance type mismatches for better visual distinction

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 22:57:00 +0200

Pylance is Microsoft’s new and improved Python language server.

I have been using this in my Visual Studio Code remote editing sessions (editing Python codes on the machine learning Linux machine next to me, from my laptop), and I’m enjoying its new type-checking capabilities.

Today I discovered a little configuration change that improved my Pylance experience, so I thought I’d share in case it helps anyone else.

Aside: ox-hugo exports with org-download screenshots

It was also an excuse to test how ox-hugo exports would work for a note straight from my daily journal if screenshots were involved.

Open WSL2 files in Windows apps using Emacs TRAMP

Thu, 21 May 2020 22:46:00 +0200

From the department of how-obscure-can-you-get-really, I present you with this neat trick to open WSL2 files in their native Windows handlers via Emacs TRAMP connection from WSL1 to WSL2.

Motivation

My use case is this:

On Windows, I use Emacs primarily from WSL1 to manage everything on Windows, on WSL1 and on the WSL2 distros I use for development.
I’m often connected to WSL2 via TRAMP, for managing files with dired, manipulating the results of simulations, and using the amazing magit.
When I open e.g. a simulation report in HTML or some other format, I would ideally like it to open with my Windows browser.

Method

The code below is a slightly modified version of crux-open-with from the crux package, with the one major change that it uses the relevant TRAMP mechanisms to spawn a remote process to open the file.

Emacs, WSL, helm-locate and Everything

Sat, 09 May 2020 23:38:00 +0200

On Windows, running Emacs on WSL (the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or rather Linux in Windows), is faster and in my experience an altogether a better experience than running native Windows Emacs.

However, you will need to do some tweaking to use it to its maximum potential, some of which I have written about before.

In this post, I show a small but useful trick to use the brilliant and lightning fast Everything search tool to find directories and files anywhere on your Windows system whilst using helm-locate from your WSL Emacs.

Voice capture org-mode notes and more using Siri Shortcuts on iOS

Fri, 01 May 2020 23:46:00 +0200

This post originally appeared at Org Mode Exocortex, my Org mode-focused blog, on April 30, 2020.

:ID: b3c6cee0-567e-4324-9685-f6fd9959d402

Introduction

Inspired by Stéfan’s post explaining how to voice capture TODOs using Google Assistant on Android, I decided to find out how one would go about hooking up Siri dictation on iOS to Org mode.

It turns out that Siri Shortcuts is a pretty amazing tool that can be used for all kinds of automation on your iPhone or iPad.

xdg-open-wsl: A WSL-specific xdg-open replacement to open files and links using Windows apps.

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 14:01:00 +0200

TL;DR: Install my WSL-specific xdg-open replacement by following the instructions on the xdg-open-wsl github page.

Convert a Python script to a Python package with Poetry.

In my previous vxlabs post, I explained how to use Emacs lisp advising to fix buggy behaviour when opening Windows files from Emacs running on WSL.

In that post I mentioned my home-grown xdg-open replacement.

As I was writing that bit, I wondered how long it would take for the first astute reader to wonder about the mentioned script.

Patch Emacs org-open-file using advice.

Sat, 07 Mar 2020 13:48:00 +0200

Background.

On Windows, I run Emacs on WSL 1 whilst displaying to Windows via the X410 X-Server.

This is currently the best compromise if one wants to interoperate with the NTFS side, at least until the WSL 2 developers manage to fix up its current cross-OS IO performance issues.

As part of this setup, I have written a small xdg-open replacement in Python which does path translation. This enables me to open any links from Emacs, running on WSL 1, using the relevant Windows file handler, no matter whether the file finds itself on the Windows or the WSL side of the world.

Improve the plaintext email experience through format=flowed with long lines.

Sun, 25 Aug 2019 19:20:00 +0200

TL;DR.

In this post, I propose bending the format=flowed RFC by allowing lines up to the SMTP limit of 998 characters, in order to improve the plaintext reading experience for users of non-compliant email clients and services, such as GMail, FastMail, Outlook and others.

Background.

The format=flowed plaintext email convention described in RFC3676 is an elegant method whereby plaintext emails can be prepared in such a way so that they are wrapped correctly on older email clients, but they can also be reflowed by modern clients supporting that part of the standard.

Sending queued mails in the background with mu4e.

Wed, 03 Jul 2019 22:02:00 +0200

These days I’m running mu4e, the mail programme that runs on the Emacs operating system (the one with the terrible editor), on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

(Previously, see my other mu4e posts, I was using it on Linux or macOS.)

I have also switched from offlineimap to isync’s mbsync for no other reason than it was time to try something new.

In addition, and this is the topic of this post, I’ve switched from nullmailer to Emacs’s built-in smtp and smtp queue functionality for email delivery, because I now prefer the idea of having a second chance to evaluate whether an email should really go out or not.

Link directly to emails from Emacs Orgmode using Thunderbird and Thunderlink

Sat, 20 Apr 2019 21:40:00 +0200

On macOS, links of the form message://message-id are by default supported by the system.

Using a tool such as org-mac-link, it is straight-forward to link directly to relevant emails from Orgmode tasks and notes.

It does not matter if you have moved the mail around. When you open the link from Orgmode, the relevant email is instantly shown in Mac mail.

Fortunately, similar functionality can be configured on Windows and Linux using the Thunderbird mail client, an add-on called ThunderLink, and a touch of Emacs Lisp.

Configuring Emacs, lsp-mode and Microsoft's Visual Studio Code Python language server.

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 14:37:00 +0000

In a previous post I showed how to get Palantir’s Python Language Server working together with Emacs and lsp-mode.

In this post, we look at the brand new elephant in the room, Microsoft’s arguably far more powerful own Python Language Server, and how to integrate it with Emacs.

Motivation

Since that previous post on Palantir’s language server, I’ve been using Emacs far more intensively for Python coding in tmux on remote machines with GPUs for deep learning.

Importing all of your orgmode notes into Apple Notes for mobile access.

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 11:22:00 +0000

Over the years, I’ve built up quite a collection of notes as Org mode text files. So far, it has proven to be the most expressive and the most robust note-taking modality out of a long list of candidates that I’ve tried.

Note-taking using Org mode has one big drawback however: Mobile accessibility.

In other words, consulting one’s org mode notes database from a mobile device is painful. This should not be the case; notes should be always and instantly available, even on mobile.

Configuring Emacs, lsp-mode and the python language server.

Fri, 08 Jun 2018 12:29:00 +0000

The language server protocol was proposed by Microsoft as a way for different editors and development environments to share language analysis backends

This post describes how to configure Emacs, lsp-mode and the palantir python-language-server for improved code intelligence when working on Python projects. (I’m planning a companion post for Emacs, C++ and the cquery language server.)

Goal

Before starting, it is motivating to see what we are working towards.

With a correctly configured setup, Emacs will sport, amongst others, improved completion with interactive documentation, imenu navigation, documentation on hover, and really snazzy find definitions (=M-.=) and find references.

Interactive programming with Fennel Lua Lisp, Emacs and Lisp Game Jam winner EXO_encounter 667

Fri, 18 May 2018 08:48:00 +0000

Phil Hagelberg recently won the Lisp Game Jam 2018 with his entry EXO_encounter 667.

What I found most interesting however, was his interactive programming setup.

He programmed his game in (and contributed new features to) a Lisp to Lua compiler called Fennel, and used the game programming library Löve.

With Emacs and some Lua thread magic, he was able to perform runtime changes and introspection to his live running game project. (See below for a demo!)

Asynchronous rsync with Emacs, dired and tramp.

Thu, 29 Mar 2018 22:10:06 +0000

tmtxt-dired-async by Trần Xuân Trường is an unfortunately lesser known Emacs package which extends dired, the Emacs file manager, to be able to run rsync and other commands (zip, unzip, downloading) asynchronously.

This means you can copy gigabytes of directories around whilst still happily continuing with all of your other tasks in the Emacs operating system.

It has a feature where you can add any number of files from different locations into a wait list with C-c C-a, and then asynchronously rsync the whole wait list into a final destination directory with C-c C-v. This alone is worth the price of admission.

Run code on remote ipython kernels with Emacs and orgmode.

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 08:05:00 +0000

As is briefly documented on the ob-ipython github, one can run code on remote ipython kernels.

In this post, I give a little more detail, and show that this also works wonderfully for remote generation but local embedding of graphics in Emacs Org mode.

As I hinted previously, the jupyter notebook is a great interface for computational coding, but Emacs and Org mode offer far more flexible editing and are more robust as a documentation format.

Getting ob-ipython to show documentation during company completion.

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 06:18:00 +0000

ob-ipython is an Emacs package that enables org-babel to talk to a running ipython kernel. The upshot of this is that you can use org-mode instead of the jupyter notebook for interspersing executable code, results and documentation.

The screenshot from the ob-ipython github shows it in action:

Personally, I would like to use this for controlling ipython kernels on remote GPU- and deep learning-capable Linux machines, all via Emacs on my laptop. The juyter notebook is really fantastic, but it’s not Emacs.

Querying RESTful webservices into Emacs orgmode tables

Sat, 03 Jun 2017 10:20:00 +0000

In this post, I’ll show you how you can use Emacs and orgmode to query live data from any RESTful webservice, and then use that data in orgmode tables, a really great way to get live table-based calculation and display functionality in your rich orgmode-based documentation.

As an example, we will query live ticker data from the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange, and then use the current trading values of two different cryptocurrencies to calculate a fictitious investor’s position.

Fixing crux-open-with on Ubuntu

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 20:46:00 +0000

The crux package for Emacs contains, amongst a list of useful functions (crux does stand for A Collection of Ridiculously Useful eXtensions for Emacs after all), the function crux-open-with. This interactive function opens the file you currently have open, or the file under your cursor in dired, using the system application for that file.

On Ubuntu 16.04, this function unfortunately does not work. It looks like the application tries to start (icon visible in the dash) and then dies.

Recursive text search in project without projectile

Sat, 11 Mar 2017 10:39:00 +0000

If you’re not using projectile, but you would like to be able to perform interactive, search-as-you-type, recursive searches through the current project, this is pretty easy to do if you have counsel and find-file-in-project installed.

Add the following Emacs Lisp to your init:

(defun cpb/counsel-ag-in-project ()
  "Use `ffip' and `counsel-ag' for quick project-wide text searching."
  (interactive)
  (let ((project-root (ffip-project-root)))
    ;; if ffip could not find project-root, it will already have
    ;; shown an error message. We only have to check for non-nil.
    (if project-root
        (counsel-ag nil project-root nil
                    (format "Search in PRJ %s" project-root)))))
(global-set-key (kbd “C-c s”) ‘cpb/counsel-ag-in-project)

From org file with local bibtex to LaTeX and PDF

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 20:54:00 +0000

Screenshot of orgmode source, PDF preview on the right, interactive citation selection in the minibuffer. Click for full resolution.

I have (co-)written a few LaTeX documents in my time.

However, as I have been writing my life and lab notes and many of my technical blog posts in Emacs orgmode for the past few years, I wanted to see how one would go about using BiBTeX references in orgmode files (using John Kitchin’s org-ref package) such that they would render correctly in orgmode’s export LaTeX and PDF.

mu4e 0.9.18: E-Mailing with Emacs now even better.

Tue, 07 Feb 2017 20:48:00 +0000

In this post I talk about three great new features in the latest release of mu4e, an email programme that runs in Emacs. I also show my mu4e configuration as an example to others who would like a similar setup.

mu4e 0.9.18 screenshot showing selected context (bottom right of main) and visual-line-mode (long lines) which is activated by the format=flowed support.

After recently discovering that plaintext format=flowed in Thunderbird works only partially, it was time to check back in on mu4e after my previous happy stint using it.

Date-sorted interactive recursive search with ivy, counsel and ag

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 19:57:00 +0000

A core part of my note-taking strategy is a growing collection of Emacs Org mode files containing my monthly lab journals, project summaries and various technical documents.

Usually I rely on Projectile’s Helm integration to perform recursive searches with The Silver Searcher (ag) using helm-projectile-ag (trigged by the completely muscle-memorised C-c p s s) through all of the org files in my notes hierarchy. Recursive regular expression search results are shown interactively as you type. Wonderful!

Step-by-step guide to C++ navigation and completion with Emacs and the Clang-based rtags

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 20:48:00 +0000

If you want C++ completion and navigation (jump to definition, jump to declaration, and so forth), there are several good options for Emacs. For a QtQuick / C++ project I’m working on, I needed the best Emacs has to offer.

This turned out to be the Clang-based rtags system.

Rtags is not the easiest of the options to get going, hence this short tutorial. I initially configured irony-mode, which is also Clang-based and was significantly easier to get going, but it soon started hanging on the completion of for example QStringList methods in my project. Because it also doesn’t support navigation, I decided to try rtags. So far, rtags has been working quite well on a Qt 5.x project of slightly under 200K lines of C++.

Up and running with ECL and Emacs SLIME in four easy steps

Sat, 05 Mar 2016 22:14:00 +0000

ECL is of course Embeddable Common Lisp, a small but quite complete Common Lisp implementation that can be easily embedded in your C applications to act as dynamic extension language, but it is also a fine stand-alone implementation. It includes an interpreter and a compiler, and can even produce compact binaries. Read this blog post by Chris Kohlhepp for a brief and practical overview.

SLIME is the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs, a great Emacs environment within which one can write code for a number of Common Lisp implementations.

Sending emails with math and source code

Wed, 28 Jan 2015 07:33:00 +0000

Org mode is great for authoring rich documents with syntax highlighted source code, LaTeX math and images. It even supports evaluating live snippets of code embedded in the text. It does all of this whilst remaining a plain text format.

Imagine how useful it would be to author programming-related or technical emails using this functionality?

Imagine no more! org-mime, part of the org mode contrib, does this for a number of emacs-based mail clients. However, our preference is for mu4e, which is not part of that list.

Inline GraphViz DOT evaluation for graphs using Emacs, org-mode and org-babel

Thu, 04 Dec 2014 09:25:00 +0000

With Emacs, org mode and org-babel, it’s possible to evaluate source code samples embedded in your org files and have the output of said evaluation appear inline. This makes for a beautiful literate programming environment. It also enables one to include graphs in one’s documents (org mode, PDF, HTML presentations or blog posts) by using for example GraphViz.

This blog post (obviously authored using Emacs and Org mode) contains short instructions for doing so.

Getting EmacsKeys working with QtCreator 3.1.2

Wed, 25 Jun 2014 20:01:00 +0000

Today, Qt 5.3.1 was released along with Qt Creator 3.1.2. Unfortunately, nsf’s EmacsKeys plugin, merged into the Qt trunk a few months ago, was not a part of this release (it should be included in Qt Creator 3.2).

Because the Emacs keybindings are hardwired into my fingers, and I’m using QtCreator for a project at the moment, I spent some time figuring out how to get the plugin built for Qt Creator 3.1.2. This post explains how you too can build it, but, if you’re on Ubuntu 14.04 with Qt 5.3.1 x64, you can just download my binaries and the keymap file (see under requirements).

Configuring Emacs mu4e with nullmailer, offlineimap and multiple identities

Fri, 06 Jun 2014 07:00:00 +0000

mu4e is a mail user agent for your Emacs. After leaving GMail a few months ago, this is the first MUA that I am loving even more. The major reasons for this are the faster than GMail real-time search (e.g. press s, then from:buddy flag:attach design review and watch it search my 68 thousand email archive in a fraction of a second), its Emacs foundation (the more I use it, the better I get at customizing it) and the observation that having my email in an uncluttered, by default text-only interface, somehow helps me to maintain the feeling of control.

Modify Emacs Deft for recursive directory search

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 19:53:00 +0000

Update 2014-11-18 I’ve forked the original Deft, added this recursive directory listing feature as well as support for multiple different file extensions, and pushed it all to github as deft-turbo!

Deft is a neat Emacs mode for the Notational Velocity-inspired searching, browsing and editing of a directory of text files. In short, this means that simply start typing, and Deft finds the note that you were looking for. It supports straight text searching and regular expression searching, almost like my own baby nvpy.

Publish to WordPress with Emacs 24 and org2blog

Sun, 25 May 2014 10:33:00 +0000

I’ve recently discovered the absolute joy that is writing and publishing wordpress blog posts using Emacs 24 and org2blog. Because it took me a while to get everything (including source code syntax highlighting by the WordPress SyntaxHighlighter plugin) going, I wanted to document the whole procedure step-by-step, using org2blog of course!

I’m using Emacs 24.3 (from the PPA) with Prelude on Ubuntu 12.04.4.

Installing required packages

org-mode is already installed in Emacs 24 with Prelude. However, we need to install org2blog and some extra dependencies.

Syntax-highlighting markdown fenced code blocks in Emacs

Tue, 08 Apr 2014 07:12:37 +0000

The syntax-highlighted fenced code blocks in GitHub flavored markdown, or GFM, are a beautiful and useful invention. One starts a code block with three or more backticks or tildes, followed by the name of the language, and then proceeds to show one’s code, which, at least on GitHub, is then syntax highlighted.

In other words, something like this in your markdown:

```python
def computer_says(no):
    print("computer says %s" % (no,))
```

Would become this in the preview: