In today's video, we'll take a look at a few new completion frameworks for Emacs. For years I've been using Ivy and have been very happy with it but since I decided to rebuild my Emacs config from scratch I thought I'd try the new kids on the block, Selectrum and Vertico along with some support packages. I've liked Ivy from day one and still do. To be honest, from a day to day point of view, I didn't notice much difference between Ivy and the newcomers but I do like their philosophies - they're supposed to be simple and minimalist and focus on the Emacs completion API without extending it.

One of the comments on my last video talked about the new project management support Emacs includes in it's latest version - project.el. I remembered reading about it when it rolled around but then forgot and never checked it out. Up until recently when working in projects I used Projectile, a great package by Bozhidar Batsov, also known as Bug. I only used it when doing development work - that's when I find myself jumping around within a group of related files.

Grading sucks. Even for a well crafted assignment it takes time and rarely does it give you the same insights into your students as you can get from just observing them and working with them, at least when the environment supports you doing so. This leads lots of teachers to go to auto graders. I can't bring myself going along with that. While assignments are imperfect and tedious to grade, they do provide some insight to your students and that's an important part about being a teacher.

Quick Emacs hit today. After my last video, I received a comment noting that I was using ibuffer and that there was another package I might want to consider - bufler. I started with basic ibuffer and then started to customize it to group buffers but that was always somewhat finicky. More often than not I couldn't tune it the way I wanted. Most recently, I started using ibuffer-projectile which group projects for me but lost the other customizations.

I primarily program in four languages these days - Clojure C++ Python Java And most of the time, my Emacs configuration has handled each one differently. Cider for Clojure, Irony for C++, Elpy and Jedi for Python and Java I could never figure out. This is of course on top of tools that work across languages like company for completions, or flycheck for general language syntax checking. A while ago I heard about lsp-mode - Language Server Protocol mode.

As I said in my last post, I'm moving to a new Hugo theme. I decided on Anubis. It's simple and clean. Unfortunately, in this change over, many things broke. Specifically, all my embedded html. Using earlier version of Hugo I could directly embed HTML and it would render. Now I have to bracket the HTML with special org markup - #+begin_export html and #+end_export html. #+begin_export html <h1>html stuff to render goes in here </h1> #+end_export Minimally I had to find all my embedded videos and all my embedded Tweets.

I made this video write after I made the openwith one so even though I don't mention anything in this video, I wanted to share some updates on dired and openwith. I got a lot of suggestions on alternate ways to achieve the workflow I was seeking - being able to open a file using an external viewer. One person noted that under newer versions of Emacs, the W key is bound to the command (browse-url-of-dired-file) which does exactly what I wanted.

I spend most of my time in Emacs but still use the shell and browser for some things. One of the things I use my shell for is to launch libreoffice to view and edit docx files and spreadsheets, evince for pdf files and imagemagick for image files. Yes, I know I can view all of these in Emacs but there are a few limitations: Emacs chokes on large files I can't edit the docx file or the image So, I hop to the shell and launch the program I need on the files in question.

I spent part of today cleaning up my Emacs workflow. Specifically, how I capture emails and links into org-mode I already wrote about how I used org-capture (here and here). It's pretty clean and easy but there was one thing that always nagged at me. When I capture from mu4e within Emacs by hitting C-c m it's set up to automatically populate the capture template with a link to the email labelled with the email's subject.

Hunter, like most other schools has gone remote. I taught my first two online classes on Thursday. Currently, I'm using Zoom for synchronous stuff and a mailing list and slack for async. There are still some missing pieces. When we're all together, it's easy to look at a student's work and talk them through issues. It's also easy to get students to work together, at least to a point. With everyone locked up in their own homes, real time collaboration is harder.