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.

I maintain a couple of small simple web sites. One provides information about my undergraduate honors CS program and another that isn't live yet is a FAQ for my CS teacher certification program. Traditionally I would use ssh to connect to the host machine, fire up Emacs and edit the html files to update the sites. I always forget that with Emacs we can do better. One way is with Tramp Mode.

I've been meaning to do my version of the Emacs VI rant for a while. A few years ago I staged out a video showing what it would be like for a beginner to start with Emacs, Vim, Atom, and Sublime Text but decided it would be long, unwieldy and clunky to present - particularly when it came to customization. I tabled it for a while but recently have been seeing a bunch of threads, videos and posts talking about Emacs and Vim.

I thought it was time to give eshell in Emacs another try. It has some pretty cool features but for whatever reason, I've never really been able to adopt Emacs as my go to shell. Eshell out of the box is pretty cool but could use some enhancements. When launching at login it doesn't know about the path you set in your .bashrc or .zshrc in my case files. It just seemed to have problems with paths in general but that was fixed with the exce-path-from-shell package.

The other day I stumbled upon Emacs's Live Coding plugin. It takes interactive coding up to the next level. Normally, when you code Python, if you're working in a REPL, every time you hit <Enter> the line you just typed is evaluated. When you're working ina source file, you're just editing until you send the file into a Python interpreter. With this module, your file is continually evaluated as you type and it shows you the results in a side window.

I've been using the gmail web interface for a long time. My first email or at least the oldest one still in the system dates back to Oct 18, 2004 7:29am. It was a letter to a buddy about an indoor turkey fryer and if he needed a lift to Fairway the following morning to shop. Before that, I used my Panix shell account - probably with PINE. Work email was using my own servers at Stuy along with either PINE or Emacs using VM mode which has long been deprecated.

I've been playing with ClojureScipt for my web projects recently and really like it. Much more fun than any of the JavaScript frameworks I've used. Still, getting started was somewhat difficult due to the number of options in tooling and uneven documentation and learning resources. Here's a video that shows how I use Emacs for ClojureScript development but the focus of the video is on how to get started with ClojureScript and Emacs takes a back seat other than an example of my workflow.

Ever since I started looking at Magit as a "git dashboard" instead of as a "git interface" it's been yet another Emacs killer app to me. I just recently started playing with forge which allows Magit to interface and interact with git "forges" like GitHub. This allows you to work on issues and pull requests without ever leaving Emacs. Here's a video on how easy it is. The video doesn't show this but the first time you fire forge up it will prompt you for credentials.

By living in Emacs I get a consistent interface across all sorts of tasks - programming, lesson planning, making presentations, preparing documents, and yes, even email. I've been using mu4e as my Emacs email client for a while now. Currently, I'm using Emacs for my work email and Gmail for personal. I've been thinking of going whole hog to mu4e and possibly migrating from Gmail to a new email provider for the personal stuff but there are still a few pain points with Emacs email: