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.

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.