I'm writing a longer (as it seems) article on the lock-in effect of solutions like #Obsidian that are using open formats like #Markdown for storage. The file format is not the only thing that might lock you in.
I did already start with a list of arguments but also want to collect your ideas so that I don't forget a good argument.
Please, no emotions, just facts and objective arguments.
Reply here in this thread and I'll collect ideas from it. 🙇
I love this quote. Can't seem to find the original author to give attribution where due:
#vim is immortal in the nokia brick-phone sense. It's got very few dependencies, it'll survive a drop from a ten foot pole and it's cooperative with like thirty year old technology. It's fast and ergonomic and once armageddon comes you'll shell into the flaming wreckage of a datacenter and edit configs with it. Pure embodiment of the strength and certainty of steel.
#emacs, by contrast, is immortal in the shambling fleshbeast sense. Its thousand thralls write beautiful evocations to pull domains you never could have wanted or imagined from its flesh. It grows cancerously to envelop any domain, any need you may want from it. You can tear out its heart and swap it, still-beating, for a new one. It embodies the ultimate desire to survive. It can send email.
Please help collecting statistics to optimize Emacs GC defaults
Many of us know that Emacs defaults for garbage collection are rather ancient and often cause singificant slowdowns. However, it is hard to know which alternative defaults will be better.
I recently worked with SWWS (https://softwareworkers.it/) developing a minimalist CSS theme for their websites.
I think this is the first time I get to work a paid job using libre tools (GNU Guix and its packages) and be able to release the resulting work as a libre cultural work. It feels great 🙂
The value of #Emacs is not in the packages that are available (Gnus, org-mode, Magit, etc.). It is the fact that these packages live in the same application, manipulate text the same way, and can interact with each other to do exactly what you want them to do.
I would like to give a shout out to all the excellent people on emacs.ch. You are not only passionate about Emacs and Lisp, but also friendly, fun and always willing to help out.
What makes the #Guix System so cool is that almost all of it is just #Scheme code. This opens up a LOT of possibilities, like for example quickly writing a web interface for package-management.
You can see this idea in action in guix.el, which lets you manage all your Guix packages through a powerful #Emacs interface.
This is a two-for-one, these are two tips that I can't believe I never learned about it until now.
What is an easy way to see the value of a variable, or see the result returned from a function call?
You might know about the M-: (Alt-Colon) command, which lets you run any Lisp code, the result is printed into the *Messages* buffer. But... if you use the prefix command C-u (Control-U) and then press M-: (Alt-Colon), the result returned by the Lisp code is printed into the current buffer after the cursor.
Even better, however is using the (pp) ("Pretty-Printing") function. This also outputs to *Messages* by default, but it takes 2 arguments, the second of which can be a buffer. Try this code:
(pp (buffer-local-variables) (currrent-buffer))
The result returned by (buffer-local-variables), which is a list of all buffer-local variables and their values, is pretty-printed right after the cursor.
I’d like to welcome the M-x Research group on Emacs.ch: @Mx_Research :blobfoxemacspeek:
M-x Research is a community of Researchers and Research Software Engineers. They hold virtual meetings bi-weekly to discuss and share #Emacs experiences, tips, tricks and tools useful for researchers and research software engineers. Newcomers and veterans are all welcome.
If you want to be notified of scheduled and deadlined tasks in Org mode, there is no better way than with org-yaap. It has zero dependencies other than Emacs 27.1 and it works great on Android with termux.
I've been using it for two years without issue. The documentation and options are superbly setup to fit most uses of Org:
"""
By default, you will be notified for all scheduled headings (org-yaap-include-scheduled') and headings with a deadline (org-yaap-include-deadline') within your agenda files. If a heading only includes the date, you will be notified at 9am on the day of the heading (org-yaap-daily-alert'). If you don't mark a heading as done, you will be repeatedly notified every 30 minutes after the heading was due (org-yaap-overdue-alerts').
"""
Fabrice Niessen, Developer and evangelist for Org mode and creator of the org-html-themes, is offering hands-on Emacs training in a three day course in Rotterdam, Valencia and Paris this spring.
If you've got questions about Emacs, Guix, Guile, or other related topics and want a friendly place to ask them, come check out the new System Crafters Forum!
Wow, I can't believe I'm only just learning about the org-pretty-entities variable in #Emacs#orgmode. Setting it to t automatically transforms a lot of LaTeX fragments into unicode symbols in the buffer.
I've been using the $ delimiter around very small fragments (e.g. $\sigma^2$) and then using org-latex-preview to show it in the buffer. Much slower and clunkier obviously, I wish I had known about this a year or two ago! 🤦♂️
While the LSP protocol is useful for completion or access to symbol definitions, some of its features are less appealing. In #Emacs, you can instruct Eglot to ignore any feature you dislike.
E.g. (setq eglot-ignored-server-capabilities '(:inlayHintProvider)) to remove annoying hints mixed with the code in c-mode with clangd.
The best time to learn #emacs and #orgmode is ten years ago. The second best time is today. I use #orgmode as my calendar and organiser, and each year I discover something more awesome in it. I didn't realise how good the exporter is and how well formed the HTML is, so now I'll keep my notes on astronomy literature in a new org file. Future proofing through flat text files FTW.
I always told people that #texlatex is best written/edited in #emacs but didn't have a better argument for it than how well everything integrates. #AUCTeX, pdf-tools, #magit, etc. make it a seamless experience. I had a little bit of YASnippets going as well which made life wonderful.
That already brought things to the state of Gilles Castel's 2019 latex lecture notes in #vim article (which I believe is famous, at least in these circles). But yesterday I found a blog post by @karthink about how to get that and more in Emacs.
The very first demo (40 seconds) shows how to get an equation in latex that I am sure would take me over a minute to write by hand (and it would look ugly in comparison). Then I looked at the second video (45 seconds) and realized that somehow org table style editing can be used for things like matrices and arrays and what not.
Just like that, less than 2 minutes has me committed to getting all that functionality in my Emacs config. Of course, this being emacs, I can tailor it all precisely to my comfort and I'm willing to spend however long is needed to get it to that stage.