Reposting my #introduction, since I'm seeing a lot of fresh faces recently. I'm an associate professor at UMass Amherst, where I teach about #journalism and #MediaIndustries. My research focuses on media distribution and, occasionally, dysfunction in the adtech industry.
I also co-edit a book series on the civic impacts of media distribution for The MIT Press. Feel free to hit me up if you're working on a relevant project!
🔴 Today on #SystemCrafters Live, we'll take a look Ement.el, a package by prolific Emacs coder Alphapapa. Ement.el is a great client for Matrix which provides rich chat experience from the comfort of Emacs.
If you're interested in joining the System Crafters Matrix rooms, definitely give this a look!
I have a small little (old) netbook with VIA VX800 GPU.
It had been running #Debian for 14 years. The openchrome driver for this machine broke in Debian 12 (segfault). I don’t blame the the Debian team, it seems that Linux is moving away from X11 towards Wayland, which is sensible for new machines.
But I like to keep this old machine running, it does its job well at 800x480px. NetBSD 9.2 works fine out-of-the-box. And it runs #emacs fast enough.
You know, after last night, I've thought about it. And I'm just not gonna even concern myself with Linux besides WSL anymore, probably until KDE is fully accessible. Why? Because Linux needs developers, and users with tons of time to put in, and then keep up with, and poke, issues on Git forges. And you know what? I have a full time job. I was not born with the Python docs or JavaScript handbook or Rustations' Guide to Living, in my hands. I wasn't made to code. Maybe I could have been if I'd kept to it when I was in high school. But not now. Too busy. Too tired. And you know, there are plenty of developers on Mastodon. If they need my help, they freaking know where to reach me. And yeah, I know there are people who are scared to death of asking the blind person something, in fear of offending or something. Tough. Ask and you'll get answers. You know, I went to the developers of System76's new desktop environment, and asked if I could help with any accessibility stuff, and they were like "Sure yeah when we get to the UI stuff." I signed up for their Mattermost instance. I took time out of my day to talk to them. And that's what I get. Not "Thanks for volunteering. Here's what our current accessibility stack works with, anything else we need?" Cause of course the UI is where you start with accessibility, not at the beginning when designing what the UI will do /s. Oh hey lookie, Easy-effects. Anyone use that? https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects/issues/1168 They need help that I can't provide. Oh hey here's another one, Doom Emacs! https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/issues/4256 Oh Manjaro Linux! https://github.com/manjaro/release-plan/issues/208. Point is, I tried all that. From a distro to Doom Emacs to apps, they need developers, not more blind users. But I've spent far more time on this post than I'd planned, and today is gonna be a great day of using Windows and iPhone, cause damn they work at least.
“The dev branch contains a lot of refactoring. I have been trying my best to make this change as smooth as possible for existing Org-remark users. I believe there is no break changes in the eye of users. My tests have been good so far. My old notes file work with no adjustments.”
In #emacs, sometimes you want to surround a region with some text or delimiters -- say, <div> and </div> in HTML, or == for Mediawiki headers, or similar.
There was a blog post a while back that had a nice function for that -- I improved it so that you can repeatedly call the function and it will correctly nest the text it inserts. That is, you can first surround an HTML region with a span, then immediately call surround-region again without re-marking the region, tell it to surround the region with a div, and it will correctly nest the HTML tags.
A very nice feature in Emacs 30 that got recently merged is etags-regen-mode by Dmitry Gutov:
+++<br></br>** New global minor mode 'etags-regen-mode'.<br></br>This minor mode generates the tags table automatically based on the<br></br>current project configuration, and later updates it as you edit the<br></br>files and save the changes.<br></br>
I found it useful when working with C code, will have to try other languages as well. By default it uses the etags executable, which depending on your system might be Universal or Exubrant Ctags.
Introducing Cleandesk.el, a small collection of functions to rapidly rename and process files in Dired.
Pictures, PDFs and many other kinds of files frequently end up on my Desktop. In the past, I used Hazel and/or Devonthink (both macOS only) to automatically rename and refile. Cleandesk offers an alternative (manual) approach for these tasks from within #Emacs. It draws on #Dired and #fd.
To be sure, vanilla Dired probably can do most of this. But perhaps neither as convenient nor as swift. 😉
I'm using #Emacs since 2008, I've been maintaining an Emacs bundle since 2010 (currently working on v4.1). Emacs is genuinely one of the programs that still gives me the goosebumps. After all these years, I still learn new stuff about it that blows my mind.
Today I learned and practiced using Pikchr. Pikchr is a low-level diagram markup language. This is my second attempt at it and I think it clicked this time.
The program is available is a single function library and a CLI that emits SVG.
It hides various secrets like passwords, username, email addresses, IP addresses and hash sums in Emacs buffer, so you can show these buffers online without risking privacy.
Inspired by @howard 's recent post sharing his #elfeed configuration, I'm sharing mine. Elfeed is a powerful RSS feed reader for #emacs with a number of hooks to customize it.