The Emacs 29 release branch was just cut—and it’s chock full of new features! In this post, I want to talk about the new package-vc-install function, which allows one to install packages directly from their respective upstream source; for example, GitHub. It can be seen as a built-in alternative to things like quelpa or straight.el.

Read more – 2022-11-30

Here’s a fun one: when previewing LaTeX fragments via AUCTeX’s preview.el library (whether it be in a .tex buffer, or—via org-auctex—in Org) things get really messed up when one or more monitors are set up in portrait mode.

Read more – 2022-11-05

Emacs is the “extensible text editor”, and it wouldn’t be fun if one didn’t at least try to take advantage of that, right? Having just written a README for my Emacs configuration, I thought it might be nice to somewhat expand on certain ideas and give a little context to some snippets that have accumulated over time.

While there is a post about my version of the query-replace function, most other tidbits have only seen the light of day in places like the “Weekly Tips, Tricks, &c.” thread on Reddit. In the spirit of hosting my content somewhere that I actually control,¹ I chose to showcase these again here, hoping that other people may also find some of this stuff useful.

Read more – 2022-10-22

If you’ve been doing category theory for any amount of time, you’ll probably have stumbled upon enriched category theory as a way of expressing categorical ideas internal to some context other than Set. Reading into it, you might have come across these foreign sounding concepts like weighted (co)limits and wondered what that was all about—and then got lost for a few days, trying to decipher what Kelly is talking about and why symbols resembling tensor products are suddenly being thrown around. At least that’s what happened to me.

After scouring the internet for good resources, I found two really enlightening blog posts: one by Todd Trimble and the other by John Baez—and they’re too good not to share. Plus, people always say that you don’t understand a concept unless you can explain it to someone else, so here’s my shot at it!

Read more – 2022-10-15

One of my favourite—and most used—modules is XMonad.Actions.TopicSpace. However, it seems relatively unknown among the general XMonad community. I fear this is due to the fact that the module is quite old and formerly had a rather high barrier to entry. Despite having been given shiny new documentation, lots of people probably did not bother revisiting it and thus still don’t really understand why they might be interested in using topics instead of workspaces. Time to change that!

Read more – 2022-09-11

As I’ve said before, basically my entire digital life happens in either Emacs or XMonad. Thus, a lot of time spent on my setup either goes towards working on the two configurations separately, or—as we’ll do today—bringing them ever closed together.

Specifically, I want to showcase a new¹ XMonad module: XMonad.Prompt.OrgMode. Building on top of XMonad’s prompt—which works much like dmenu—it is designed to rapidly capture thoughts and ideas whenever inspiration strikes and, importantly, to do so without disrupting one’s current workflow. The module recently got support for Org priorities, so I figured this was as good an excuse as any to talk about it.

Read more – 2022-08-27

As its name suggests, Emacs’s query-replace function (bound to M-% by default) can be used to replace occurences of one string with another. In comparison to other tools that are used for similar purposes—(a subset of) keyboard macros and multiple-cursors—the whole process after entering the from and to strings is interactive all the way through: it’s very fast to step through the individual matches and decide on the spot whether one would like to replace them or not. Needless to say, I like query-replace a lot! In true Emacs fashion, the function also takes way too many arguments: among other things, it can operate on the current region, backwards, or only on things surrounded by words boundaries.

However, there is one crucial feature missing from its default functionality: the ability to create multiple from → to pairs. But this is Emacs, after all, which means that I can just write that query-replace-many function I’ve always wanted!

Read more – 2022-08-06

In the post about my research workflow, I briefly mentioned having to call Emacs—or other external programs—from within XMonad. I figured that this was perhaps something that could be of use to more people than just me. After a little bit of deliberation and coming up with a generic enough API, I decided to turn it into an XMonad module!

Yesterday these changes were merged into the xmonad-contrib repository and they are now available for everyone to try out; provided one has the git version of XMonad installed.¹

I’d like to use this opportunity to both showcase the module—how and why one would use it—and talk a little bit about its only redeeming implementation detail.

Read more – 2022-05-25

After reading Gilles Castel’s excellent blog post about his research workflow, I decided that it was as good a time as any to write about mine—deeming it novel enough to hopefully contribute something to the discussion.

Just like Castel, I’m a new PhD student in mathematics, which means no lab work and—in my case—no code. Just you and your inability to understand basic concepts. As such, I often scribble things down on paper or a blackboard first and, when sufficiently convinced that the information is worth keeping around, type it up. Typesetting something is a surprisingly effective way to catch errors in handwritten manuscripts!

As basically my entire digital life happens in either Emacs or XMonad, my setup is very heavily skewed in that direction; I will make use of these tools almost every step of the way.

Read more – 2022-05-01