A Bookmarklet for Copying a Link as an Org-mode Link

 Posted on 2022-08-08  (Last modified on 2023-03-25)  |  2 minutes  |  408 words

In this blog post, I'd like to share a bookmarklet for copying a web page's URL as an org-mode link on Firefox, Chrome, or whatever web browsers support bookmarklets. It's handy when the URL isn't SEO-friendly, which means you can't tell what its content is about at first glance of the URL. So a little description text on the link would help. Here is the bookmarklet: javascript:window.prompt("Copy to clipboard: Ctrl+C, Esc", "[[" + document. [Read More]
Emacs  Org-mode  Bookmarklet 

Emacs Debugging Basics

 Posted on 2022-07-17  (Last modified on 2022-10-15)  |  5 minutes  |  1026 words  • Other languages: 简体中文

If you are new to Emacs, you may run into some errors, especially after you absorb elisp snippets from the Internet or elsewhere. Don't panic. It happens. To ease your pain, in this post I will introduce some Emacs built-in features to help you solve the problems yourself. Start Emacs Without Any Configurations When you have some problems/errors with built-in features, the first thing you should do is to run emacs -Q to start another Emacs instance without any configurations from your emacs. [Read More]
Emacs  Debugging 

Duplicate the current line in Emacs

 Posted on 2022-05-23  (Last modified on 2022-07-12)  |  1 minutes  |  196 words

Duplicate the current in Emacs Duplicating the current line is frequent editing for me when I am coding. Initially, I copied a snippet as a command in Emacs from the Internet: (defun w/duplicate-line() "Duplicate the current line." (interactive) (move-beginning-of-line 1) (kill-line) (yank) (open-line 1) (next-line 1) (yank)) Most of the time, I was happy with it, but it has mainly two drawbacks: It cannot keep the column position when moving to the next line It messes up with the yank ring as it yanks the text under the hood So today, I took some time to fix these two problems, and I also want it to be capable of commenting the current line out if I prefix the command. [Read More]
Emacs 

Adjust the laptop's screen brightness in Emacs

 Posted on 2022-05-21  (Last modified on 2022-10-15)  |  3 minutes  |  453 words

Adjust the screen brightness in Emacs If you're using i3wm on Linux, how do you adjust the laptop's screen brightness? Most of the time, I use the laptop with an external monitor. But when I am out, I have no monitors. And it seems no easy way to adjust the brightness in i3wm. Being too bright or dim is terrible for the eyes. Recently, I found a command-line tool called brightnessctl, which can adjust the brightness in a terminal. [Read More]
Emacs  Linux  tiling-wm 

How to Kill a "Visible" Buffer Quickly in Emacs

 Posted on 2022-04-09  (Last modified on 2022-08-07)  |  2 minutes  |  355 words

Selecting Emacs windows using ace-window Recently I've been building a simple Emacs config for myself, along the way I re-discovered some fantastic packages, for example, I found that ace-window is a simple yet powerful package to enhance the default other-window command to select other windows quickly when it has more than two windows in a frame. I replaced the key binding of other-window to ace-window by simply doing (global-set-key (kbd "C-x o") #'ace-window), then when there are >2 windows, it will show a white-in-red number at the top-left corner for every window, hit the number (1, 2, 3, …) and then Emacs will select the corresponding window (as demonstrated in the above screenshot). [Read More]
Emacs 

How to append items to the CSV file without header row?

 Posted on 2022-04-09  |  2 minutes  |  313 words

Scrapy Architecture Scrapy provides a few item exporters by default to export items in commonly used file formats like CSV/JSON/XML. I usually use CSV to export items, it is pretty convenient, and it comes in two ways: appending mode, for example, scrapy crawl foo -o test.csv overwriting mode with -O option, like scrapy crawl foo -O test.csv But in the appending mode, it's a bit annoying that it always appends the header row before the newly scraped items, which is not correctly in terms of CSV format. [Read More]
Python  Scrapy 

Eglot for Better Programming Experience in Emacs

 Posted on 2022-01-22  (Last modified on 2023-03-15)  |  3 minutes  |  510 words

LSP, or Language Server Protocol, makes programming easier by introducing features like more precise auto-completion and definition lookup. It may have scratched your itches, and you may wonder what the experience is like in Emacs. Emacs has mainly two LSP clients out there, eglot and lsp-mode. Eglot is lightweight, and it could almost run out of the box. So in this post I will briefly show you how to use eglot. [Read More]
Emacs  Eglot  YouTube 

How to Reload i3status config On the Fly

 Posted on 2022-01-14  (Last modified on 2022-10-15)  |  2 minutes  |  333 words

Sometimes I want to change the status (i3status) of i3wm temporarily, but it seems that i3wm doesn't support it directly, although reloading the config for i3wm itself is a piece of cake (bindsym $mod+Shift+c reload in the config, or i3-msg -t command reload in the command line). But this issue scratched my itch, and I swear that I must solve it today. Following this Reddit post, it looks like it can be done by restarting the process of i3bar: [Read More]
i3wm  Linux 

Language Shadowing with subed in Emacs

 Posted on 2022-01-12  (Last modified on 2022-01-13)  |  2 minutes  |  327 words

So I'm trying to improve my English speaking skill by shadowing while watching TV episodes. The workflow before was to loop over video clips using mpv: hit l to mark the start of the loop play the video and wait for it to be at the end of the loop hit l again to mark the end Then mpv will loop over the clip, it basically works, but it's a bit hard and tedious to set the start and end precisely. [Read More]
Emacs  English 

Writing a Python Script in Emacs in 45 Minutes!

 Posted on 2021-12-11  |  3 minutes  |  561 words

Note: watch my live coding session of this article: Intro If you've heard some rumors of Emacs that it has a very steep learning curve (or that Emacs makes a computer slow), you may be too scared to look at it. It indeed has some learning curve (learning anything does have one), but it isn't very steep. I learned this after getting my hands dirty with Emacs a few years ago. [Read More]
Emacs  Python  YouTube