Emacs

Hello everyone! My first post in this new forum.

I read a lot for research, and to keep track of the read books I am experimenting with a combination of bibtex and org mode column view. I have list of my books in an org-file, which then is exported to a bib-file to be able to use org-cite-insert.

Now, to filter the list of books to show I need to set the :match criteria in the column view dynamic block. This works well for all exact matches. But for instance, if I want to match all the books I have read in a certain year (I have a field in the per-book-heading like: DATE_FINISHED), I cannot filter them out. If the value is, say, 2023-08-26, how can I filter that when I am looking only for the year?

It seems to me, :match is always looking at the whole entry, I cannot use:

:match "DATE_FINISHED=\"2023\"

I would have to use:

:match "DATE_FINISHED=\"2023-08-26\"

But I want all the books of 2023, not only those of the 26th of August. How could I solve this? Thank you very much for any hint!

Titus

I mentioned in a previous post that one of the things that I'm doing to bootstrap the content on this community was to get submissions from reddit and place them here.

I couldn't resist and decided to play with Reddit's and Lemmy's API to see if I could automate some of this job (not on Elisp, I will shamefully admit) and after some time I got a Python script that I checks the date of the last submission and grabs the url of all new (non-self) submissions and posts them here.

I was wondering what the community thinks of the idea of me running this script every hour or so? This would basically mean that every post from reddit would be synchonized here.

There are some other things that I'd like to do as well:

• avoid posting links from people who are already here (to let them make the Lemmy post themselves)
• Lots of posts on /r/emacs are "self" posts from people describing or summarizing their project/blog posts, and with a link inside it. I'd like to add a (interactive) step to look at "self" submissions and see if there is a link that can be submitted.
• While checking for "self" submissions, possibly send a DM to the poster inviting them to join this community

What do you think? Should I go forward with these ideas?

What are you using to make your VHDL development faster and cleaner; eMacs configurations files / linters etc.

This is a followup on the previous call for collecting GC statistics [1].

We now got around 90 reports in the mailing list [2] and the frequency of getting new reports is fairly low now.

Thus, I would like to make one final call to submit the statistics. After a week from now, I will start bringing all the data together.

[1] https://reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/14dej62/please_help_collecting_statistics_to_optimize/

[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-gc-stats/

URL: https://bbb.emacsverse.org/b/iho-h7r-qg8-led Time & Date: <2023-08-09 Wed 19:00-21:00 @+03,Europe/Istanbul>

Thanks everyone who participated! We had quite a few people by Emacs meetup standards.

Here is a short summary of the main discussion points (those that I remember):

• Adham Omran announced his new package for Anki (flash card/spaced repetition) integration: https://github.com/adham-omran/ankifier Efficiently create Anki flashcards from your notes.

• Ilya Cheryshov announced his new package to display agenda time grid as interactive svg image. Looks like the usual Google calendar view, but inside Emacs. https://github.com/ichernyshovvv/org-timeblock/ Org mailing list discussion: https://list.orgmode.org/87edkc85fl.fsf@localhost/T/#t

  • Similar, but ASCII-only package: https://github.com/ml729/calfw-blocks, based on Calfw Emacs calendar framework.

• More on visualizing Org statistics:

  • https://github.com/rksm/clj-org-analyzer/: clocking data visualizer using web-frontend. Features heatmap view of clocking time per-day. Allows filtering by tags.
  • https://github.com/Elilif/org-heatmap/: monthly heatmap for habit tracking
  • A bit tangent, but illustrates how to make use of time clocking: https://samplesize.one/blog/posts/my_year_in_data/
    • One more article I did not mention during the meetup: https://sqrtminusone.xyz/posts/2023-04-13-emacs/

• [[info:eintr#Top][eintr#Top]] Elisp introduction for non-programmers. This is really a well-written manual worth reading if your config is larger than a few lines.

• yantar92's window manager: Awesome WM https://awesomewm.org/

• https://git.sr.ht/~bzg/worg is the source code of Org WIKI (WORG) [ Contributions welcome: a number of articles really need some love there ]

  • We also have some Org internals documented as articles in WORG.

• Meeting report export template (backend): https://github.com/DarkBuffalo/ox-report which reminded me of actual LaTeX template by Tecosaur (Org dev): https://github.com/tecosaur/BMC

• New WIP fast LaTeX preview system with instant preview as you type

  • Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AfvuV-bYo
  • Another demo previously posted on the mailing list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AfvuV-bYo
  • And the mailing list discussion with more details: https://list.orgmode.org/orgmode/87lek2up0w.fsf@tec.tecosaur.net/

• =#+begin_src := will give you completion of header arguments

  • Same for #+ keywords and, sometimes, for their values (like for #+TAGS: )
  • The underlying code is in lisp/org-pcomplete.el
  • Also, see org-eldoc (part of org-contrib): https://git.sr.ht/~bzg/org-contrib/tree/master/item/lisp/org-eldoc.el

• Collaboration using Org mode

  • Concurrent editing options are not great, unfortunately:
    • https://code.librehq.com/qhong/crdt.el (need Emacs for all sides)
    • https://logseq.com/: similar to notion/obsidian, but supports Org syntax
  • Can use Git, if not real-time. Org is just a plain text.
  • I also used email workflow using pdf export -> sending email -> getting pdf with comments back -> modifying Org source -> ...

• Authoring books/thesis in Org

  • Adham Omran wrote his thesis in Arabic using Org mode
    • Emacs has built-in right-to-left language support [[info:emacs#Bidirectional Editing][emacs#Bidirectional Editing]]
    • Right-to-left may be mixed with left-to-right (English) in Org export, though some LaTeX-specific tweaking may be needed.
      • Org offers some help with #+LANGUAGE document keyword (see [[info:org#LaTeX specific export settings][org#LaTeX specific export settings]])
    • Also, https://list.orgmode.org/orgmode/87h6z7jq4o.fsf@localhost/
    • There was a question about XeLaTeX, but, AFAIK, event normal LaTeX can support Arabic and other Unicode languages with polyglossia package. Although fonts may be tricky to set and a number of people opt-in to LuaTeX/XeLaTeX for smoother experience (the downside is that non-LaTeX may not always be an option in real-life publisher requirements)
    • Examples from Org mailing list on complex typesetting while keeping sources in Org mode
      • https://list.orgmode.org/orgmode/87y1yovcip.fsf@posteo.net/
      • The bi-lingual book I mentioned: https://list.orgmode.org/orgmode/87h70tyyiz.fsf@posteo.net/

• Adham Omran wrote colemak input method for Arabic (only qwerty-based variant is available by default in Emacs)

  • I suggested submitting it as a patch for Emacs core.

• On the Emacs fringe indicators showing buffer begin/end

  • ↑↓ indicate that there is more text above/below the screen
  • ｢｣ indicate begin/end of the buffer text within displayed part of the buffer
  • These can be enabled using ~(setq-default indicate-buffer-boundaries 'left)~

• Using ~helm-org-ql~ for searching across knowledge base, git commits, and emails

  • I modify the default ~org-ql~ search adding a number of shortcuts to quickly filter by tag/todo keyword
    • https://github.com/yantar92/emacs-config/blob/master/config.org#trying-org-ql
      • My modifications are tailored to my own fork of org-ql: https://github.com/yantar92/org-ql
      • Although the particular special feature I used here (custom default org-ql predicate) is already implemented upstream, though using different defcustom.
    • I have a custom helm search, unifying org-ql, notmuch search (for emails), and git commit search
      • https://github.com/yantar92/emacs-config/blob/master/config.org#helm-org-ql
      • I also add custom helm actions to insert bookmark/commit/email Urls or Org links right from helm search.

With Zotra, you can get a bibliography entry from a url or a search identifier (DOI, ISBN, PMID, arXiv ID). You can even add a bookmark to you browser so that when you click it, the bibliography information of the webpage you're visiting would be saved in some bib file. You can also get the links for attachments and download them from Emacs.

This is done using Zotero translators, so it basically has the full power of Zotero. There is no need for the Zotero client, but it needs to connect to either Zotero translation server or zotra-cli as the backend.

First of all, I'd want to thank you all that subscribed to the community and doubly so for those that are actively contributing, posting and writing comments. I might be missing some data (federation is never perfect) but it seems that !emacs@communick.news is the most active Emacs-related community in the whole threadiverse.

Second, it is no secret that I am working hard to have an ethical and sustainable alternative to the walled gardens of Big Tech, and I think that having at least one community on Lemmy that could surpass the reddit equivalent would be an impressive milestone.

Given that, I want to ask for your feedback and your help to increase the momentum. What can we do to make this place a reference not just for the fediverse, but the whole Internet?

So far, what I've been doing:

• Checking all the resources that we have on the sidebar (which was shamelessly copied from reddit)
• Following #emacs on Mastodon to find out interesting links that could be posted here.
• Inviting people I find on /r/emacs and on Mastodon for them to join this community.

Bear in mind that I am not looking for "growth at all costs" and I really do not want to sacrifice quality over quantity. I think we can "win" by continuously attracting the people that are passionate about Emacs and slowly converting them away from Reddit and into here.

As always, feel free to throw around all of your ideas around. I am pretty sure that something good will come out of this discussion.