By Jack Baty in AI —

Asking ChatGPT to do things I used to think were fun

I’ve been testing a version of Johnny Decimal using folders and org-mode files. While doing this, I found myself frequently wanting to create a new .org file in the current (Dired) directory with the same name as the directory (long story).

In a past life, this would have been a fairly straightforward challenge. I’m not remotely fluent in (emacs) lisp, but I’ve always enjoyed learning, so I would have dug in and figured out how to write the function myself.

I don’t feel like that person any more. I just wanted to use the function and move on.

So, I asked ChatGPT to write one for me1

Write an emacs lisp function to create a new org-mode buffer having the same name as its enclosing folder

It worked. First try. However, I wanted to also automatically save the buffer as an org-mode file with the new name, so I amended my prompt with…

Add to the function so that it saves the new buffer using the buffer name into the current directory

And that also worked on the first try.

(defun jab/create-and-save-org-buffer-same-as-current-folder ()
  "Create a new Org-mode buffer with the same name as the current folder and save it in the current directory."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((current-directory (file-name-directory (or buffer-file-name default-directory)))
         (folder-name (file-name-nondirectory (directory-file-name current-directory)))
         (file-path (expand-file-name (concat folder-name ".org") current-directory))
         (new-buffer (generate-new-buffer folder-name)))
    ;; Switch to the new buffer and set it to Org-mode
    (switch-to-buffer new-buffer)
    (org-mode)
    ;; Save the new buffer to the specified file path
    (set-visited-file-name file-path)
    (save-buffer)
    (message "Created and saved new Org buffer: %s" file-path)))

I ran this, and it did exactly what I wanted, so I added to my permanent configuration and moved on.

I kind of hate how well this works. It feels like I’m a lazy cheater and that I’m using a bunch of magic code to do stuff. Then again, I can now do things in a few minutes what might have taken hours before. I’m not learning, but at least I’m doing. I guess.

π