Emacs

A fix for backlink display with Org-roam and Doom Emacs

Posted on March 5, 2023 by Jack Emacs

I’ve been tracking an issue with the way backlinks are displayed that affects my use of Org-roam. Someone (hwiorn) finally discovered a workaround when using Doom Emacs: delete the compiled version of org-roam-utils. Like this:

rm .config/emacs/.local/straight/build-*/org-roam/org-roam-utils.elc

Now my links show up correctly. Finally! I’ll probably need to delete the file every time I sync or update but I don’t care as long as there’s a fix. It was driving me nuts.

UPDATE: And a few hours later, it was fixed for good in this commit.

Things I can’t quit: Film photography and Emacs

Posted on February 14, 2023 by Jack Emacs Photography

I know that film photography and Emacs are completely unrelated, but I have been thinking about both of them quite a lot recently.

Since moving back to shooting film in 2003, I have regular thoughts of switching to all-digital again. It’s just easier. I have rooms full of “stuff” in support of film photography, and things would become so much faster and easier without all of that. A nice digital camera, a good RAW editor, an inkjet printer, and some hard drives, and I’m all set.

And yet, I still enjoy shooting film and have found it impossible to quit. I like how film looks, I enjoy working in the darkroom, and I love my Leica rangefinder cameras. Having binders full of negatives sitting on my shelves is a comfort to me. They’re real, you know? I prefer real things.

In a completely different arena, I would like to stop using Emacs for everything. The great benefit of Emacs, that it can be anything and do everything, is for me also its greatest drawback. I can’t stop futzing with it. And I can’t stop trying to use it for freaking everything all the time. I just need to write stuff and keep track of some tasks. Why then do I use it to read email, RSS feeds, Mastodon, and whatever other things I can shoehorn into what should be a simple text editor?

So, I frequently fire up Obsidian, BBEdit, Logseq, Roam, iA Writer, TheBrain, Tinderbox, and oh right, none of these does the things Emacs and Org-mode can do quite as efficiently and with so much flexibility. After a few days away, I end up back in Emacs and farting around with capture templates or trying to decide between Denote and Org-roam.

The truth is that I’ll probably always shoot film and I’ll probably always use Emacs. I just wish that I could convince myself of this, then move on and actually do something creative or useful with them.

C-x C-c

Posted on June 29, 2022 by Jack Emacs

I rage-quit Emacs this morning. By that, I don’t mean that I hit C-x C-c really hard, although I did do that. I mean I stopped using Emacs.

Marking a region for highlighting in Hugo posts

Posted on June 12, 2022 by Jack Emacs

You’ll notice that I highlight short phrases in many of my daily post entries here. I think this makes it easier to scan things later. The HTML markup for this is just a styled <mark> tag wrapping the text to be highlighted.

I write my posts in Org-mode and convert them to Hugo-compatible Markdown using ox-hugo. The path from Org-mode to HTML for this is a little convoluted, so I cheat and use a macro to generate the markup.

One way to discourage new Emacs users

Posted on June 8, 2022 by Jack Emacs

If you aren’t willing to put in a little effort to learn the Emacs way, please go away.
jcs – Emacs Buffers, Irreal

I understand the sentiment, but dammit, gatekeeping statements like that are unnecessarily off-putting for new users. Why are we surprised that people new to Emacs are initially befuddled by “buffers”, “frames” and weird key combinations? I sure was! If the first thing someone said when I asked “why” or otherwise questioned the status quo was “go away,” I would have done just that. And then we complain about the lack of uptake and “nebbishes”.

Do better.

Book logging in Emacs

Posted on April 29, 2022 by Jack Emacs

I’ve kept a list of books I’ve read as a plain text (well, technically, Markdown) file for years. I wrote about it here . The public version is rendered using Github Pages at books.baty.net . This is fine, but at some point last year I also started logging books in an Org mode file, just to see how it felt. It felt pretty good!

Searching Org-roam files

Posted on April 21, 2022 by Jack Emacs

Org-roam is “A plain-text personal knowledge management system” using Emacs and Org-mode and I put nearly all my notes in there. While it’s easy to find notes in org-roam based on filename, there’s no obvious way to search the contents of notes. Weird, right?

I could use the default projectile search, but my org-roam files live within my main ~/org directory, so the results are littered with all my other org documents. I’d prefer to only search in ~/org/roam

I use a simple lisp function to help with this. It uses consult-ripgrep:

(defun jab/search-roam ()
 "Run consult-ripgrep on the org roam directory"
 (interactive)
 (consult-ripgrep org-roam-directory nil))

I added a keybinding for it to my other org-roam bindings:

(map!
 "C-c n f" 'org-roam-node-find
 "s-u" 'org-roam-node-find
 "C-c n i" 'org-roam-node-insert
 "C-c n t" 'org-roam-dailies-goto-today
 "C-c n d" 'org-roam-dailies-capture-today
 "C-c n c" 'org-roam-capture
 "C-c n s" 'jab/search-roam               ;; <-- my new keybinding
 "C-c n l" 'org-roam-buffer-toggle)

Now, with a quick C-s n s I can search my org-roam files using the blazingly fast ripgrep .

If there’s a better way to do this, I’m all ears.

Publishing portions of my Org-roam database

Posted on March 27, 2022 by Jack Emacs

I’m trying something new.

I’ve become a pretty heavy user of Org-roam for personal notes. I put nearly everything there now; technical notes, contact information, project notes, vendor info, etc. These notes are all nicely linked and backlinked and live in my main ~/org directory so I can easily find things right within Emacs.

A portion of these notes might be useful to other people. So I’m exporting the shareable notes from Org-roam as Hugo -compatible Markdown files. This turned out to be surprisingly easy. You can see the results at https://notes.baty.net and the details of how it works makes a good example.

I’m sure there are a dozen ways to do this, but this seems to work quite well.

Aligning comments in Emacs

Posted on March 25, 2022 by Jack Emacs

I want my per-line code comments to line up nicely, so I’ll often add a bunch of spaces by hand to make things just so. I realized that, being Emacs, there must be an easier way to handle this. Of course there is.