category - geek :: Sacha Chua

acdw let me know that my Emacs News links to https://reddit.com didn't work for him in Firefox on Linux, but that changing the links to https://www.reddit.com would make them work. I was glad that I had migrated my blog from Wordpress to the 11ty static site generator. All my blog posts were HTML files, and I could just whiz through them all.

In the past, I might have used find-dired or find-grep-dired to get a list of files. Then I would record a keyboard macro to open a file, search and replace the text, save the buffer, and then kill the buffer, and I would just repeat this macro until an error occurred.

Some time ago, I learned about using Q (dired-do-find-regexp-and-replace) in Dired to replace regular expressions in marked files, using Y to accept all the replacements. That would then let me use C-x s (save-some-buffers) to save all the modified buffers with !. The bufler package is handy for closing a whole bunch of buffers of a certain type, although ibuffer or helm can handle that too.

Emacs being Emacs, there's an even better way to do it. I used M-x grep to find the lines to change, the wgrep package to make the results editable, and M-x replace-string to change things. A quick C-c C-e (wgrep-finish-edit) later, and I was able to change 5485 matching lines in 302 files.

It's so nice being able to deal with things in plain text. Yay for Emacs! There's always something more to learn.

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Started learning how to interactively debug Javascript in Emacs with Indium

Aug. 16, 2021| 11ty, emacs, coding

I noticed something strange in my static blog: my blogging category page didn't list my post on statically generating my blog with Eleventy. Now it does, of course, since I fixed it. But it didn't, and that was weird. I tried using console.log to debug it, but it was annoying to try to figure out the right thing to print out in a long list of nested objects. Besides, console.log debugging is so… last century.

Since these tips for debugging in 11ty mentioned interactively debugging things in VS Code, I decided it was a good time to learn how to use Indium, a Javascript development environment for Emacs.

(use-package indium :hook ((js2-mode . indium-interaction-mode)))

After some trial and error, this was the .indium.json file that allowed me to use M-x indium-launch to start the Eleventy process.

{
  "configurations": [
    {
      "name": "11ty",
      "type": "node",
      "program": "node",
      "args": "./node_modules/.bin/eleventy"
    }
  ]
}

I originally had "inspect-brk": true in it as well, following the suggested configuration, but I found it easier to just set breakpoints in my files using indium-add-breakpoint (C-c b b, a keybinding set up by indium-interaction-mode in my js2-mode-hook).

Conditional breakpoints didn't seem to work, so I just put my logic in an if and set my breakpoint in there.

  categories.forEach((item) => {
    if (item.slug == 'blogging') {
      let post = data.collections._posts.find(o => o.inputPath.match(/statically-generating-my-blog-with-eleventy/));
      console.log(post);
    }
    ...
  }

When I set my breakpoint on the let post... line and ran M-x indium-launch, I got an interactive debugger at that breakpoint. I could also switch to the REPL console and type stuff. Yay!

As it turned out, the post I wanted wasn't showing up in the list of posts. It was because I had used eleventyConfig.setTemplateFormats and forgotten to include md for Markdown files. Once I figured out what was going on, it was easy to fix. This is what the debugger looks like. It adds values to the ends of lines, and you can evaluate things.

I'm looking forward to learning more about using Indium to debug scripts running in Node or Chrome. Slowly, slowly having some focused time to sharpen the saw!

If you use Emacs for Javascript development and you're curious about Indium, you can check out the documentation.

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2021-08-16 Emacs news

Aug. 16, 2021| emacs, emacs-news

Help wanted:
- EmacsConf 2021 Call for Proposals (Reddit, HN) until Sept 30
- Prot's laptop is having a hard time (Reddit) - Prot has a Paypal donation link at the bottom of the page
- Command Discovery in Emacs (Feb 2021) - might be a good way to start contributing to Emacs
Upcoming events:
- M-x Research (contact them for password): TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Aug 20 0700 Vancouver / 0900 Chicago / 1000 Toronto / 1400 GMT / 1600 Berlin / 1930 Kolkata / 2200 Singapore
- Emacs Berlin (virtual, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Aug 25 0930 Vancouver / 1130 Chicago / 1230 Toronto / 1630 GMT / 1830 Berlin / 2200 Kolkata – Thu Aug 26 0030 Singapore
- Emacs APAC (virtual, in English) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/ Sat Aug 28 0130 Vancouver / 0330 Chicago / 0430 Toronto / 0830 GMT / 1030 Berlin / 1400 Kolkata / 1630 Singapore
Beginner:
- 30 days of Emacs – Day 1: Installation using Homebrew on macOS, first steps, tutorial, use-package
- A gentle introduction to Emacs for ex-ViM users (09:08)
- The Modern Emacs - Andrew Tropin (1:33:38, Reddit)
Emacs configuration:
- Emacs config without use-package - an experiment
- yuri tricys: Emacs Snitch and How to Improve Performance
- unpackaged/custom-toggle-all-more-hide: Expand all options’ documentation (Reddit) - discussion of helm in the comments
- System Crafters Live! - Emacs Package Potluck (Trying Your Suggestions!) (02:02:23)
- ahmadnazir's Emacs config - Spacemacs, .NET, Helm
Emacs Lisp:
- Submitting a Package to NonGNU ELPA (Reddit)
- plz.el: An HTTP library for Emacs, using curl as a backend
- Andrea: Moldable Emacs: editing your file via Treesitter (or, how I fixed my CSS with a Playground)
- First time writing elisp code from scratch - 1password handler
Emacs development:
- * lisp/simple.el (shift-select-mode): Add new choice 'permanent' (bug#50038).
- Revert "Bind the GIT_LITERAL_PATHSPECS environment variable"
- Add new functions for lax mail address splitting
- Fix merging of ambiguous nil maps
- Add font-lock-doc-markup-face (bug#50041)
- Add new face diff-changed-unspecified
- Add save-some-buffers-root to save-some-buffers-default-predicate (bug#46374)
- Add a `pcase-setq' macro
- Add new image-dired commands
- Mark marked images in Image-Dired mode
- Let image-dired-mouse-toggle-mark act on active region
- Use ### for outline headings in shell-script-mode
- Add support for outlining in shell-script-mode
- Add new user option `gnus-topic-prepare-topic'
- Add a new command `revert-buffer-quick'
Appearance:
- highlight-parentheses.el: Emacs: highlight surrounding parentheses
- Basic WYSIWYG printing in GNU Emacs (Arabic & Hebrew)
Navigation:
- crux - a Collection of Ridiculously Useful eXtensions for Emacs (08:52)
- thing-edit: Copy and paste anything under cursor. (2020)
- [ANN] dogears.el: Never lose your place in Emacs again (Reddit)
- Manuel Uberti: Switching buffers (Take 3)
Completion:
- consult-dir: switch directories in Emacs at any time (Reddit)
Writing:
- fanyi.el: English-Chinese translator for Emacs.
- mw-dictionaries: This is modified from mw-thesaurus.el with support for Learner dictionary
Org Mode:
- Peter Prevos: Ricing Org Mode: A Beautiful Writing Environment (Irreal)
- Emacs Agenda Views | DummyHead (2019)
- Timekeeping with Emacs and Org-Mode (2020)
- Irreal: Org-ref-cite Video
- Org parser libraries | org-almanac (Reddit)
- iOS: Improving org task rendering (Reddit)
- Org Roam:
Coding:
- Getting Emacs and Julia to work
- 30 days of Emacs - Day 2 — kevinsjoberg OCaml
- datum Query databases from the command line, via ODBC. Plays nicely with Emacs' SQLi mode
- parcont.el: Continuation-based sexp editing commands
- comp-ide.el: A simple and efficient Emacs Competitive IDE. (Youtube)
- Fast switching between two git branches (Reddit) helm-git-branch
Math:
- Easy Entry of Math Symbols (Global Keybindings) (Reddit)
Mail and news:
- Tassilo Horn: Make your RSS enjoyable in feed readers such as elfeed
- [ANN] New package: mu4e-column-faces (Reddit)
Web:
- Switch nyxt buffers and run nyxt commands from emacs (Reddit)
- Andrea: Following wise suggestions: making emacs-with-nyxt more consistent
Spacemacs:
- GUI Spacemacs support for Dockerized Pen.el
Doom Emacs:
- One year of doom emacs and never looked back
- Use Emacs-Tree-Sitter for Highlighting in Doom Emacs (2020)
Community:
- Weekly Tips, Tricks, &c. Thread
- Telegram @emacs_posts: Emacs News and Posts (Reddit)
- Lars Ingebrigtsen: 10×10% – Random Thoughts (closing 45% of open Emacs bugs) (Reddit, HN)
Other:
- Termux + Emacs
- How to run multiple Emacs daemon instances
New packages:
- consult-dir: Consult based directory picker
- efar: FAR-like file manager
- evil-textobj-treesitter: Provides evil textobjects using treesitter
- gumshoe: Scoped spatial and temporal POINT movement tracking
- netease-cloud-music: Netease Cloud Music client
- session-async: Asynchronous processing in a forked process session
- streamlink: A major mode for streamlink output
- untappd: Display your latest Untappd feed

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, r/planetemacs, Hacker News, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar and emacs-devel.

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