Adding Disk Usage Reporting to Emacs Dired

Just a quick one today. One of the great strengths of Emacs is its extensibility, I have mentioned before in adding the ability to disk report on the size of a directory in dired but I thought I would quickly revisit the topic, demonstrating the function I currently use.

Syncing Tab Bar To Theme

Using tabs as part of my workflow has enabled a nice encapsulation and collection of files per tab that I can quickly switch to.

Selected Window Accent Mode v0.8.0

Whats New

What’s New in Selected Window Accent Mode v0.8.0 - (selected-window-accent-mode) which is my window accent package in MELPA for Emacs, here is a quick summary before I dive into the new features:

Creating a Spelling Transient

I really want to finally get to grips with my spelling / dictionary set-up.

I’m happy with jinx instead of flyspell. I like powerthesaurus and, of course, dictionary-lookup-definition. It is mainly the keybindings I want to finally settle on. I have been moving them around for a while now but haven’t really established something comfortable.

WOWEE v0.3.3

More tinkering and enhancements to some AutoHotKey scripts with WOWEE to allow some emacs keybindings throughout the realm of Windows.

New Package, xkb-mode, to edit X Keyboard Extension Files

Based on my recent forays into ergonomic key-mapping in Emacs for SwayWM, and effectively for any Wayland compositor or X11-based system using the X Keyboard Extension (XKB) standard, I realized that there doesn’t seem to be an Emacs mode to edit these keyboard configuration files (*.xkb). This is surprising, considering they have been around for more than 30 years!

My Emacs Key Workflow Moments Over The Last 30 Years

I am just at the moment reflecting on how my experience with Emacs over the last 30 years has evolved. I thought that just for fun I would list all the key moments along my Emacs journey regarding work-flow efficiency breakthroughs, roughly in year order!.

Transitioning RAlt to Ctrl - Enhancing Emacs Keybindings

In the midst of adjusting my Emacs keybindings for a more ergonomic workflow, I’ve experimented with various configurations. For example, I duplicated the right Alt key (RAlt) to function as an additional Alt key allowing for versatile key presses across the keyboard based on command keybinding locations.

Waybar Toggling Sticky Key Keymaps

For my previous post I was talking about a software visual indicator to discern which key has been locked in a sticky key situation. For example there are typically two modes of stickiness, being latched and locked, by default I had set up the locked variant as I thought it would be more useful for Emacs and in fact I have found this to be the case. For example, double tapping the Control key allows nice easy single key navigation via ’n’ ‘p’ ‘f’ and ‘b’, possible page down with ‘v’ and to delete lines I can use ‘k’ .e.t.c.

Waybar Sticky Key LED indicators on a Laptop

From my previous post regarding setting up sticky keys mainly for Control, Alt and Shift in Emacs to remove the dependence on key chording I just wanted to scratch another itch, and that was to provide a modifier LED indicator type experience on a laptop that you would commonly get on a full size keyboard.

kmonad Sticky Keys on Sway to Help Prevent RSI

I primarily use Emacs on a laptop, and unfortunately, Emacs isn’t inherently designed for ergonomic use. Coupled with the less-than-ideal typing experience of continuous laptop use, I’m considering adopting preemptive measures to protect my hands from potential strain injuries, including the infamous emacs pinky and RSI.

Unified Interface for Switching Contexts - Switch to Thing

Now I have ditched save-desktop for recentf which gives me a faster startup time but still being able to quickly access my most common files (i.e. those I have most recently opened) I have realised that I would like to have quick access to other Emacs resources after a startup.

Winner Undo to Tab Bar History

Now I am using the tab-bar workflow I noticed that winner-mode was not working per tab in that the winner undo would return to the previous state of another tab, pretty annoying! 😕

Opening Frequently Used Files More Efficiently using consult

Periodically, I find myself in situations where I restart Emacs frequently, such as when tweaking my configuration or simply experimenting. During these phases, to achieve a swift start-up, I often resorted to clearing my ibuffer as I tended to have more of an automatic desktop-save type workflow for restoring Emacs sessions. However this would leave me with the task of manually reconstructing my previous session by reopening files.

Emacs asynchronous copying using dired-async-mode

For a while now I’ve been using an rsync based dired-copy replacement for large copy asynchronous operations within emacs. It is not uncommon for me to want to copy large files in emacs and rather than waiting for the operation to finish I leveraged async-shell-command to perform an rsync copy as thus:

Selected Window Accent

Borrowing from the concept of a tiling window manager I thought that emacs could better indicate the currently selected window by a form of highlight/emphasis like the following:

Describe Character / Face Under Cursor

Every now and then I find myself tweaking the look of emacs and have started to build up a list of my own common faces in custom-set-faces to suit my needs, for example here is my current setup:

SwayFX Losing Corners

I seemed to temporarily lose the rounded corners in SwayFX and I think the reason for this is that the gaps inner need to be a certain width, for example the following doesn’t seem to work:

Quick Search Through Org Headers using Consult Outline

I’ve been on the lookout for an efficient way to swiftly scan through org headings exclusively for a specified input string, akin to the functionality of isearch. This would enable me to promptly navigate to a past blog post which is typically stored under an org heading.

Battery Laptop Optimisations on Garuda Linux

There are quite a few different ways to reduce power consumption on a laptop, most linux distros will be geared towards desktop, but I am always installing on a laptop, generally I was looking to use tlp but the options are quite bewildering and can be daunting so I was looking for something more lightweight and in fact garuda has a good starting point for this:

Window Divider Mode

I was playing around with the look of emacs and thought it might be nice to have more control over the border between windows (I have now learnt that this is referred to as a window divider!)

More Improvements to Dired Duplicate Here

On a previous post I created an elisp function to quickly duplicate a file or directory in dired, by default it would copy the dired item under the cursor to an old suffix or append a number based on the universal argument.

Recursively Listing Files in Size Order using find-name-dired

For a while now I have been looking for a simple method in emacs for trimming down my largest files, usually this means locating those large image files and compressing them as I like keeping my media compressed or deleting any large files I didn’t know were lurking around my system.

Plotting Other Org Tables

I’m currently in the process of learning how to create graphical plots from org tables using gnuplot. I’ve noticed that it’s generally more straightforward to extract x-axis data from an org table column with incrementing numbers, as opposed to relying on gnuplot to potentially sort out data from an existing column (which may not be plot-friendly)

Plotting Org Table Weight Loss Using gnuplot

Now I have a weight loss org table defined and therefore an easy way to track the total amount of weight loss each week I had an idea for an improvement with some form of a satisfying graphical representation.

My Evolving Modeline

I am a tinkerer and of course emacs is a perfect vehicle for this mentality. A prime example of this is my constant evolving modeline. For many years the default modeline hasn’t presented itself as being a problem, but is it optimal for me?, the answer I have now realised is no, and I think I can do better for my use cases.

No Bell For Me

Now I have set (pixel-scroll-precision-mode 1) which comes with emacs 29 this has led to an unexpected issue in that I now often get the following messages which cause a bell sound to be generated each time:

Saving My Favourite Wallpapers

I am using the styli.sh script as my wallpaper changer in sway and with a little transparency and wallpapers from unsplash I can quickly switch randomly through my wallpaper images and get things looking pretty nice.

Showing Org Agenda For The Year

I am just starting to include more of my org files into org-agenda. By default C-c a a gives a show for the next 7 days but I think for now I would like something of a more calendarish overview with a long form look of scheduled and completed tasks.

Defining Categories in Org Files for Hugo

I use Hugo to generate my web site and I made a decision early on to use ox-hugo withing emacs and to manage a single large org file with each subheading a blog post and each subheading tag representing… well, tags! I was aware of the concept of defining categories but decided to sort that out at a later date until I really understood what I was doing - this is a common thing that I do.

Dired Duplicate Here Revisited

It is not uncommon for me to want the ability to quickly duplicate a file, especially if I am hacking around and just want a quick snapshot of a working file.

Magit Status To Show Tracked Files

While currently piecing together my git repositories and figuring out which files to commit I am invariably going to have some Untracked files but I also would like to see the Tracked files in magit-status

Quickly Deleting Duplicate Blank Lines

I am currently hacking around with my org files and in fact macro removing quite a few unnecessary lines. However this has had the side effect of leaving some significant holes in the form of blank lines. Sometimes just two duplicate blank lines and sometimes more!

Initial focus in Occur Buffer

Just a quick one today!

I am finding occur extremely useful, from building an index from my emacs init file to searching through org headers to generally just having my isearch all there in a single window.

Cursor Blinking Rate

Sometimes I can find a blinking cursor distracting and somewhat expectant!, so currently I am favouring a solid non blinking cursor while still being able to easily locate my cursor using hl-line-mode

Indexing My Emacs Init File

Since I keep all my emacs configuration in a single .emacs file and in a hyper organised manner it means I have my init file split into different sections, for example :

Sorting Org Tags using Org Mode!

Well as always a little more time with emacs a little feedback and then finding more about org I have now figured out (I think) how I can better sort tags in an org file. In my previous post:

Sorting Org Tags

I use a package called org-rainbow-tags which adds random colours to org tags to provide a consistent colour between identical tags. This helps to identify common tags throughout the file but has the side effect of emphasising the lack of my coherent tag ordering.

Trimming ArtRage Playback Scripts using Emacs

Emacs isn’t my only obsession, I like to create digital art and for that I use ArtRage. The interesting thing about ArtRage is that each brush stroke or editing action can be recorded in a text file or script for later playback. I use this facility for creating time-lapses.

Digital Art Printing

Once a digital piece of art has been created then it is time to print it. A few tweaks are required in my image editor of choice and that is GIMP.

Using Macros to Help Code Debugging

Often I find myself requiring the most rudimentary of methods of debugging and that is to push text to standard output from within a running executable to indicate the logical structure of a program.

Moving Away From Deft

As the title says, it is with a heavy heart that I have decided to move away from deft. There are a few reasons for this:

Commenting Un-commenting

After watching an interesting video by EmacsElements regarding commenting and un-commenting I have to say that I wholeheartedly agree. I really don’t like the way comment-dwim works and made me think back to one of the first elisp functions I commandeered from the interwebs :

Simple Flexible Scrolling

I have written before about smooth scrolling using good-scroll and how I managed to find a semi satisfactory way of centering my cursor after a single scroll which meant I would then have a minimal amount of subsequent line movement to get to the line I want.

Using ripgrep within Projects

Given my recent forays into the world of grepping in emacs using deadgrep (and hence ripgrep) and my use of find-file-rg which feeds into my current completion system of ivy I think the next step is to try to set up a project and to see if I can gain any advantages in my workflow.

Dired Duplicate Here

dired can do most things for me especially now I have my DWIM image conversion scripts working and image-dired configured to my liking.

Merging org files for Hugo static site

I have just started the process of reducing the number of org files I maintain for my web site. I now have a greater understanding of how Hugo handles these files and I think can both simplify and make them more flexible.

Creating a DVD from a video file

This year I have been starting to archive anything of interest from the family VHS collection. There are certainly slim pickings and it is difficult to find anything when most of the 200+ videos contains either a western or a Dire Straits concert!

RIP grep, long live ripgrep!

I have come to the realisation that I can be a little more efficient when it comes to searching for text within files, or as it is known in software engineering circles, grepping!

Revisiting Window Cut / Copy Files with DWIM

I previously wrote about wanting the ability in emacs to copy and paste files from one window to another just like a linux GUI file manager and after a little hunting around and experimentation I settled on putting together some elisp:

Tidying up Dired

Bit by bit I am getting to grips with dired and using this for more operations on my files.

Centering the Cursor After a Scroll

Something has been nagging at me for a while now, I seem to spend a lot of time moving the cursor to the next or previous line within a window, spamming C-n and C-p to get where I want to within a file.

Do You Remember?

I am currently keeping all my textual notes in a separate org file called appropriately, notes.org. This is pretty much just a random rambling set of text containing bits and bobs that I don’t want to forget.

Dired folder size

My dired replacement of Dolphin / linux terminal continues. The next thing is something useful to me but uncommon and something that dired didn’t seem to be able to do out of the box.

Dired going Up Directories

Now dired is becoming more ingrained into my muscle memory, navigating efficiently through the folder structure is becoming more prominent in my mind and it still doesn’t feel natural enough.

Cut / Copy between Windows using Dired Buffers

The next step in my emacs journey is to move files around a little more easily, in fact more like a regular file explorer using the concept of file / folder selection copy and paste. That concept seems a little more natural to me than dired file marking, renaming / copying and then entering the path of the destination address.

Trimming Text With Macros

I am having a bet!, it is one of my few vices, and it shall be on the horses. I don’t often have a bet and in fact I generally only ever have a bet on a special occasion, like the grand national or a random parallel bet with my dad.

Finding Files With RipGrep

Now I am appreciating the power and simplicity of ripgrep and have it available on all my systems I was hunting around emacs to see the best way to leverage this tool for quick file searching.

Putting to Trash

I was recently reading a post about deleting files from within emacs and pushing them to the local Trash, this seems like a good idea especially now I am using dired more often.

Hugo Text Title Tidying

Currently I am just displaying the title of my posts with no filtering. Now that I have developed a general format to help with some emacs Deft categorisation I have run into a little bit of a problem.

Images to Blog Posts

I am just playing around with writing some sort of “techy” blog, trying to focus on a couple of my favourite things in the world, namely linux and emacs, so I thought I would do the best productive thing in the world and just start to type.

Emacs Configuration

Emacs Configuration

-- mode: org; fill-column: 80; eval: (display-fill-column-indicator-mode 1); --