Tag: Emacs

Personal approach for collecting Emacs usage statistics advice?

Lately I’ve been curious whether or not my actual Emacs keymapping usage actually reflects how I think I use it. What I mean is that I have a goal of mapping frequently used operations to easily-accessible keybindings on the keyboard. What I plan to do is to record my usage so that I can study it to find mapping decisions that I got right, and wrong, and also identify things that I use that I should be mapping closer to home.
The simplest approach would be to use a keylogger, or advice inside of Emacs.
What I am curious about is your approach if you had done, or would do, something like this, and your thoughts an ideas.
In my case I lay out my mappings for how far away from home they are, and that has worked well so far, but I would like some numbers to back up that claim though it is not too serious depending upon how you look at it.
Cross posted from help-gnu-emacs

Simple in-document generation with org-mode

org-mode’s literate programming (Babel) functionality is amazing. The limitation in my case is me, not the tool. The power and abstraction just aren’t something that you think about it for a document. While I suppose that is the whole point of LP, it does just take time for it to sink in, and experience. That said, this example is nice.
Clearly generating a headline is something you may do once, and probably not very often, so would perhaps be more likely just use a macro definition. When I see how simple this is though, the idea of using macros really goes out the window because this is far easier and simpler and much more powerful. Here is a simple example:
This:

* Code
#+name: hname
#+header: :exports none
#+begin_src emacs-lisp
"Hello, world."
#+end_src
* call_hname()[:results raw]

Produces this:

1 Code
══════
2 Hello, world.
═══════════════

The difference between org-ref and org-bibtex

In case you were wondering, here is an answer:

Some features could be merged, but there is an important difference in that org-ref uses bibtex as the backend database, and reftex for searching, and org-bibtex uses org-mode headings as the backend database, and tag/property searches (I think). It is like the difference between org-contacts and bbdb. They both serve similar needs, but with different data sources, and different ways to think about it.

Both approaches are quite nice. Sometimes it seems easier to be able to share the original, not exported, database with folks even though technically it makes no difference what is the system or origin for that data!

org-ref for delightful LaTeX citation management in org-mode

Having avoided setting up a nice LaTeX/BiBTeX build chain in org-mode, and instead leaving it all to the latter, it was wonderful to watch this overview of org-ref. There is a lot of discussion on the org list about different folks workflows. This looks like a really, really nice one with org-ref.

3 articles on Dired that every Emacs user must read

This post will send you to these 3 other posts. Cherish the experience of reading these exquisite expositions of the power of Dired mode. Simply reading them will immediately illuminate the part of your mind that used to say things like “What is the big deal about Dired? I’ll just use Finder/Explorer instead… it is the same thing”. It isn’t. It is better. It is so, so powerful and you will love it after reading those 3 articles.