“Lisp” Tagged Pages

NotDeft

Revised on Sunday, May 9, 2021
Created on Tuesday, August 22, 2017

NotDeft is an Emacs-based manager and local search engine for directories of plain text notes. NotDeft features a Xapian backend for efficient free-text search over potentially very large numbers of note files; in that respect it is like the Notmuch Emacs mode for managing email. NotDeft is a spin-off of the Deft note manager, and retains similar functionality for browsing, filtering, and managing note collections. While NotDeft inherits its user interface from Deft, that interface is used for managing search result sets of notes, rather than directory contents.

Org-Mode iCalendar Export with Explicit Time Zones

Revised on Thursday, August 23, 2018
Created on Tuesday, July 3, 2018

For several years I used Symbian phones for calendaring, and the biggest issue for me was the lack of support for time zones: there was neither a way to specify a “floating” time, nor could you select a specific time zone for an appointment. Times would be interpreted in the context of the currently selected system-wide local time zone, and shifted later when changing the time zone setting. Consequently, I avoided ever changing time zones to retain the times as entered.

Fetching Web Pages into NotDeft

Written on Thursday, March 22, 2018

I'm increasingly using NotDeft not only for note taking, but also for capturing information from various sources. To some extent it already acts as a lightweight substitute for the likes of Evernote. As explained in the documentation, Org mode's built-in capture protocol can be used to send snippets of text from a page open in a web browser into one's NotDeft note collection. Sometimes, however, we already have a URL of an interesting page in our clipboard, and we would like to fetch the entire page's textual content into NotDeft with a single command.

Transient Directories in NotDeft

Revised on Friday, February 16, 2018
Created on Sunday, January 21, 2018

My NotDeft note manager has an optional notdeft-path feature to better support transient directories of notes. Also in the standard configuration, the notdeft-directories list may contain directories that do not have to always exist, as any non-existing directories are simply ignored; if and when they appear, they can be included in subsequent searches. Note, however, that the notdeft-directories variable is normally set only once, and if the initializer expression includes wildcards, the variable value may not contain directories that get mounted or copied over later.

Org-Mode Export of Scheme-less Absolute Path Links

Written on Monday, January 29, 2018

I sometimes turn Org format notes into blog posts (as in the case of this one), and when doing so it's good to be mindful of how Org links get translated on export. In some cases we want the output link to have the absolute path of the resource (for the site, not the file system), but no URL scheme or authority part. Emacs Org mode (as of version 9) interprets scheme-less links with an absolute path as file: links of the same path.

Opening Racket Modules in Emacs

Revised on Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Created on Sunday, July 6, 2014

In recent past, I've adopted Greg Hendershott's racket-mode for Emacs, added keyword completion, hover help, documentation lookup, customized syntax highlighting and indentation and such for my personal tastes, but one thing I haven't really looked at so far is code navigation support for Racket. What seemed like an easy place to start was implementing a function for loading a Racket source file by its module path, as would appear within a require form.

Dictionary-Enabled Racket Support for Emacs

Written on Friday, August 23, 2013

For the last month or so I've found Racket programming even more enjoyable than before. The reason for this is a tool named Ractionary (short for Racket Dictionary Generator), which I wrote for extracting information about Racket language names. Said information can easily be used for setting up some Racket language awareness for Emacs. There is an Emacs tradition of running an external Lisp (or "inferior Lisp") process to allow for dynamic evaluation of foreign (non Emacs Lisp) code, and this kind of a solution could be used to query information known to Racket on demand.

Rascal Mode for Emacs Released

Written on Monday, October 8, 2012

During the last year or so I've written some program transformations in the Rascal programming language. I find it beneficial to have an Emacs mode for any language I make significant use of. Not finding an existing one for Rascal, I proceeded to put one together myself. See Emacs Mode for Rascal (on GitHub) for the code. The mode has its imperfections. Rascal is not exactly a small language, and while it has a C-like surface syntax, there is some unusual syntax that seems tricky to get right.