Context

Recently I was trying to reproduce a bug with citeproc.el and org-mode in emacs.

I thought I could use package-vc-install to install a set of upstream emacs packages at fixed versions, and thereby let citeproc upstream test in the same environment as I have.

It turns out that getting emacs to load the non-builtin version of org via package-vc-install did not work because

• org-mode needs to run make after cloning
• once package.el was initialized, I always seemed to end up with the built in org-mode (yeah, I realize that isn't an explanation).

Recipe part 1: get org

Here you can replace 9.8.7 with any other tagged release

  EMACSHOME=$(mktemp -d)
  git clone https://git.sr.ht/~bzg/org-mode ${EMACSHOME}/org
  git -C ${EMACSHOME}/org reset --hard release_9.8.7 
  make -C ${EMACSHOME}/org autoloads
  emacs -Q --batch -L ${EMACSHOME}/org/lisp --eval "(progn (require 'org) (message (org-version)))"

This should print 9.8.7, not the version of built in org-mode.

Recipe part 2: add-on packages

Now to test some add-on packages, run

    emacs -Q --init-directory ${EMACSHOME} -L ${EMACSHOME}/org/lisp

  (progn
    (require 'org)
    (package-initialize)
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/emacs-straight/queue")
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/joostkremers/parsebib" "6.7")
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/rejeep/f.el" "0.21.0")
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/magnars/s.el" "1.13.0")
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/akicho8/string-inflection" "1.0.16")
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/andras-simonyi/citeproc-el" "0.9.5"))

You can then run your tests in that emacs right away, or restart the environment with

  emacs -Q --init-directory ${EMACSHOME} -L ${EMACSHOME}/org/lisp

I have lately been using org-mode literate programming to generate example code and beamer slides from the same source. I hit a wall trying to re-use functions in multiple files, so I came up with the following hack. Thanks 'ngz' on #emacs and Charles Berry on the org-mode list for suggestions and discussion.

(defun db-extract-tangle-includes ()
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (let ((case-fold-search t)
        (retval nil))
    (while (re-search-forward "^#[+]TANGLE_INCLUDE:" nil t)
      (let ((element (org-element-at-point)))
        (when (eq (org-element-type element) 'keyword)
          (push (org-element-property :value element) retval))))
    retval))

(defun db-ob-tangle-hook ()
  (let ((includes (db-extract-tangle-includes)))
    (mapc #'org-babel-lob-ingest includes)))

(add-hook 'org-babel-pre-tangle-hook #'db-ob-tangle-hook t)

Use involves something like the following in your org-file.

#+SETUPFILE: presentation-settings.org
#+SETUPFILE: tangle-settings.org
#+TANGLE_INCLUDE: lecture21.org
#+TITLE: GC V: Mark & Sweep with free list

For batch export with make, I do something like [[!format Error: unsupported page format make]]

I have been meaning to fix this up for a long time, but so far real work keeps getting in the way. The idea is that C-C t brings you to this week's time tracker buffer, and then you use (C-c C-x C-i/C-c C-x C-o) to start and stop timers.

The only even slightly clever is stopping the timer and saving on quitting emacs, which I borrowed from the someone on the net.

• Updated dependence on mhc removed.
• Updated 2009/01/05 Fixed week-of-year calculation

The main guts of the hack are here.

The result might look like the this (works better in emacs org-mode. C-c C-x C-d for a summary)

So I spent a couple hours editing Haskell. So of course I had to spend at least that long customizing emacs. My particular interest is in so called literate haskell code that intersperses LaTeX and Haskell.

The first step is to install haskell-mode and mmm-mode.

apt-get install haskell-mode mmm-mode

Next, add something like the following to your .emacs

(load-library "haskell-site-file")
;; Literate Haskell [requires MMM]
(require 'mmm-auto)
(require 'mmm-haskell)
(setq mmm-global-mode 'maybe)
(add-to-list 'mmm-mode-ext-classes-alist
   '(latex-mode "\\.lhs$" haskell))

Now I want to think about these files as LaTeX with bits of Haskell in them, so I tell auctex that .lhs files belong to it (also in .emacs)

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.lhs\\'" . latex-mode))
(eval-after-load "tex"
'(progn
    (add-to-list 'LaTeX-command-style '("lhs" "lhslatex"))
    (add-to-list 'TeX-file-extensions "lhs")))

In order that the

 \begin{code}
 \end{code}

environment is typeset nicely, I want any latex file that uses the style lhs to be processed with the script lhslatex (hence the messing with LaTeX-command-style). At the moment I just have an empty lhs.sty, but in principle it could contain useful definitions, e.g. the output from lhs2TeX on a file containing only

%include polycode.fmt

The current version of lhslatex is a bit crude. In particular it assumes you want to run pdflatex.

The upshot is that you can use AUCTeX mode in the LaTeX part of the buffer (i.e. TeX your buffer) and haskell mode in the \begin{code}\end{code} blocks (i.e. evaluate the same buffer as Haskell).

In the eternal battle against spam, I have recently written an extension to the Wanderlust mail reader to help maintain address whitelists.

It consists of two parts: wl-whitelist.el manages the user interface, and passes whitelisted addresses to the server as fake messages in a special mailbox. This sounds lame, but it allows me to take advantage of the nice offline functionality built in to Wanderlust.

On the server (e.g. in a cron job), I run a python script to extract the addresses so the the rest of my baroque anti-spam system can use them.

Update

• Now supports blacklisting as well as whitelisting
• Updated scan-whitelist.py with workaround for python library bug

blorg didn't allow digits in tags. So I hacked the two regexps. You can find a patch against blorg.el 0.74 here

• UPDATED Bastien kindly fixed my whines, and a new version is available. I still have to use eval-after-load to load it.

This blog is produced with emacs and blorg.el To get blorg to load I had to change

(provide 'org-blogging) 

to

(provide 'blorg) 

in blorg.el. Also, it seems like blorg really wants to be loaded after org, so I loaded it like the following.

 (eval-after-load "org"

: '(require 'blorg))