A new version of Equake, the drop-down “terminal emulator” for Emacs, should be hitting Melpa shortly. This version includes a number of bug fixes, and some new features. Jeff Kowalski added code for a “close Equake frame on loss of focus feature” (similar to the Tilda feature) and a number of bug fixes and code-cleanup. Further: I’m (half-)jokingly calling this the Geas on Gnomish Smiths release as I’ve finally figured out how to make it behave properly under GNOME Shell Wayland.

Following on the last post Lisp Common Lisp: … Clojure: slack Racket: slack

This expands on a feature I included in the setup for using Org-roam on Android/LineageOS in the last post, specifically automatically adding properties to newly created Org-roam files. Since Org-roam v2 creates a top properties drawer (with an :ID: tag) anyway, it is nice to stick other information there as well. Specifically, information that could be useful in some situation, but which usually we don’t want to see, like :AUTHOR: (it’s probably you, and you know who you are), :CREATION_TIME: (and why not use Unix epoch time?

I’ve been using the note-taking Zettelkasten-ish Org-roam system for a few months and it’s been very useful to me, just as a low-friction way of making more notes and easily finding and/or (re)discovering notes that I’ve made. It’s pretty useful to be able to have access to these notes, and be able to quickly add notes, on mobile as well. I thought it might be useful to include here some notes on how to do, since (especially since v2 of Org-roam) there are some hurdles.

In Emacs, pdf-tools can be used to add annotations to a PDF document. It can be useful to have multiple annotation colours though, and be able to set these on the fly. Here’s an example of how to do it with four colours: ;; annotation colours (defun bms/pdf-annot-colour-blue () (interactive) (setq pdf-annot-default-markup-annotation-properties '((label . "") (color . "blue") (popup-is-open))) (message "%s" (propertize "Annotation colour set to blue." 'face '(:foreground "blue")))) (defun bms/pdf-annot-colour-yellow () (interactive) (setq pdf-annot-default-markup-annotation-properties '((label .

The Twiddler [here’s archive.org’s link, as the site seems to be down as I write this], a one-handed chording keyboard, has a longish history of being associated with Emacs. Here’s 1990s Alan Alda interviewing Thad Starner, who’s using a wearable-computing device foreshadowing Google Glass, using a Twiddler mk 1 to interact with Emacs (using the Remembrance Agent): I’ve long been intrigued by this one-hand, non-tethered input method and finally got a Twiddler 3.

I’ve started using StumpWM’s groups (like “workspaces” in other window managers) more extensively, but this broke a behaviour I like: the ability to easily switch back to the last focussed window, because StumpWM’s “last focussed” is group-specific. So I wasn’t easily about to switch quickly back and forth between two windows that were inb different groups, which turns out to be something I frequently want to do (e.g. switch back and forth between an emacsclient frame in my “emacs” group and a Firefox instance in my “web” group).

For my academic papers, I often need a typeface with a wide range of characters and diacritic combinations. Basic diacritics are supported by a wide range of fonts, but more specialised diacritics and particularly combinations of diacritics only work well in a handful of typefaces. I write my papers in TeX, which has two components: the typeface used to set the paper in (La)TeX and the typeface/font used inside Emacs, where I write the papers.

Emily Short wrote a blog post a fortnight ago or so discussing her nominees for Victor Gijsbers’ Top 50 Interactive Fiction Games of All Time list, 2019 edition. The contest closes on the 31st of July 2019 (i.e. in 2 days, as of the day I write this), and I was thinking about what games would be on my list. This has also resulted, perhaps more importantly, with me having a list of games I still need to play.

pdfpc is a fantastic application for presenting PDF slides, including perhaps especially those produced using LaTeX Beamer. It creates two (full-screen) windows, one a presenter viewer which shows the time elapsed and a preview of the next slide, and one the presentation view which is what is shown to the audience. It also has a bunch of other cool features like being able to draw on slides; highlight areas of slides, &c.