The key principle I follow is this: how I take my notes will evolve over time. I do not stick to any system too dogmatically.
That said, I’ve settled on a system that’s been fairly robust and stable for the past few years. I have tweaked it here and there to make it easier for me to find what I need.
...Emacs has come a long way in the past decade. This is meant as a guide to anyone who’s been using stock or near-stock Emacs for some years and wants a quick update on the new shiny stuff that comes bundled with Emacs.
...I started using the Zsh a few years ago and I’ve liked its completion features. I tried out Oh-my-zsh for a while and I liked the stock Robby Russel prompt. It gave me all the information I cared about: the status of the last command, current directory, and the state of the current Git repository.
However, I didn’t like how slow Oh-my-zsh was making my shell startup. This mattered especially, I think, because my Emacs config would fire up a shell on startup to read the ENV so it could configure some language servers properly. Irked at how long stuff was taking, I set out to build my own.
If you ask anyone what the best Emacs packages are, you’ll almost definitely hear Magit (the only Git porcelain worth using) and Org Mode (a way to organize anything and everything in plain text) listed as #1 and #2. And they’re right! I use those packages extensively every day.
Besides those two powerhouses, there are a handful of packages that make using Emacs a delight. If I had to ever use something else, I would miss these packages most:
...Here’s a nifty Emacs workflow for doing a project-wide search-and-replace on steroids. While I do use refactor tools that come with language servers,1 sometimes those aren’t enough. Consider the case where you not only need to change the name of a function, but also e.g. need to swap the order of two of its arguments. Or you’ve broken one function out into two that need to be chained together. Whatever—there are plenty of ways where the IDE won’t be able to do everything that you need. Enter: Emacs.
...I recently managed to get access to my Outlook email from Emacs. This took some doing as my university had disabled app passwords. I consider Outlook to be harmful, but inasmuch as companies and schools continue to enforce OAUTH-only authentication with email systems, it is good to find workarounds.
This is how I set up email sending/receiving on my computer running macOS with DavMail. I also use mbsync (confusingly also known as isync) to actually fetch my email, and mu/mu4e to index and read mail. Douglas Rumbaugh has an awesome blog post that I followed to get this working. You should read that. This will mostly be my specific configuration settings as well as some tips and tricks.
...Are you tired of having a particular buffer pop open in the wrong direction? Do you wish, for example, that the Racket REPL buffer showed up on the right in a vertical split, rather than below in a horizontal one? Look no further. I give you, display-buffer-alist:
(add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist
'("\\*Racket REPL </>\\*"
(display-buffer-in-direction)
(direction . right)))
That little snippet will make sure when you hit C-c C-k inside of a racket-mode buffer, a REPL will pop up on the right-side instead of on the bottom. I find that much more comfortable to use.
Wikipedia cites a few different sources on what “Unix Philosophy” is. Peter Salus summarizes it as:
- Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
- Write programs to work together.
- Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
That second bullet point is my favorite: making composable programs rather than monolithic systems. In this way, Unix is designed to be a forge for easily building new tools. The first rule—writing programs that do one thing well—is largely a means to the second. When you have building blocks that take simple shapes, you can compose them easily like Lego pieces.
...Today I figured out how to add a tab-bar to Emacs. I didn’t like having it in the mode-line: it gets duplicated for every window and my mode-line space is precious. In contrast, the right side of the tab-bar was always blank.
A collection of what worked well and what didn’t in classes that I took this semester. This is partially for me to record what things reduced friction for me as a student so that one day, should I become a professor, I’ll be able to run the lowest-friction class ever!
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