Moving my blog to Hugo

 Posted on February 3, 2019 Federico Iachetti

If you're one of the 8 people that's visited my blog since it's creation, you probably noticed that it has changed. That's because I'm using Hugo how. Hugo is a static site generator written in Go (language I've never used in my life). The main thin that drove me to try it out is that it allows writing posts and pages directly using org-mode (among other formats such as Markdown as well). [Read More]

Smarter rails server command

 Posted on July 11, 2018  (Last modified on November 25, 2018) Federico Iachetti

Some time ago I added the following line to my .zshrc (and .bashrc as well): alias rs='rails server -b 0.0.0.0' This gave me an easy to use and easy to remember way to start my rails server when working on a Ruby on Rails project. I have several of these two-word aliases spread across my configuration files and I love them. But recently I started working on a project that uses Foreman to run the server and several other niceties. [Read More]

Call a function interactively from another function in Emacs

 Posted on March 1, 2018  (Last modified on November 25, 2018) Federico Iachetti

The Silver surfer (ag) Linux tool is the fastest way to find where a word or phrase appears in the files on a directory. I've been using ag in two ways from inside Emacs. The ag-mode package, that asks me to input a search term and the root directory where I want it to search and then it performs the search. Via projectile, that allows me to search on a whole project without the extra step of inserting the root dir. [Read More]

Defining keybindings on the fly in Emacs

 Posted on February 16, 2018  (Last modified on November 25, 2018) Federico Iachetti

This is not a trick nor a hidden capability in Emacs, but it's something I never thought of using until about a mont ago. In our Emacs configuration, we can define keybindings either global (for use everywhere) or local (for use inside the current buffer) and we do it using global-set-key. I've mentioned this multiple times in this blog. Here's an example of how you'd use it (global-set-key (kbd "H-s") 'save-buffer) But I recently came to the realization that global-set-key is an interactive function, which means that you can invoke it as any command in Emacs, via M-x (or similar). [Read More]

Naming my macros in Emacs

 Posted on February 15, 2018  (Last modified on November 25, 2018) Federico Iachetti

I love using macros in Emacs, they help me speed up several tasks in a regular basis. Writing a macro is a relative easy thing to do and a topic for another article. What I want to talk about today is how and why you could name a macro. If you don't know what a macro is, the concept is simple, it's a sequence of actions that can be recorded and reused later. [Read More]

Splitting a Ruby Array in equal parts

 Posted on February 4, 2018  (Last modified on November 25, 2018) Federico Iachetti

I'm working on a personal project that involves calendars. One of the features I wanted was to be able to print a calendar like this: | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun | |-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----| | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | For that I needed to split a 28-ish Array into 4 or 5 rows (weeks). [Read More]

Re-indent the entire buffer in Emacs

 Posted on February 3, 2018  (Last modified on November 25, 2018) Federico Iachetti

One of the tasks I leave entirely to my editor is indentation. I don't like at all to indent by hand, except for the current line, but once I have two lines out of place, I tell Emacs to handle it for me. For that reason I've written this simple command (defun fdx/reindent-buffer () "Indent the current buffer." (interactive) (delete-trailing-whitespace) (indent-region (point-min) (point-max)) (untabify (point-min) (point-max))) This will select the whole buffer and apply the correct indentation, cleaning white-spaces in the process. [Read More]

Captureception

 Posted on February 3, 2018  (Last modified on November 25, 2018) Federico Iachetti

Today I was bored and my playful mind presented me with an idea I'm starting to use org-capture for lots of things, what if I create a capture entry for new capture entries? and that's what I did. It took me some time and didn't end up quite perfect, but good and useful enough. Assumptions We'll be using a plain type and use a non-org file as the target, so we are going to have to navigate and edit the file using elisp, and this assumes a specific structure. [Read More]

Listing all branches of the current repository using Magit

 Posted on January 30, 2018  (Last modified on November 25, 2018) Federico Iachetti

At work, I have a git project with several branches, one for each feature or bug I'm currently working on. Once in a while I like to clean those up in order to keep my sanity. In the interest of performing that cleanup, I went looking for a command to list all branches in Magit. I found magit-show-refs-popup, which brings a pop-up window (or panel if you're not used to Emacs's terminology) that lists all refs. [Read More]

Capturing files

 Posted on January 28, 2018  (Last modified on November 25, 2018) Federico Iachetti

So far we've been using org-capture to capture notes. To do this we set a template and indicate in which file to put it. But we do this in a static way, by providing the exact place we want it as a hardcoded string. (setq org-capture-templates '( ("i" "Post idea" entry (file "~/Dropbox/wordpress_rake/IDEAS.org") "* %?\n") ("w" "Woodworking project" entry (file "~/Dropbox/org-files/woodworking_projects.org") "* TODO %?\n") )) When I first learned to use org-capture, the main use case I wanted for it was to write blog posts. [Read More]