orgmode

By default Emacs Orgmode uses uppercase words for todo keywords. But having tens of entries marked with TODO and DONE in my file looked horribly cluttered to me. So I searched for alternatives. After a few months of experimentation, I decided on the following scheme.

For a long time it bothered me that auto-complete made it necessary for me to abort completion before being able to use org-mode templates.

I typed <s and auto-complete showed stuff like <string, forcing me to hit C-g before I could use TAB to complete the template with org-mode.

I fixed this for me by adding all the org-mode structure templates as stop-words:

;; avoid competing with org-mode templates.
(add-hook 'org-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (make-local-variable 'ac-stop-words)
            (loop for template in org-structure-template-alist do
                  (add-to-list 'ac-stop-words 
                               (concat "<" (car template))))))

Update 2017: a block with sem -j ... seems to block in recent versions of Emacs until all subtasks are done. It would be great if someone could figure out why (though it likely is the right thing to do). To circumvent that, you can daemonize the job in sem, but that might have unwanted side-effects: sem "[job] &"

; Execute babel source blocks asynchronously by just opening a new emacs.
(defun bab/org-babel-execute-src-block-new-emacs ()
  "Execute the current source block in a separate emacs,
so we do not block the current emacs."
  (interactive)
  (let ((line (line-number-at-pos))
        (file (buffer-file-name)))
    (async-shell-command (concat 
                          "TERM=vt200 emacs -nw --find-file " 
                          file 
                          " --eval '(goto-line "
                          (number-to-string line) 
                          ")' --eval "
     "'(let ((org-confirm-babel-evaluate nil))(org-babel-execute-src-block t))' "
                          "--eval '(kill-emacs 0)'"))))

; Export as pdf asynchronously by just opening a new emacs.
(defun bab/org-beamer-export-new-emacs ()
  "Export the current file in a separate emacs,
so we do not block the current emacs."
  (interactive)
  (let ((line (line-number-at-pos))
        (file (buffer-file-name)))
    (async-shell-command (concat 
                          "TERM=vt200 emacs -nw --find-file " 
                          file 
                          " --eval '(goto-line " 
                          (number-to-string line) 
                          ")' --eval "
     "'(let ((org-confirm-babel-evaluate nil))(org-beamer-export-to-pdf))' "
                          "--eval '(kill-emacs 0)'"))))

Update 2023: I no longer work at the University. Nowadays I would use this setup as starting point, but with more focus on using org for reproducibility (I have German instructions for that) when the first version is ready for submission, export it as LaTeX, and work directly on that, because you’ll need detailed changes in LaTeX.

For years I regularly stumbled over LaTeX-Errors in the form of Unicode char \u8:χ not set up for use with LaTeX. I always took the chickens path and replaced the unicode characters with the tex-escapes in the file. That was easy, but it made my files needlessly unreadable. Today I decided to FIX the problem once and for all. And it worked. Easily.

Firstoff: The problem I’m facing is that my keyboard layout makes it effortless for me to input characters like ℂ Σ and χ. But LaTeX cannot cope with them out-of-the-box.

Für verlässliche Wissenschaft sind reproduzierbare Veröffentlichungen essenziell - aber oft sind sie nicht gegeben¹². Dieser 5-Minuten-Vortrag motiviert, wieso Reproduzierbarkeit so wichtig ist, und zeigt eine Lösung zum wirklich reproduzierbaren Veröffentlichen - die er auch selbst nutzt. Ich habe ihn in einem Seminar zum wissenschaftlichen Präsentieren gehalten.

Einen praktischen Leitfaden für entsprechende Veröffentlichungen, den ich auch selbst genutzt habe, liefert das Tutorial: Writing scientific papers for ACP using emacs org-mode.

Update (2017-05): babcore is at 0.2, but I cannot currently update the marmalade package.

C-g: abort

Table of Contents

Intro

I recently started looking into Autotools, to make it easier to run my code on multiple platforms.

Naturally you can use cmake or scons or waf or ninja or tup, all of which are interesting in there own respect. But none of them has seen the amount of testing which went into autotools, and none of them have the amount of tweaks needed to support about every system under the sun. And I recently found pyconfigure which allows using autotools with python and offers detection of library features.

Warning 2016: Contains some cargo-cult-programming — my current setup is cleaner thanks to using AC_CONFIG_LINKS in configure.ac.

@marjoleink asked on identi.ca¹, if it is possible to use emacs org-mode for showing scaled screenshots inline while writing. Since I thought I’d enjoy some hacking, I decided to take the challenge.

It does not do auto-scaling of embedded images, as far as I know, but the use case of screenshots can be done with a simple function (add this to your ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el):

I wrote some recipes for creating the kinds of slides I need with emacs org-mode export to beamer latex.

Update: Read ox-beamer to see how to adapt this to work with the new export engine in org-mode 0.8.

The recipes as PDF (21 slides, 247 KiB)

The org-mode sources (12.2 KiB)

Below is an html export of the org-mode file. Naturally it does not look as impressive as the real slides, but it captures all the sources, so I think it has some value.

Note: To be able to use the simple block-creation commands, you need to add #+startup: beamer to the header of your file or explicitely activate org-beamer with M-x org-beamer-mode.

PS: I hereby allow use of these slides under any of the licenses used by worg and/or the emacs wiki.

If you want to use the literate programming features in emacs org-mode, you can try this minimal example to get started: Activate org-babel-tangle, then put this into the file noweb-test.org:

Minimal example for noweb in org-mode

* Assign 

First we assign abc:

#+begin_src python :noweb-ref assign_abc
abc = "abc"
#+end_src

* Use

Then we use it in a function:

#+begin_src python :noweb tangle :tangle noweb-test.py
def x():
  <<assign_abc>>
  return abc

print(x())
#+end_src

noweb-test.org

Update (2013-01-23): The new org-mode removed (org-make-link), so I replaced it with (concat) and uploaded a new example-file: org-custom-link-completion.el.
Happy Hacking!

1 Intro

I recently set up custom completion for two of my custom link types in Emacs org-mode. When I wrote on identi.ca about that, Greg Tucker-Kellog said that he’d like to see that. So I decided, I’d publish my code.

Kanban for emacs org-mode.

Update (2020): Kanban moved to sourcehut: https://hg.sr.ht/~arnebab/kanban.el

Update (2013-04-13): Kanban.el now lives in its own repository: on bitbucket and on a statically served http-repo (to be independent from unfree software).

Update (2013-04-10): Thanks to Han Duply, kanban links now work for entries from other files. And I uploaded kanban.el on marmalade.

Some time ago I learned about kanban, and the obvious next step was: “I want to have a kanban board from org-mode”. I searched for it, but did not find any. Not wanting to give up on the idea, I implemented my own :)

The result are two functions: kanban-todo and kanban-zero.

“Screenshot” :)

TODO	DOING	DONE
Refactor in such a way that the
	let Presentation manage dumb sprites
return all actions on every command:
Make the UiState adhere the list of
Turn the model into a pure state

Ich bin gerade auf das Paper hier gestoßen:

“A Multi-Language Computing Environment for Literate Programming and Reproducible Research” (PDF)

Es beschreibt schön, was mit emacs org-mode möglich ist. Dazu gehören so spannende Punkte wie im Dokument mitgelieferter Quellcode, dessen Ergebnisse automatisch eingebunden werden, so dass die Dokumente aktuell bleiben können.