Automation on Janusworx

Restart Emacs on System Startup

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 11:00:00 +0530

This post was originaly published on 2022-09-27.
Updated 2022-09-28, to include the improved script.

It’s been a year, since I figured out the hack that finally let me use my Compose key in Emacs.¹
Without it, I am unable to type any kind of quotation marks or umlauts in emacs.
A year in, and I’m tired of restarting the service everytime the machine comes on.
The computer can do that for me.

So I whipped up this tiny bash script

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#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [[ $(( $(pidof -s emacs) )) -le 10000 ]]; then
	systemctl --user restart emacs; 
else
	:;
fi

It just arbitrarily checks for the Emacs service’s PID and then if it’s lesser than or equal to 10000, it goes ahead and restarts the service.
This is just some superstitious thing I did, because when I was troubleshooting all those months ago, I assumed that if Emacs started at an ID in the low thousands, it must not have been loading something and restarting it to get a higher process ID meant what ever it needed must have loaded.

I learnt a couple of things doing it this way too.

The output of a bash command is a string.
I use $(( some_numerical_string )) to convert said string into an integer
: means pass in bash-speak

What I ought to do is to check for the existence of a PID and if there is one, to then go ahead and restart emacs. I’ll do that some other time. Because right now, I put this script into my system startup and it just works.

Update 2022-09-28
#

I obviously am incapable, of leaving well enough alone.
As I was in the bath this morning, it struck me that I was restarting the service using systemctl restart …
So I could just check for the exit status of a systemctl status command, and then depending on what I got, do something. If it was running, I could just restart it.
I checked on the command line and sure enough, if a service is running, the exit status is 0 and if it isn’t, the status is 3 .²
So … then I monkeyed with the script to this

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#!/usr/bin/env bash

if systemctl --user status emacs > /dev/null; then
 systemctl --user restart emacs;
else
 :;
fi;

If the emacs service is running, restart it, else do nothing.
This ought to quiet the monkey brain for a while.
I hope 🙂

all i have to do is restart my Emacs service as soon as the system boots up ↩︎
I don’t know if it is always 3. It could probably vary. But it suffices in my case that it isn’t 0. ↩︎

Blocks in Org Mode

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 14:07:32 +0530

I remember, when I first learned it, the Org Manual mentioning I could have code, quotes, poetry and sundry self structured blocks of text, where the text in that block would flow like I wanted it to. I could have indentation or line breaks as I pleased.
And then I promptly forgot about it.

The only thing I did remember were code blocks.
And that I needed to do a #+begin_src and then a #+end_src and put my code in the middle. And all this while, I would keep typing it in, by hand.

Until I tired of keeping on doing that shit, because there are more and more notes that are now going into my zettelkasten and decided well, the computer can do that for me.
So, I went back to the Org Mode documentation and discovered Structure Templates.
And now, I am at peace!

Turns out, all I needed was (org-insert-structure-template) aka C-c C-,
Here’s some code I’ve selected in a document

Now I hit C-c C-,, which brings up a whole host of options, with a prompt!
Do I want this block of text to be a quote? Or some verse?
Well, this is just boring code, so I choose source with the s key

And tada! The block is surrounded by the begin and end tags, and is now a source block! I could add the programming language after #+begin_src to get highlighting as well, but that’s a story for another day.

I’m practicing this, so that I get C-c C-, into my muscle memory, because be it verse, quote, code, example or exports, I know I will be making heavy use of Structure Templates.

Tomorrow is Another Date

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 31 Jul 2022 15:17:11 +0530

Org mode is ~~slowly spreading its tentacles~~ increasingly becoming something, I cannot live without, to manage my day.
And I’m getting pretty consistent with it too!

Like you see above, I use dates as my headlines, below which I list the various tasks for the day.¹
And that’s where I run into my current itch to scratch.

I don’t want to keep typing out the date daily.
The computer can do that for me.
But how? Of the millions of ways possible, what do I want to do?
My first thought was to figure out some way to insert a date into Emacs.
And then I thought, why only emacs? I want it systemwide, across all my programs.
So I checked if Espanso, my friendly text expansion program, would do that for me.
Turns out, Espanso does!
I could just type :dtx wherever I wanted and Espanso would happily insert the date in there. And so I did that for a few days.
Problem solved? Well, that’s when the itch got stronger.

See my evening tasks above?
I use Cal Newport’s idea of a shutdown ritual, to empty my mind and plan the next day, every evening.
Which, for the past couple of weeks meant using my little expansion snippet to put in today’s date for the next day’s headline, as I began planning it. And I’d just manually change the date part to the next day’s date.²

Until today.

I typed in :dtx and I got 2022-07-31.
And then the lazy bum inside me groaned. What? I need to the change the month too?
The computer can do that for me!

So I went back to Espanso to see if it did support date expansions for tomorrow.
Turns out it does!
Only for some reason, it just wouldn’t play ball with the way I want my dates expressed, (YYYY-MM-DD). It would throw weird yaml errors.
And then I recalled Emacs just called the shell to do it.
So I went looking to see, if Espanso could call the operating system shell³ to do expansions ala Emacs.
Turns out, it can!

Finally, I looked up how the date command worked with past and future dates, and jigged up a small expansion snippet and put that into Espanso’s match/base.yaml

 - trigger: ":dttx"
 replace: "{{output}}"
 vars:
 - name: output
 type: shell
 params:
 cmd: "date --date='tomorrow' +'%Y-%m-%d'"

Et voilà!
No more backspacing and struggling with Espanso undos and date calculations.
:dttx turns into tomorrow’s date:2022-08-01!
And the monkey brain is happy again :)

Subtasks not shown. ↩︎
like yesterday evening, I typed in :dtx to get 2022-07-30 for e.g. and then changed the 30 to a 31. ↩︎
in my case, bash ↩︎

Automation on Janusworx

Restart Emacs on System Startup

Update 2022-09-28 #

Blocks in Org Mode

Tomorrow is Another Date

Update 2022-09-28
#