Emacs: Automating the insertion of text

Posted on July 24th, 2006 by Sacha Chua

As the VP Education of Toast I.T. Toastmasters in downtown Toronto, I’m responsible for assigning people roles in upcoming meetings and confirming these roles by e-mail. We currently do our scheduling in a spreadsheet. Copying and pasting the roles for the spreadsheet results in the following text:

Ari Caylakyan
Anthony D'Costa
Chris Charabaruk
Michael Chan
Chris Charabaruk
Chris Charabaruk
Khalid Ghaffar
Natasha Guigova



Ari Caylakyan - C&L 5
Anthony D'Costa
Jackie Achonu
Sacha Chua

Adding role descriptions to this was a bit of a pain, so I wrote a
short Emacs Lisp function that inserted descriptions if and only if
there was a corresponding person assigned to that role.

(defun sacha/toast-add-roles ()
  "Add role descriptions."
  (interactive)
  (mapcar (lambda (item)
            (goto-char (line-beginning-position))
            (unless (looking-at "^[ \t]*$")
              (insert item ": "))
            (forward-line 1))
          '("President" "Toastmaster" "Sgt at Arms" "Timekeeper" "Ah-counter"
            "Grammarian" "Table-topics Master" "General Evaluator" ""
            "Educational Speaker" "Guest Speaker"
            "Speaker #1" "Evaluator #1"
            "Speaker #2" "Evaluator #2"
            "Speaker #3" "Evaluator #3")))

Next step: Personalized e-mail that highlights upcoming roles, just as
I wrote Emacs Lisp functions to make it easier to send students
personalized feedback on their programs.

That’s one of the coolest things about Emacs – it’s so easy to automate tasks.

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Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/3692

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