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2025-03-03 Emacs news

| emacs, emacs-news

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, r/planetemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Bluesky #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, communick.news, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

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Working with smaller chunks of thoughts; adding anchors to paragraphs in Org Mode HTML export

Posted: - Modified: | org, js

I write my blog posts in Org Mode and export them to Eleventy with ox-11ty, which is derived from the ox-html backend.

Sometimes I want to link to something in a different blog post. This lets me build on thoughts that are part of a post instead of being a whole post on their own.

If I haven't added an anchor to the blog post yet, I can add one so that I can link to that section. For really old posts where I don't have an Org source file, I can edit the HTML file directly and add an id="some-id" so that I can link to it with /url/to/post#some-id. Most of my new posts have Org source, though. I have a my-blog-edit-org function and a my-blog-edit-html function in my Emacs configuration to make it easier to jump to the Org file or HTML for a blog post.

If the section has a heading, then it's easy to make that linkable with a custom name. I can use org-set-property to set the CUSTOM_ID property to the anchor name. For example, this voice access section has a heading that has CUSTOM_ID, as you can see in the . If I don't mind having long anchor names, I can use the my-assign-custom-ids function from my config to automatically set them based on the outline path.

my-assign-custom-ids
(defun my-assign-custom-ids ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((custom-ids
         (org-map-entries (lambda () (org-entry-get (point) "CUSTOM_ID")) "CUSTOM_ID={.}")))
    (org-map-entries
     (lambda ()
       (let ((slug
              (replace-regexp-in-string
               "^-\\|-$" ""
               (replace-regexp-in-string "[^A-Za-z0-9]+" "-"
                                         (downcase (string-join (org-get-outline-path t) " "))))))
         (while (member slug custom-ids)
           (setq slug (read-string "Manually set custom ID: ")))
         (org-entry-put (point) "CUSTOM_ID" slug)))
     "-CUSTOM_ID={.}")))

Adding anchors to paragraphs

If the part that I want to link to is not a heading, I can add an ID by using the #+ATTR_HTML: :id ... directive, like this snippet from my reflection on landscapes and art: 

  #+ATTR_HTML: :id interest-development
  That reminds me a little of another reflection
  I've been noodling around on interest development...

Text fragments

Text fragments are even more powerful, because I can link to a specific part of a paragraph. I can link to one segment with something like #::text=text+to+highlight~. I can specify multiple text fragments to highlight by using #::text=first+text+to+highlight&text=second+text~, and the browser will automatically scroll to the first highlighted section. I can specify a longer section by using text=textStart,textEnd. Example: #:~:text=That%20is%20the%20gap,described The text fragments documentation has more options, including using prefixes and suffixes to disambiguate matches.

Text fragment links require rel="noopener" for security, so I added JKC-Codes/eleventy-plugin-automatic-noopener to my 11ty config.

Update 2025-03-20: Quick ways to link to a text fragment:

  • On my Android phone, selecting text in Google Chrome and sharing it automatically includes the text and a link to the text fragment.
  • In Google Chrome on my iPad, my process is:
    1. Select the text and choose "Copy Link with Highlight".
    2. Tap the selected text again and share it.
    3. Paste the link after the shared text.
  • There's this Text Fragment extension for Firefox.
  • I have some Emacs Lisp to link to currently-selected text using Spookfox. Spookfox connects Emacs to Firefox using a browser extension. Once it's properly set up and connected, it allows Emacs to evaluate things in the Firefox context.

These seem like good starting points for addressing smaller chunks of thoughts.

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2025-02-24 Emacs news

| emacs, emacs-news

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, r/planetemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Bluesky #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, communick.news, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

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2025-02-17 Emacs news

| emacs, emacs-news

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, r/planetemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Bluesky #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, communick.news, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

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You can comment with Disqus (JS required) or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

2025-02-10 Emacs news

| emacs, emacs-news

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, r/planetemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Bluesky #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, communick.news, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

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2025-02-03 Emacs news

| emacs, emacs-news

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, r/planetemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Bluesky #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, communick.news, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

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Improving subed-vtt parsing; using dedicated windows in Emacs; training my intuition

| emacs, subed

While putting together some notes on how to use subed.el with auto-generated YouTube captions, I decided to get subed-word-data working with the Youtube VTT format. The sample file I downloaded from one of my YouTube videos had a cue whose text started with a blank line, so I ended up redoing the way subed-vtt.el parsed cues. Twice, actually. The first time, I changed it to handle multiple blocks in cue text (separated by blank lines). Then I came across this test suite for WebVTT parsing and found out that the timing line for a cue doesn't have to be preceded by a blank line, so then I needed to change the VTT parsing again.

Fortunately, I inherited a large Buttercup test suite from subed.el's original author. I've been adding to it over the years. As I learned more about how I wanted subed.el to behave, I added more cases. Then I worked on shifting the code to behave the way I wanted it to. At first, I didn't quite understand what I wanted the code to do, but as I pinned down more test cases, I was able to figure it out.

This was the first time I used toggle-window-dedicated (C-x w d) extensively. This function keeps the same buffer displayed in the window instead of letting Emacs Lisp functions replace it. First, I set up a large window for my subed-vtt.el. I split the other side into a smaller window for my test-subed-vtt.el, another window for a temporary VTT file, and a window for output from whatever command I'm running. I set most of the windows to dedicated except for my temporary output window. I also enabled winner-mode just in case I messed things up so that I could restore with winner-undo. Dedicating the windows meant I didn't have to keep fussing around with my windows and buffers to get things back to where I wanted them to be. I did use C-x o (other-window) a lot, so maybe it'll be worth getting the hang of ace-window.

2025-01-28_12-40-04.png
Figure 1: Dedicated windows for the code, the test file, and a VTT buffer for interactive testing; a spare window for other output

Sometimes I wanted to focus on one of those small windows. prot/window-single-toggle was helpful for maximizing a window and then returning to the previous configuration.

I mostly evaluated or edebugged my code and then used my-buttercup-run-dwim to run a suite in my test-subed-vtt.el. sp-backward-up-sexp and sp-narrow-to-sexp were also helpful for navigating the suites and focusing on whatever I was working on.

I'm looking forward to exploring the other test cases from that repository. It feels good to get better as a coder.

I just finished reading Mathematica: a Secret World of Imagination and Curiosity, by David Bessis. The idea of training your intuition echoed in my mind as I wrote test cases and changed the code. I started to look forward to the gaps between my understanding of the spec and my understanding of the test cases, and the gaps between the test cases and my implementation. It felt almost like a conversation. Sometimes it was hard to translate an idea into code. I felt myself getting muddled and turned around. Whenever I noticed that, I just had to back up and start from something I understood, figure out what I was uncertain about, and then go from there.

I like the way that subed.el gives me tools for thinking about text, times, and metadata together. That abstraction has been helpful for editing audio and making videos. The more solid I can make it, the easier it will be to imagine other things that use those ideas.

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