Notes from Emacs Asia-Pacific (APAC) virtual meetup, July 2021

These are the notes from Emacs Asia-Pacific (APAC) meetup happened on July 24, 2021.

• Managing music queue with Emacs
  • [Yuchen] download the media files, delete them once played.
  • [bhavin192] https://emacsconf.org/2019/talks/28/
  • [meain] https://www.mankier.com/1/podboat
  • [Sean O’Byrne] EMMS can be used as a player.
  • https://www.gnu.org/software/emms/
• Python code to Toot/Tweet and post on LinkedIn.
  • [shrini] http://github.com/tshrinivasan/twoot
  • A demo of above script, using mastodon.el to compose the post. And using M-| to send the region to Python code.
  • [shrini] how to count the total characters from a buffer?
  • [bhavin192] M-= shows character count.
  • [meain] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WordCount
• Intro to emacs editor and orgmode - in Tamil
• Emacs Client related issue and discussion
  • [Yuchen] getting error:

    Cannot save customizations; init file was not fully loaded
    

    • https://stackoverflow.com/q/9650612/6202405
    • https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1193119#p1193119
  • [bhavin192] I start the server as part of .emacs using (server-start), and keep the Emacs instance running.
  • [Yuchen] benefits of running Emacs Client: it is fast, keeps the buffers open.
  • [bhavin192] I use emacsclient as my EDITOR.
  • [meain] helpful to set as popups for my email, terminal etc. I have set few OS level keybindings which popup Emacs frames using emacsclient.
• Tables as variables in Org mode source blocks
  • [Sean O’Byrne] the language I’m trying to use has support for running code from source blocks, but does not seem to support tables as variables.
  • https://code.orgmode.org/bzg/org-mode/src/master/lisp/ob-python.el
  • [bhavin192] https://code.orgmode.org/bzg/org-mode/src/c9dfed48a607c7f6524f1c6480f09cf61a5d6237/lisp/ob-gnuplot.el#L79-L113
• Ledger source block related question
  • [Yuchen] I want to put the error from Ledger block to the results instead of showing a popup.
• Using shell inside Emacs on Windows
  • [vijay more] which shell to use, and how to use tools like grep, find etc.
  • [Sean O’Byrne] eshell can be used in this case.
  • [bhavin192] multiple shells can be run with C-u M-x shell.
  • [bhavin192/Sean O’Byrne] usually more setup is required to run Emacs correctly on Windows.
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/hjkktt/native_emacs_on_windows_10_in_2020/
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/m7pe6c/wsl2emacsvcxsrv_open_everything_with_native/
  • https://emacsredux.com/blog/2020/09/23/using-emacs-on-windows-with-wsl2/
  • [Sean O’Byrne] in eshell you can have alias for Emacs commands like alias d 'dired $1'.
  • https://masteringemacs.org/article/complete-guide-mastering-eshell
  • [shrini] Emacs shell is the only terminal which can show Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam etc as of now.
    • [bhavin192] Fedora has a package emacs-terminal, https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/emacs/blob/2c49d5d/f/emacs.spec#_164-174
• How do you learn Emacs step by step?
  • [vijay more] the documentation has too many things.
  • [Sean O’Byrne] C-h * can be used to get more help.
  • [bhavin192] use which-key package. https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key
  • [yantar92] try helm-info for searching.
  • [Yuchen] icomplete + fido are good for discovering new commands.
  • [bhavin192] refer to the logs from here: https://geeksocket.in/posts/entering-church-emacs/#references

Credits: bhavin192, meain, Sean O’Byrne, shrini, yantar92, vijay more, Yuchen.