I use EXWM and three monitors, so knowing my window numbers is crucial to my navigation. I used to use Ace Window to present a red digit at the corner of emacs screens with which number to press to get there. The two problems with this are that you can’t know your numbers until you invoke Ace Windows, and more damningly, you can’t get these numbers on exwm (non-emacs) windows, such as my ever-present browsers.

Part of the power of emacs is the navigation and paradigm: cursors zipping around, sophisticated kill-ring and undo support, interactive searching, frames and windows, etc. And all of this within a keyboard-driven interface. So when done right there are some exceptional wrappers/interfaces. Let’s focus on things that are actually just an emacs interface over facilitiers provided by other programs/apis – not just emacs replacements. Below are some superb examples that I find superb:

This is the second of a 2-part series of articles.1 It was updated 2021.005.24 to add the :servercert option to the openconnect command. The sundries of just handling arguments and options2 was alone so annoying in Bash that I finally used it as an excuse to play with Babashka3, which I’ve been watching eagerly for quite a while. The script itself is small while providing niceties that would have taken much longer, and also more lines of code, to implement in Bash.

Bypassing proprietary GUI for VPN connection was a very productive idea, and using OpenConnect to replace the Cisco AnyConnect client which was continually breaking for me proved nice, and provided a nice1 command-line interface to make it scriptable. This is part of a series2 of articles because making something even as trivial as an API wrapper in Bash, gave me a mortifying glimpse of the antiquity of Bash. So after this article, check out the re-work in Babashka, a fast and much better designed interpreter that works as a shell script.

There has been recent discussion about emacs for text editing and it got me thinking; I use emacs for a lot of non-code text editing and here are some features I use all the time that lead me to consider emacs good at text-editing. I’ll separate them into built-in and external library categories. What would you add to this list for things that help with raw text-editing (not IDE-like programming features)?

Some of my Clojure deployments are using our old deployment method, which uses immutant, but it’s deprecated and fails due to an old dependency requiring java 8-. So switch to java 18 like (assuming it’s installed) like this: sudo update-alternatives --config java Resources

I accidentally1* replaced my menubar in KDE2 and the unintended side-effect was that I couldn’t hit the Windows key (super) and have it bring up the helpful menu and search anymore. A little bit of searching around made the answer easy; apparently, binding to Meta+F1 results in the same thing as just meta. Beautiful! Resources Answer found on askubuntu: https://askubuntu.com/questions/246886/how-do-i-open-the-application-launcher-on-kde-with-just-the-meta-windows-key/961407#961407 Footnotes 1 Well, it was on purpose, but I didn’t know it would have that effect

The Problem I have text in Cyrillic and need to replace individual characters with their transliteration. I have a tiny json of the mappings: {"в": "v","а": "a","ф": "f","ё": "yo","д": "d","ж": "zh","ы": "y","э": "e","л": "l","щ": "shch","я": "ya","й": "j","у": "u","н": "n","г": "g","с": "s","п": "p","ч": "ch","б": "b","х": "kh","е": "ye","ъ": "\"","з": "z","ю": "yu","ь": "'","ш": "sh","о": "o","к": "k","и": "i","ц": "ts","м": "m","т": "t","р": "r"} And I have a number of files that contain lists with entries like

I now have a perfect use for the rarely-used numpad! Because I have three monitors connected and am an exwm/winum user to navigate all those screens from the keyboard, I have bound that rarely-used numpad to quickly allow for switching between screens, up to 9 (I am not sure my brain could handle more than 9 decisions on viewports, anyway…). The magic is that numpad numbers are a different keycodde than the normal numberline at the top of the keyboard.

I recently shuffled things with my office and found that I have hardware and ports for a third monitor to connect to my exwm setup. So, without further ado, how to get it going and registered with Linux/EXWM? Edit [2022-01-02 Sun] an easier way with arandr Downloading and installing arandr made this whole configuration much simpler than using the raw randr output. I finally made the jump when I was receiving an error at my attempts to load it manually: xrandr: Configure crtc 2 failed.