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

Sometimes in emacs nil is not punned well enough. I found this when using Telephone Line, when the crucial problem is that nil can’t be construed as a string (why isn’t it the empty string when strings are wanted?). Error during redisplay: (eval (telephone-line-add-subseparators ‘((lambda (face) (telephone-line-raw (if (telephone-line-selected-window-active) (progn (propertize battery-mode-line-string ‘mouse-face ‘(:box 1))))))) telephone-line-cubed-hollow-left ‘evil)) signaled (wrong-type-argument stringp nil) [36 times] I fixed this manually with some extra code, when writing such cruft feels like a slight against lisps:

Someday I’ll get around to writing about code quality in elisp, but for now I don’t know it well enough to know idioms and avoid code-smell. Orgmode has a massive code-base and the documentation has a hard-time keeping up, so I asked, How is the following code, aimed at getting the list of header tags and making them into a comma-separated string? org-get-tags didn’t work because I needed to support when the cursor is in the text of an entry, not just on the headline.

Until recently I was well-served by now-derelict url-shortener which worked well. It’s a cool library – very general, supporting a variety of shortening options. But when it broke, it was annoyingly complex to fix. Plus, I needed the excuse to sharpen my elisp skills a bit. The result is below. I learned a lot of good things (big thanks to the Reddit emacs community), including: Using defcustom to create customs groups for use in emacs’ nice customization tooling Utilizing url-build-query-string to build my… well, you know.

I start with a list with a bunch of entries like this: newsletter W02 newsletter W02 newsletter W02 newsletter W02 EDIT: New Solutions It turns out that emacs automatically initializes a variable that tracks how many interations your replacement function has made, and in lisp mode you can get to it with \#. This way, the single line necessary to number all my newsletters becomes this: W\(02\) → W\,(format "%02d" (+ 4 \#))) and, of course, you can adjust that 4 to whatever you need it to be for your starting digit.

If you work much with the Orgmode agenda you soon find that you can have a huge amount of appointments and todo tasks to deal with. You can sort these by putting tags on the, either straight from the agenda view (with :) or in the actual org file (with C-c while point is over a headline). You can then use those tags to filter and search your agenda (from agenda view, with / and \ followed by TAB).

If you work much with the Orgmode agenda you soon find that you can have a huge amount of appointments and todo tasks to deal with. You can sort these by putting tags on the, either straight from the agenda view (with :) or in the actual org file (with C-c while point is over a headline). You can then use those tags to filter and search your agenda (from agenda view, with / and \ followed by TAB).