Emacs Berlin July 2014

There are six of us \o/. Thank you Contentful and Ticketsolve for drinks and pizza, respectively.

We start off with an impromptu discussion about doing email in Emacs. Til and Andy talked again a bit about not-much.

Apparently our Mailman based mailing list was added to gmane, so it can be accessed as a mailing list.

• usenet/newsgroups in emacs
• LATeX
• org-mode / org-babel / literate programming
• reset script

Demonstration of how to pass data from a list or table, into an org-mode code block, and then pass the resulting data to a next code block, possibly in a different language.

topics.sort.map {|x| [x, x.length]}

LATeX	5
org-mode / org-babel / literate programming	43
reset script	12
usenet/newsgroups in emacs	26

echo $topics

Somebody asked if it would be possible to include and run tests this way, let's try it:

def foo(x)
  x*x
end

require 'rspec/autorun'

describe 'foo' do
  it 'should square' do
    expect(foo(3)).to be 9
  end
end

Finished in 0.00061 seconds
1 example, 0 failures

The interesting org-mode options here are :var, to pass values into variables, :results, to determine how the output from the program should be treated, and :exports, to determine if the code, results, or both are exported.

:results can take these values

• silent
• output
• value
• table
• drawer
• replace
• append
• pp
• verbatim
• raw
• org

:exports can be set to

• code (usually default)
• results
• both
• none

Everybody watched closely as we got a demo reading newsgroups, mailing lists, rss feeds, all in gnus.

This led us on some tangents, we learned about Conkeror, the browser that behaves like emacs, key bindings, org-capture integration, the works. We founded out about the org-mode tutorial by Brent Hanson, which looks mighty promising.

Org-mode also has a companion app for mobile. It turned out some people had used this before, but were happy to find out things improve all the time and it's worth a second look.

It's always interesting to see how people use emacs for different applications. We got a demonstration of LATeX integration, looking up references in BibTeX, previewing documents, and some little editing tricks that make life easier.

Also interesting was to see someone who actively uses the menu bar, which in this case seemed to make plenty of sense.