Irreal

Sacha Chua has a really nice post on dictating into Emacs. She starts by quoting Matt Weber on how he writes better than he speaks. Chua can relate and so can I. We both feel the same way. As I’ve said before, “…my written thoughts are always much better organized than my spoken ones…”.

Being who she is, Chua resolved to fix this by arranging to dictate her posts into Emacs. As you can imagine, she encountered all sorts of problems along the way but was mainly able to find solutions for them. You can check her post—and Weber’s—to see how they’re doing that.

When I read Chua’s post, I thought, “maybe I should do that too” but then I realized that I don’t want to dictate my text. The truth is, I enjoy writing a lot more than I do speaking and I especially enjoy writing with Emacs. Although it’s not always obvious, I do a lot of revising on my posts as I write them and I usually try to make a final editing pass at least one day after I’ve written them. Speaking, on the other hands, feels more like “one and done” to me. I know that I could dictate a post and then edit the result but it’s not the same. And in any event, as I say, I enjoy writing a lot more than I enjoy talking.

I suppose, as Chua says, the day may come when ever encroaching old age, disease, or accident may make typing hard or impossible and I may be forced to consider dictation but until then, I’m happy to continue typing my text.

As you all know by now, I really hate being spied on by web sites and other on-line entities. I’m pretty sure this misbehavior won’t be legal much longer but I’m equally sure that the on-line advertising industry won’t go gentle into that good night and will find ways to nibble around the edges of whatever laws get passed.

Happily, there’s Magic Lasso which pretty much solves the problem for Safari users. That would be the end of the story except that I use XWidgets with mu4e to read HTML emails and Elfeed entries through the wonderful elfeed-webkit. They work nicely but now Magic Lasso is no longer filtering their content so cookies and trackers are being accumulated. For the longest time I couldn’t find where they were being stored. I finally stumbled on its location and discovered that it was a simple text file that could simply be deleted.

The problem was that I had to remember to do it and more specifically, where the file was located. I finally stopped being stupid and wrote a simple function to delete the file:

(defun jcs-kill-cookies ()
  "Delete the cookies from Webkit"
  (interactive)
  (delete-file ".emacs.d/url/cookies")
  (message "Cookies deleted."))

It’s almost too simple to bother showing.

While I was at it, I also called jcs-kill-cookies when I quit elfeed so I don’t have to remember to do it manually. All of this is trivial, of course, but it’s another example of sanding down your workflow to make it as simple as possible. Now things pretty much take care of themselves. I suppose I should figure out a way to delete cookies after email too but for now I’m happy that the problem is mostly solved.

Randy Ridenour has an interesting post about debugging your init file. The main problem, he says, is that he sometimes makes a change that results in unbalanced parentheses. Often he doesn’t discover this until the next time he reboots Emacs, something he doesn’t do often.

He says that his usual method for finding the problem was to do what amounts to a binary search on his init file: He comments out half the init file. If the problem occurs, he repeats the process with the commented potion; otherwise he continues with the uncommented half. But then he discovered the built-in function check-parens that checks for unbalanced delimiters in the current buffer. That’s a nifty solution to Ridenour’s problem that I didn’t know about. Another tool in the toolbox.

The other thing about his post is that it reminded me of a package I wrote about in 2015 from Artur Malabarba: elisp-bug-hunter. I haven’t used it in a while but every time I do, it works perfectly and invariably finds the error often without any further action. What it does is automate the binary search that Ridenour used to hunt down his unbalanced parentheses but it works for any problem.

If the problem throws an error, elisp-bug-hunter will find it without any user input but for more complicated situations, you can specify a predicate to indicate whether the current run succeeded or not. I load it early in my init so it will be available if there is a problem.

So the take away from this post is two really useful debugging tools: check-parens for finding unbalanced delimiters and elisp-debug-hunter. Everyone should know these tools.