Eat is a terminal emulator for Emacs available in NonGNU ELpa. Eat is much slower than
foot, but faster than term.el. It has some nice features like sixel support, and being
able to send messages to Emacs. It also has some surprising idiosyncrasies which makes
adding Evil key bindings and other modifications challenging.
Last week I worked with over 10,000 files of tabular data, each with about 50,000 rows and
10 columns separated by a '|'. This is the kind of problem that falls in the uncanny
valley between small and biggish data. My goal was to make some quick checks and, if
possible, concatenate the files into a single csv file I could load into Python.
The new Emacs 29 support for tree sitter awesome. Since I'm an evil user, I made a small
package to take advantage of the new facilities. If you are interested, the package is on
GitHub here. From the README:
This package provides some basic additional actions for evil-mode using the new built-in
tree sitter library. The package only works with Emacs 29 or greater. To activate, just
run M-x evil-ts-mode. This was so easy to do, that it hardly merits a package. But perhaps
it will be useful to someone.
I like text emails. To the point that I would argue that html doesn't add significant
value to most messages. But sometimes it does. So I open those messages on my browser.
Unfortunately, snaps cannot access the /temp/ directory, and by default, that's the
location Emacs and mu4e use to save a message before calling the browser. Fortunately, the
default behavior can be easily changed. Better yet, it's easy to leverage that change to
add new actions to mu4e, like quickly converting an email into a pdf.
ProtonVPN provides a GUI and a console application for Linux, but on 2023, it is nearly
unusable. It consumes up to 2 GB of memory idled, drops connections, and fails to
reconnect unless the kill switch is deleted using nmcli. The command line application has
a bizarre dependency on nm-applet, which of course means it cannot be used on a headless
machine. It appears that ProtonVPN is not going to fix this. The solution is to use
ProtonVPN with Wireguard.
December is the season to mail and receive packages. To keep track of them, I create a
TODO item for each package in an Emacs' org file. I make note of the mailing date, the
content of the package, and the tracking number. The advantage of using Emacs is that a
few line of code can make the tracking numbers clickable.