Welcome to the
System Crafters Newsletter!
Issue #001 - May 11, 2023
by David Wilson
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== Contents ==
1. Introduction
2. Unveiling the New System Crafters Site!
3. Tips of the Week
4. Crafter News
5. Friday's Stream - How I Crafted the New Website with Org Publish
6. Closing
== Introduction ==
Welcome to the first issue of the System Crafters Newsletter!
I am incredibly excited to kick off this new endeavor to provide a crafter-
friendly source of news and articles that I can't easily cover in other places
where I post "content" (I really hate that term).
My goal is to write something new each week to give you a window into my own
system crafting journeys as well as keep you up to date on the news and events
in the System Crafters community and broader Emacs, Guix, and Linux communities.
Since this is the first issue of the newsletter, I'm experimenting with the
layout, organization, and length of content so I'd be very happy to have your
feedback! After reading this issue, reply to this e-mail to let me know what
you think.
* Why plain text?
When I was a teenage Internet user in the mid-90's, I was fascinated by all of
the cool magazines that you could find distributed as .txt files.
Many of them were written by computer hackers and others of ill repute, teaching
you the ways of phone phreaking or social engineering. I'm sure some of you
remember reading Phrack and Cult of the Dead Cow postings from that era.
If not, here's what they looked like:
-> http://phrack.org/issues/1/1.html
-> https://github.com/garetharnold/cultdeadcow/
The aesthetic of those text files was inspiring to me. One aim of mine with
this newsletter is to capture some of the nostalgia of the 90's internet by
delivering you a retro-styled newsletter directly to your inbox every week.
There are two other reasons to use plain text files for this newsletter:
- It's easy to read them inside of Emacs!
If you're using one of the excellent mail clients in Emacs like mu4e, Gnus, or
notmuch, this should be easy! These clients should display the plain text as
plain text.
If you're using a modern e-mail client, these typically don't display plain
text e-mails with a monospace font, so the formatting will look wrong and the
text will not wrap correctly.
My intention is to attach a .txt file for the issue along with each mailing so
that you can load up the issue in the text editor of your choice. I've also
provided a rendered form of the newsletter at a URL at the top of this issue
so that you can open it up in a normal web browser or with Emacs' eww!
- You can't embed pixel trackers in plain text emails
Most mailing list services include pixel trackers to measure analytics about
open rates, click throughs, etc. I wanted to ensure that anyone could feel
comfortable reading this newsletter without feeling that they were being
spied upon.
I hope you enjoy the plain-text goodness of this newsletter! Over time it will
get better with your feedback.
== Unveiling the New System Crafters Site! ==
OK, so it's not really an unveiling since I've already posted links to it in
show notes, on the Fediverse, and in Matrix/IRC already, but now I'm officially
flipping the switch to make it the official systemcrafters.net!
It may not look like a big change on the surface, but I've put a lot of effort
into improving the organization of the site and providing a clear starting point
into the guides and videos about Emacs and Guix. I've also wanted to provide an
RSS feed for a long time and now we finally have one!
-> https://systemcrafters.net/rss/news.xml
The larger goal of this redesign is to put the focus on comprehensive written
guides that I'll be gradually writing and releasing on the site. These will be
much more in-depth than the YouTube video series I've made and they'll also form
the basis for new videos on those topics!
If you want to read more about the details of the website relaunch, you can
check out this news post on the website:
-> https://systemcrafters.net/news/new-systemcrafters-site/
== Tips of the Week ==
* Sorting completed Org Mode tasks under a headline
Here's a quick snippet that might help if you have a lot of TODO items in an
Org file where your DONE tasks are mixed in between them.
This function will move all DONE tasks to the bottom of the top-level heading
where you keep your TODO items:
```
(defun my/org-move-done-tasks-to-bottom ()
"Sort all tasks in the topmost heading by TODO state."
(interactive)
(save-excursion
(while (org-up-heading-safe))
(org-sort-entries nil ?o))
;; Reset the view of TODO items
(org-overview)
(org-show-entry)
(org-show-children))
```
To explain what this code is doing:
- We call `save-excursion` to store the current buffer and cursor position
- `(while (org-up-heading-safe))` moves the cursor to the topmost heading.
I do this because I keep my TODO items under a top-level heading like "Tasks"
- `(org-sort-entries nil ?o)` sorts the Org items under the current heading by
their TODO state order (determined by `org-todo-keywords`)
- The final 3 function calls reset the view of the document so that the TODO
items are collapsed again. I added this because sorting the items caused all
the TODO items to have their contents expanded!
It's also possible to interactively run the `org-sort-entries` command to get
a full menu to sort Org items in different ways, but I wrote the above function
to streamline my own task management workflow.
If you know of a better way to do this, please let me know!
* Editing plain text files with a specific "fill width"
This may not be something you need to do very often, but it's useful when you
need it!
While writing this newsletter, I needed a way to visually see how "wide" the
text is to ensure I stay within the 80 column width that I'm designing for. It
turns out that Emacs provides `display-fill-column-indicator-mode`, a nice minor
mode that draws a line in your buffer where your `fill-column` cuts off.
You can also turn on `auto-fill-mode` to automatically wrap paragraph text to
fit within the specified width!
Here's a quick configuration snippet you can use to enable these modes
automatically in text buffers:
```
(defun my/setup-text-mode ()
(when (eql major-mode #'text-mode))
(display-fill-column-indicator-mode 1)
(auto-fill-mode 1))
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'my/setup-text-mode)
```
I added a check to ensure we're in `text-mode` because apparently `org-mode`
ultimately derives from `text-mode` meaning that the `text-mode-hook` gets
triggered when you open an Org Mode file!
Another couple of useful commands for editing fixed-width text documents:
- `fill-paragraph` (bound to `M-q`): Reformats the text in the current paragraph
to fit
- `center-region`: Select a region of text and run this command to center it
within your `fill-width`. Great for centering ASCII boxes
+------------+
| like this! |
+------------+
== Crafter News ==
Here are some interesting news items in the broader sphere of system crafting:
* Check out the new Emacs package `devil` by Susam
Recently we've been discussing modal editing and keybinding efficiency packages
like `god-mode`, `meow` and more. A new contender has just stepped into the
ring, it's called Devil!
-> https://github.com/susam/devil
It seems to be a new take on god-mode's model, possibly with some inspiration
from other similar packages. It looks interesting, I'm hoping to try it soon
either on stream or in my personal configuration hacking.
* Try out the latest Crafted Emacs v2 Alpha changes!
Jeff Bowman, the Crafted Emacs maintainer, has been working hard on a new design
for the configuration over the past few months with the goal of making it easier
to adopt while you need it and abandon once you've crafted your own Emacs
configuration!
The overall goal is to give you control over your own init.el and early-init.el
files instead of forcing you to use Crafted's own framework for configuration.
We hope this will give you more freedom to choose how you use the pre-configured
modules that it provides!
Please give the latest changes a try and let Jeff know your thoughts by filing
issues at the Crafted Emacs GitHub repository:
-> https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs
More information can be found about this effort on Jeff's blog:
-> https://jeffbowman.writeas.com/crafted-emacs-update-71lr
-> https://jeffbowman.writeas.com/crafted-emacs-update-for-march-2023
-> https://jeffbowman.writeas.com/crafted-emacs-v2-alpha-update-for-april-2023
* GNU Guix has a ton of new package updates thanks to core-updates branch!
After an extremely long time in development, the `core-updates` branch of the
main GNU Guix channel has finally been merged on April 25, 2023!
-> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=c919bfefd98bf2e29549539b4e28e6dc2a8a6f32
-> https://lists.gnu.org/r/guix-devel/2023-04/msg00357.html
This branch brings in a ton of package updates that were previously unavailable
to the main Guix channel because there were interrelated dependencies that all
needed to be updated simulaneously to avoid disrupting users.
Lots of new core libraries, compilers, development platforms, window managers,
and more have been updated as a result of this merge. If you're a Sway user
like me, you'll be happy to know that we finally have a build of Sway 1.8!
If you haven't pulled the main Guix channel in a while, now is a great time to
do so!
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== Friday's Stream - How I Crafted the New Website with Org Publish ==
In tomorrow's stream, I'll walk you through the `publish.el` script for the
new systemcrafters.net and explain what I learned while adding features like
generated index pages, RSS feeds, and custom HTML blocks. I'll also show you
how I use Emacs Lisp to template the website layout!
The stream will go live at Friday, May 12th at 6PM EEST (UTC+3),
check your local time on this page: https://time.is/compare/1800_in_Athens
You can find the stream at these URLs:
-> https://youtube.com/live/atKDa510qaM
-> https://twitch.tv/SystemCrafters
-> https://systemcrafters.net/live-streams/may-12-2023/
== Closing ==
I hope you enjoyed this first issue of the System Crafters Newsletter! Like I
said before, I want to improve and streamline the content as time goes on so
please send me your thoughts and feedback by replying directly to this e-mail!
Until next time, Happy Hacking!
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David Wilson
[email protected]