I want to use the capture module of org-mode to create a data base of new words that I want to learn, and then use the drill module to learn them (flash cards style).
In my org-capture-templates I added the following:
("v" "Vocabulary" entry
(file+headline (concat org-directory "/vocab.org")
"Vocabulary")
"* Word :drill:\n%^ \n** Answer \n%^")
This is a rather naive template which I borrowed from here. It works fine but it is too limited. Unfortunately I'm rather new to elisp and I don't know how to improve it.
I think the above template has to be improved in the following there aspects:
Headline Currently the first input string is the (new) word and the headline is fixed. How can the headline be the same (input) word? I think that the following result is desirable:
* Vocabulary
** Foo :drill:
Foo
*** Answer
What is foo
Actually an even better way would be to have 3 input strings.
The new word (for example foo) which will be the headline.
If the second is empty, then it gets the same string as (1). Otherwise, concatenates the string to the one from (1). E.g. having as second input bar would yield foo bar. This will be the content of the entry.
The word's definition which should come in the answer sub-headline.
Duplications (see again this) If at some later point I try to capture foo again, I would like to know it, and be directed to edit the already existing entry - skipping all the inputs.
Sorting After capturing I think it would be nice to sort the list of words. This should not be too hard given that the headline of each entry is the word itself. In this case one can probably use the org-sort-entries function.
I know this is a rather big questions but I also think that if it can be solved here it will be of great use to many users.
Edits:
Using #juan_g suggestions, I improved my template and now it is:
("v" "Vocabulary" entry
(file+headline (concat org-directory "/vocab.org")
"Vocabulary")
"* %^{The word} :drill:\n %t\n %^{Extended word (may be empty)} \n** Answer \n%^{The definition}")
I didn't manage to set the default value of the second input to be the 1st one. I tried something like %^{Extended word (may be empty)|%\1} but it returns ^A which is not helpful.
In any case, this improved version seems to be already usable.
About the input question, in Org Mode Manual: 9.1.3.2 Template expansion, there is the %\1 special escape code:
%\n Insert the text entered at the nth %^{prompt}, where n a number, starting from 1.
The duplications question probably would need some Emacs Lisp coding.
For sorting, see C-c ^ (org-sort).
BTW, org-drill seems indeed a really interesting package, based on SuperMemo's spaced repetition algorithms.
You need an extra "\", therefore %\\1 works as expected.
Related
I love Emacs and Org-Mode. But I can only stand to use Org Mode in the clean view (or whatever it's called - with org-indent-mode on).
My problem is that I often want to use headers that don't have a bullet in front of them. I want one asterisk to be the start of the list, not the header.
Example:
List 1
List 2
Header 1
List 3
List 4
But when I try to do this, Header 1 gets indented to the level of List 2.
I know just turning off org-indent-mode and getting used to that is one solution. But is there a way to reset the indentation for Header 1?
The things you are talking about changing are pretty fundamental to org-mode; basically you are trying to change the org-mode syntax. The reason why Header 1 in your example is not being dedented, is that org-mode does not see it as a headline, because headlines by definition start with leading stars. Also, while it is technically supported to use * to identify a plain list item, this is not recommended, and can cause some unexpected behavior (see footnote 1 here).
That being said, you can have some control over the appearance of headlines. For example, you can use the org-bullets package. You can then define the bullets to use in place of * like this:
(setq org-bullets-bullet-list
'("◉" "◎" "⚫" "○" "►" "◇"))
which will define the bullets used for the first six levels of headlines. You can replace the bullets in that list with other utf-8 symbols, and you can even use " " as one of the symbols, so that your Headlines will be preceded by a single space. However, note that this only affects the way headlines are displayed; they will still be preceded by * in the actual file.
I know it is not very helpful, but my overall suggestion would be to stick with the org-mode syntax if you want to use org-mode, i.e., use a structure like this:
- List one
- List two
* Header 1
- List three
- List four
with * starting a headline, and - starting a plain list. Since org-mode files are just plain text, the magic of that mode depends heavily on those files having a set structure. In my own experience, if you try to change that structure (another example is changing timestamp formats), it will cause more headaches than it relieves, and cause a lot of the functionality that makes org-mode so great to break.
Just as a side note: I prefer a cleaner view as well, and one option I like to enable in addition to org-indent-mode is (setq org-hide-leading-stars t), which will display only a single star/bullet per headline (although the leading stars will still be present in the actual text file).
I'm making a custom .tmLanguage file to highlight the syntax I'm using correctly and generally make coding with it easier. I'm almost done, and I got the autocompletion working using a .sublime-completions file.
There's just one minor flaw I'd like to change. I have a pretty long list of functions, and almost all of them contain an abbreviation of the word 'parameter', PAR. When I start typing that word, the following are all in the list of completions:
PAR command
DEFPAR command
JDATA command (because the description contains PAR)
SPAA command (because there's a P in the command and an A and an R in the description)
What I want is only for the commands that begin with PAR to show up, so from the list above, only the first item.
So, like this:
In other words, I want the completions to show up based on the literal string I'm typing, and only from the trigger part of my completions file, before the \t only.
That completions file looks like this:
Highlighted in orange is what I want my completions list to be based on.
I hope this is understandable. Any help is greatly appreciated.
This is not possible. By design Sublime's autocomplete feature uses fuzzy matching, so if there are a number of options that all contain the same pattern, but you don't quite remember which one you want, you can type the pattern and have all of the options available. The more you type, the smaller the list of possible options becomes. This is a good thing®, otherwise you'd have to remember the exact command you're looking for, which kind of defeats the purpose of autocomplete and code hinting.
For the past year and a half, I've maintained a monolithic buffer in Org Mode for my engineering notes with my current employer. Despite containing mostly pointers to other documents, this file has become quite large by human standards (48,290 lines of text), while remaining trivially searchable and editable through programmatic means (read: grep and Org Mode tag search).
One thing bothers me, though. When I perform a tag search using Org Mode 6.33x, Org's sparse tree view retains the folded representation of unmatched trees within the buffer (that is, content preceded by a single asterisk, *). This is generally useful for smaller buffers or those better organized into a single tree with multiple branches. However, this doesn't work especially well for documentation where each new tree is generated chronologically, one for each day, as I've been doing.
.
Before I continue, I'll note that my workaround is inherent in what I've just asked, as are the obvious alterations in my documentation habits with this buffer. However, the following questions remain:
1) Why does Org Mode organize trees in this manner when performing sparse tag searching? The technical details are self-evident, the UX decisions less so.
2) If I wished to correct this issue with a script written in Emacs Lisp, what hooks and commands should I explore in more detail to restructure the document view? Writing overrides for the standard commands (for example, org-match-sparse-tree) is already self-evident.
.
Thank you in advance.
As you already noticed the problem only affects the top level headings. The good thing is that in org-mode you can demote easily all headings with simple keystrokes. This way you can avoid the problem. Also cleaning up afterwards are just some simple keystrokes.
Step-by-step instructions:
Mark the full buffer
Call M-right (for outline-demote)
Input * root\n at the beginning of the file
Now, build up your subtree and do what you want with it.
When done you can remove * root\n at the beginning of the file and promote the headings again with M-left
I have got the impression that you can even leave the overall-heading where it is for your application.
I started using defaultcontent.el to fill newly-created buffers with content.
Apparently this module is not widely used. I think there are 3 people including me and the author who use it, because when I do a search on it, my published emacs.el comes up as the first hit.
Despite that, I find it useful. I specify a template for each file type, and every time I create a new file of that type (or extension), it gets filled with the content in the template file. The template supports well-known tags set off with "##", that get substituted at runtime:
AUTHOR inserts the user name;
DATE (obvious);
FILENAME, inserts the name of the file being created;
ENV(xxx), inserts the value of the environment variable xxx;
and there are a few other tags.
eg, whereever ##AUTHOR## is found in the template, it gets replaced with your user name at runtime in the newly created file.
ok, this isn't an advertisement for defaultcontent.el, I just thought I'd explain it a little.
here's the question.
One of the well-known tags in the template is LISP - it purports to run arbitrary elisp code to generate content to insert into the new buffer. (usage: ##LISP(lisp content here)##). It depends on a function read-closest-sexp, which I guess would just read the sexp at point.
I can't find this function. It's not included in defaultcontent.el, and I'm not up enough on elisp to create it easily. I looked in emacs-lisp\lisp.el for hints but it seemed non obvious.
Question: how can I read the sexp at point into a variable?
I'm guessing this is 2 lines in elisp...
Try thing-at-point:
(require 'thingatpt)
(let ((sexp (thing-at-point 'sexp)))
(do-something-with sexp))
Indeed two lines if you ignore the do-something :)
I've built a number of work-specific helper functions that could be useful for other members of my team&mdash. But I've written them all in Emacs' Elisp, and getting them to convert from Notepad++ is NOT going to happen.
So, I'm thinking convert the functions to Perl. No problem.
Except I use ido-completion all the time to limit responses:
(setq client (ido-completing-read "Select a Client: " '("IniTrade" "HedgeCorp" "GlobalTech" "OCP") nil t))
EDIT: ido-completing-read is similar to completing-read, except that all the options are visible, and can be selected via cycling [arrow-keys, usually] or typing-completion. In the example above, the prompt would look like
Select a Client: {IniTrade | HedgeCorp | GlobalTech | OCP}
selections can be made on the left-most item by hitting RET, or by partial typing (in this case, the first letters are all unique, so that's all that would be needed, and the matching item would become the left-most).
nil in the example is an unused param, but "t" requires an exact match -- eg, the user must make one of the selections. The function returns a string, such as "IniTrade".
My "helper functions" are for internal needs -- opening a particular error log, restoring a batch to the server, etc. For these operations, the user needs to specify test or production environment, client, stage, etc. In almost all cases, these are string selections that are used for building another shell command. If a numeric item is returned, that could in turn be re-translated to a string -- but since the selections are usually the required string, it would be nice if that step could be skipped. [end EDIT]
Is there a Perl equivalent? I've looked at Term::Prompt which offers up a numbered-menu... closest I've found. That's not as pretty as ido-completion, and I'd still have to convert a numeric-result backwards to a string (not a major issue; just annoying).
While composing this, I noticed I used the term 'menu', so did some more searching and came up with Term::Menus. I haven't tried this one yet.
Term::ReadLine may do what you're looking for, though it's probably more like 'completing-read' than 'ido-completing-read'.