Emacs

Last week we received the worst possible task - we got nursery homework for our 2-year-old. Could we, please, prepare some photos from holidays and send them over1. Now, this could have been worse. They just wanted a number of photos that we could email over with some explanation. In the past this has included printing and sticking too - something that took far longer than we had anticipated. We started this by grabbing a few photos from Google Photos and downloading them....

I started using emacs in 2020 after reading a long-lost article about using org-mode as a blogging platform. It hit at the right time as I was looking for a tool that enabled auto-generated, centralised, todo lists - something that was surprisingly difficult to do at the time.1 I have written quite a bit in the last five year, including a peer reviewed journal article and use Emacs every day in my corporate job, both during my science days but also since my move to IT....

I am a big fan of building tools for your workflows. Here is another quick example. To create these blog posts I need to create a markdown file with some front matter. An example of this is below - indeed this is the front matter for this post. --- author: Timothy Johnson title: Emacs - Quick Blog Function date: 2025-05-27 draft: False featured_image: "" tags: ["Emacs", "personal", "tech"] --- Each time I write a blog I need to do this, I hate duplication of work!...

Very quick one today. Recently I’ve started to feel the need to build out some predefined window pane layouts within emacs. This started when I realised I was spending quite a bit of time flipping between various windows while I was under utilising screen space. Double this with some (forced) time spent in a VSCode for work and seeing what an advantage having a file tree, main code window and terminal would be - even when just playing with text....

Motivation A key task at the moment is individual 1-to-1s/catch-ups. These come around quick, and I often don’t have a huge amount of time to deal set them up. I have stared to tag things in Emacs with peoples name so that I can run queries against my agenda and pull out all tasks that I’ve tagged for someone - a great way to get info to the right people....

Motivation I am doing lots or recruitment at the moment - some weeks it can be near 15-25 % of my time. It is for this reason I wanted to think about my workflow and put in some automation to help me with the process. I am currently living almost exclusively in denote - the fantastic notes package by Prot. The real aim here is to remove as much cognitive load as possible and reduce the amount of time needed in preparation of interviews....

I have heard wonderful things about gptel - the Emacs package that gives an interface to various LLMs. I will admit however I really struggled to get this working using my OpenAI API key with the Docs in their GitHub. Below is a quick guide for anyone else that got stuck - running a Linux machine. First things, get gptel installed - add the below to your config: (use-package gptel :ensure t) (setq gptel-api-key (getenv "OPENAI_API_KEY")) You will notice here we have to specify out OpenAI API key....

When it comes to quickly pulling in images into my org documents, org-download is superb. This package is a critical part of my workflow and I use it daily on my Windows work system. Having a Windows system at work1 means that some of the cool functions that work with org-download do not function due to the limitation put on my by corporate policy. One of those is pasting images from the clipboard....

Intro I wanted to share a quick tool I’ve been using recently to up my writing - emacs-langtool. This is a tool that bring spell and grammar checking tools you would expect in modern word processing suites into Emacs. It is also free, open source and can be run locally without an internet connection. Set-up Download Languagetool and extract it into a folder on your system. Also make sure you have Java installed too....

Intro Change has an energy barrier. To do anything new you need help to get over that hump, make a change, and enjoy the rewards of your new situation. I have written in the past about my efforts to remove distractions by limiting my phone’s functionality with, if I’m being honest, the aim to remove doom-scrolling and short form content. Ideally becoming a more present person who, when they do consume content, consumes high-quality content mindfully....