Configurations for beautifying Emacs org mode

Procrastination, the time-wasting and beating-around-the-bush type of behavior before any progress could be made on the real important things, is very typical among many people, including me.

I found that visiting my favorite websites before I start working is almost irresistible.

From Matt Might’s Productivity tips, tricks and hacks for academics and Boost your productivity: Cripple your technology, I learned about LeechBlock, which is perfect to block my favorite websites during hours I am supposed to work.

I can set up what to block (for example, http://www.cnn.com), when to block (e.g., 0900-1730), how long to block (e.g., 1 min in every hour), what to show when a page is blocked (for me, I used the Journal of Medical Physics website for most recent articles)

To protect the disciplines from being violated, the LeechBlock is actually designed in a quite tricky and clever way:

• I can set up password to the Option dialog box of LeechBlock for someone else, like my wife, to help them fighting procrastination together;
• or I can let LeechBlock to require me to type in a 64 or 32 digit long randomly generated combination of letters and numbers before accessing its Option dialog box, which is really a pain. (see the pictures below)

When the path toward surfing online becomes more difficult to approach, it becomes easier for me to resist the desire to do so.

BTW, I don’t think I need to block IE, because I feel that using IE to surf online is as painful as by-passing the control of LeechBlock :-).

I have been spending time to tweak and design my own color themes since 2007, and published previous
versions (switch-color-theme-matlab-latex.el) on this blog (https://zhangda.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/my-own-emacs-color-themes-i-use-f6-c-u-f6-to-switch-between-them/).

I think now it’s a good time to move the package to the more popular host, marmalade, so anyone interested could use the
emacs package management tool (package.el) to obtain it. If marmalade is included in your package-archives list (see the
code below for this), you should be able to see the package “color-theme-dawn-night” after firing up list-packages.

(setq package-archives '(("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")
                          ("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/")))

You can also download the color-theme-dawn-night.el via http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/color-theme-dawn-night-1.0.el

Here is a brief description of the color theme:

color-theme-dawn-night.el contains two customized color themes:

(1) cl-night
is a dark-background theme, designed for normal programming,
org/muse mode editing and LaTeX editing. The foreground colors are designed
to be somewhat aqua, with a bright and warm feeling.

(2) cl-dawn
is designed with a bright and warm background. The color setup was inspired
by the light yellow background and visual effect of the Matlab programming
environment.

Call function switch-dawn-night to change to the dark face, and call C-u
switch-dawn-night for the bright background face.

Install the theme:
(1)Place color-theme-dawn-night.el into your load-path.

(2)In your .emacs, add:
(require ‘color-theme-dawn-night)

(3)optional keybinding
(global-set-key [f6] ‘switch-dawn-night)

One good thing to tweak the color theme is that you can have a full control of the appearance of Emacs. For example, I adjusted different faces of tabbar to make them appear uniformly and as if in a real tabbar system.  Another example is the color of the line numbers on the left fringe — I made them slim and in a “dark gold” color.

Here are some screen shots of my color themes.

color theme dawn night:  night

color theme dawn night:  dawn

I have a dedicated folder containing all my notes, and IT, as one of the most important topic, is a sub-folder. Here is the tree structure of the IT folder.

IT
|-- Acrobat
|   `-- startup_script.org
|-- Emacs
|   |-- debug-lisp.html
|   |-- debug-lisp.org
|   |-- emergency-elisp-steve-yegge.html
|   |-- emergency-lisp.html
|   |-- emergency-lisp.org
|   |-- lisp-programming.html
|   `-- lisp-programming.org
|-- Excel
|   `-- group_formatting.txt
|-- Firefox
|   `-- Firefox Recovery Key.html
|-- HPC
|   |-- Setup_GATE_tool_chain_20100902.lnk
|   |-- bashrc_setup
|   |   `-- bashrc_HPC
|   |-- efficient-way-of-working.html
|   |-- efficient-way-of-working.org
|   |-- tricks.html
|   |-- tricks.org
|   `-- xinhua-hps-bashrc
|-- Linux_commands
|   |-- cat.html
|   |-- cat.org
|   |-- count_files_in_dir.html
|   |-- count_files_in_dir.org
|   |-- find.html
|   |-- find.org
|   |-- find.txt
|   |-- linux_commands.html
|   |-- linux_commands.org
|   |-- scp.txt
|   |-- sed.html
|   |-- sed.org
|   |-- sed_commandline_editor.txt
|   `-- tar.txt
|-- VBA
|   `-- VBA_study_notes.org
|-- X11_cygwin
|   `-- startxwin_of_Xinhua.sh
|-- c++
|   |-- ACM-UNIX-Tutorial-Compiler.html
|   |-- C++Quick-Ref.html
|   |-- C++Std-Lib-Quick-Ref.html
|   |-- Makefiles-short.html
|   `-- gcc-intro.html
|-- cygwin
|   `-- how_to_write_.bashrc_correctly_for_cygwin.org
|-- g++
|   |-- g++compiling.txt
|   |-- gcc&g++.html
|   |-- gcc&g++.org
|   `-- note.txt
|-- gdb
|   |-- debug-tools.html
|   `-- debug-tools.org
|-- latex
|   |-- cygwin_latex_problem.html
|   |-- cygwin_latex_problem.org
|   |-- sumatrapdf-make-emacs_integration.html
|   `-- sumatrapdf-make-emacs_integration.org
|-- make
|   |-- note.html
|   `-- note.org
|-- python
|   |-- math.html
|   `-- math.org
|-- shell
|   |-- bashrc_and_others.htm
|   |-- bashrc_and_others_files
|   |   |-- css_2ad809fd00fb2c1d453a0d2b83bf7b57.css
|   |   |-- ga.js
|   |   |-- gumdrop.png
|   |   |-- index2.jpg
|   |   |-- js_957ff3e13d89532193faea68e21100f9.js
|   |   |-- js_c59e4e9c853d32975fd97f7345ddbabe.js
|   |   `-- show_ads.js
|   |-- notes.html
|   |-- notes.org
|   |-- programming.html
|   `-- programming.org
`-- ssh
    |-- How to set up SSH (for the beginner).pdf
    |-- no_password_access.html
    `-- no_password_access.org

As can be seen, almost every note has two forms: one org file, one html file. The reason that I am showing the IT folder here is to show how I organize my notes through a tree structure representing the hierarchy of related topics.

When I want to take a note, I always think first where does the topic fit into my hierarchal folder systems. Take the Linux command sed for example, I feel like it should be put in IT/Linux_commands/. Thus I enter a emacs function “notes”, which is defined in my .emacs file as

(defun notes ()
  "Switch to my work dir."
   (interactive)
   (find-file "<PATH TO MY NOTES>")
   )

This quickly bring me to my top level dir of all notes, in a dired buffer. Then I quickly follow the hierarchy to IT/Linux_commands/, where I open a file called “sed.org” via [C-x C-f sed.org]

When the file is open, I call another function “make-header”, which I customized from header2.el  for my own purpose. The function will generate a file header for me automatically, here is the result for the sed.org:

#+TITLE: sed
#+AUTHOR: Da Zhang
#+OPTIONS: H:2 num:t toc:nil
#+OPTIONS: ^:nil
#+OPTIONS: <:nil todo:nil *:t ^:{} @:t ::t |:t TeX:t
#how to change image size: #+attr_html: width="40%"

Basically it will do the following:

1. set the title to be the file name of the buffer, without its parent path and extension;
2. set up the options for org mode
3. insert a note for myself about changing the picture size in org-to-html export, which I still did not remember

Then I just start writing down the quick note about sed.

* how to use variable in a sed: use "" instead of ''
CF http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/14085-how-can-i-use-variable-sed.html
 - example: note the $1 in the double quotes of the 2nd sed
ORG-LIST-END-MARKER

function sortcsvp() {
    cat $1 | sed '1d' | tr -d '"' | sort -n -t, -k 1 | sed "1 i  $1, , " > ./sort-by-protocol/$1;
}

In most cases I will use #+begin_src and #+end_src for enclose any code, for better appearance in the html output.

At the end, I will just press C-c C-e to export the entire buffer to html, which I will view more frequently from Firefox.

To conclude, Emacs and org-mode offered me a comfort environment for systematically taking notes, organize them, and exporting them into beautiful html pages.

————————————————————————————————————————————-

Thanks to Irreal’s comment.
Here is something more I want to add about using org to take notes:

(1) the org-html process is almost perfect if you want to include pictures (for example, taken from your smart phone) in the note. Writing a org file that links to the local picture file using the [[][]] structure is so easy and natural. With the html publication, your output note file contains not only text, but also graphics and pictures that makes the note taking more efficient and direct. I used this feature so often that I need to put the following trick into my org header:

#how to change image size: #+attr_html: width="40%"

(2) the hack of header2.el I talked about making is essentially putting the following lines in header2.el:

(defsubst header-org-mode ()
  "Insert \"#+TITLE: ...\" at the beginning of org file."
  (insert "#+TITLE: " (file-name-nondirectory (file-name-sans-extension (buffer-file-name))) "\n") ;; filename only, without dir or extension
  (insert "#+AUTHOR: " (user-full-name) "\n")
  (insert "#+OPTIONS: H:2 num:t toc:nil\n")
  (insert "#+OPTIONS: ^:nil\n")
  (insert "#+OPTIONS: <:nil todo:nil *:t ^:{} @:t ::t |:t TeX:t\n")
  (insert "#how to change image size: #+attr_html: width=\"40%\"\n"))

SumatraPDF integration in LaTeX-Emacs-make tool chain

MAIN=maintex

EPS=img/*.eps

TEX=tomo_spectra.tex 

BIB=da.bib 

REBUILDABLES =  \
*.log   \
*.blg   \
*.bbl   \
*.aux   \
*.lof   \
*.lot   \

LATEXOPTIONS = -src-specials -interaction=nonstopmode

PDFVIEWER = sumatrapdf -reuse-instance -inverse-search "c:\emacs\bin\emacsclientw.exe +%l \"%f\""

BIBDIR = "C:/H/Bib"

BIBOPTIONS = -include-directory=$(BIBDIR)

vpath %.bib /cygdrive/c/H/Bib

viewpdf : $(MAIN).pdf
    $(PDFVIEWER) $(MAIN).pdf &

dvi : $(MAIN).dvi
    yap -1  $(MAIN).dvi

$(MAIN).pdf : $(MAIN).dvi
    pdfclosem $(MAIN).pdf ; dvipdfm $(MAIN).dvi

$(MAIN).dvi : $(MAIN).bbl $(EPS)
    latex $(LATEXOPTIONS) $(MAIN)
        if ( grep 'Rerun' $(MAIN).log > /dev/null ) ; then\
            latex $(LATEXOPTIONS) $(MAIN) ; \
        else :; fi

$(MAIN).bbl : $(TEX)
    rm -f $(MAIN).aux *.bbl; latex $(LATEXOPTIONS) $(MAIN); bibtex $(BIBOPTIONS) $(MAIN) 

clean :
    rm -f $(REBUILDABLES)

(setq TeX-view-program-list
      '(("sumatra" "sumatrapdf -reuse-instance \"%f\"")
        ("Yap" ("yap -1" (mode-io-correlate " -s %n%b") " %o"))
        ("dvips and start" "dvips %d -o && start \"\" %f")
        ("start" "pdfviewm %o")))

(setq TeX-view-program-selection
      '(((output-dvi style-pstricks)
         "dvips and start")
        (output-dvi "Yap")
        (output-pdf "sumatra")
        (output-html "start")))

The set up is a little different from what was described in the above post: I put the following code in my .emacs file:

(require ‘org2blog-autoloads) (setq org2blog/wp-blog-alist ‘((“wordpress” :url “http://username.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php” :username “username” :tags-as-categories nil)))

You have to substitute the “username” with your actual username of wordpress.

To use the org2blog, you can M-x org2blog/wp-login first, and then M-x org2blog/wp-new-entry.