Emacs Carnival: This year, I'll …
The theme for this month’s emacs carnival, hosted by Christian Tietze, is this year, I’ll…. I’ve not written for any of the indieweb carnivals. But since I’m all in on developing elaborate plans for what I’m going to do, this seems like a good time to jump in. This year, I’m thinking, I’m going to move beyond making plans to doing more with those plans. Moreover, I think that emacs will be central to my doing that. So, here’s what I’m going to do:
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I’m going to clean up and annotate my emacs init file. I started using emacs almost 30 years ago, when I knew much less about software than I know now. I added to my emacs config willy-nilly. Early on, I was foolish enough simply to copy and paste something from the web that looked interesting. More recently, I at least took the time to understand what the code did, even if I didn’t understand how it did it. At some point, I moved everything into an org file that generates the init.el file. This year, I’ll go through the org file systematically (probably in chunks rather than all at once), settle on what I want to use, eliminate what I’m not using, and comment on each entry that remains. Having done that, I might even feel confident enough to post it on the web.
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I’m going to do a better job with back-ups and version control.
- For back-ups, I moved away from Dropbox to a self-hosted Nextcloud instance a couple of years ago; I also started encrypting and backing up files to another off-site cloud server when I thought to do it. That’s worked pretty well, but I’m now looking into privacy-first cloud services hosted outside the United States. This year, I’ll settle on one of those services and build the back-up routine into my regular work.
- I’ve been using git/magit for years. However, I commit locally and push to a remote server only when I think of it, and I don’t think of it often enough. Moreover, when I first set up the repositories it didn’t occur to me to be more selective about which files to commit. I’ve made something of a head start on this goal — this past week I refined the .gitignore files for the different repositories and removed a lot of files from repositories (pdfs, etc) that don’t need to be there. With some help from Chris Maiorana (see here and here), I have clues in the emacs mode line that are helping to foster good habits. And magit-list-repositories pulls things together for me when I want to check things out. This year, I’ll keep this going.
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I’m going to develop structures and strategies not only to take good notes but also to make good use of those notes in my writing and reflections. I wrote a bit over a year ago about my adoption of denote as a note-taking tool. I now have over 5,000 notes (many of them imported from org-roam and vanilla org-mode), and I’ve made some use of them. But I was stung more than a little when I read Joan Westenberg’s counsel to simplify things:
…if your fundamental issue is that you have 1,500 notes and haven’t turned them into anything? If you keep accumulating inputs without producing outputs? If you’re perpetually “getting organized” but never actually organized? The problem isn’t that you lack a sufficiently powerful tool. The problem is you.
Ouch. In my defense, I wouldn’t say that I’ve not turned my notes into anything. I’ve made use of many of them. But I want to do more, even at the risk of burying myself in “perpetually getting organized.” What I’ve done with the notes makes it clear to me that there’s richness there. This year, I’ll develop and implement a more strategic and efficient way of mining that richness.
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Finally, I’m going to learn more elisp. I know just a bit, but I think it’s fair to say that I know just enough to be dangerous. Even when I’ve put something together that works, it’s taken far too long, with too many false starts, to write well functioning code. It’s time to be more systematic. This year, I’ll begin by working through Prot’s emacs lisp elements book.
Even though I’ve put learning elisp fourth on the list, I really see it as fundamental to what I’m envisioning here. I’m motivated to work on elisp because I’m convinced that knowing more about it will help me to think through and carry out the other things on this list. Even more than that, I suspect that learning elisp will inspire me to realize even more things that I want to do. And what could possibly be better than that?
