hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3918.txt

Episode: 3918
Title: HPR3918: Emacs package curation, part 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3918/hpr3918.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:18:31

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3918 for Wednesday the 9th of August 2023.
Today's show is entitled, In Max Package Curation Part 3.
It is hosted by DNT and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, let's go through every single package installed in my EMAX configuration,
the last one.
Alright, let's move on to the last file, which is in it extra.
Alright, in it extra, we start out with ORG ROM.
So ORG ROM is like a fancy notes database for ORG mode that you can use.
I take a lot of reading notes with it, when I read something that I need to take notes
on, I'll usually have it in ROM, and it can connect to a bib, what's it called, a bib
tech, to like a bibliography, right?
So that it's kind of handy to create a note, like a literature note, right?
Bibliographic note, I guess.
So you have a bunch of captured templates for quickly capturing notes into my ROM database.
People go really, really crazy with ORG ROM.
It's kind of absurd what people do.
They'll try to, they make like these graphs, and then they post the graphs of all their
knowledge, base, whatever, unread it, or something.
You can, to get a glimpse of that, you can go to their Discord, and you can see some
people going pretty crazy there.
You know, you really got to be careful with this because you can spend the rest of your
life just taking notes.
And basically, you know, the only, the best case scenario is that someone's going to, you
know, make a nice, when you die, someone's going to make a nice bonfire out of it, basically,
right?
In this case, it's just digital files, they can't even do that.
So you got to be extra careful when you're on the computer taking notes.
Anyway, so ORG ROM, next we have CITAR, or CITAR, CITAR.
It's about citations, about inserting citations, about creating citations like a bibliography
notes and things like that.
It integrates with ORG mode and ORG ROM.
Then ORG ROM UI, that's the application where people create those ridiculous graphs showing
all the notes they've taken.
It shows like the super fancy, it can even be 3D graph of all the notes you took and
the connections between them.
I mean, I've hardly, I mean, it's kind of fun, I guess, but I try to not go crazy.
I mean, I'm crazy enough already.
So next, I have ORG board.
I don't use this anymore, but I have used it at times.
It's a way to kind of archive a web page.
It works very well, but nowadays I'm preferring to archive web pages in Zotero, if I need to
refer to some kind of article on the internet or something, I just save it in Zotero.
This ORG board, it'll download the web page and it'll save it as an ORG attachment.
In my opinion, ORG attachments are a little bit messy, I don't know, I don't love it.
You can't help but use it because it's useful, but I don't like to use it for absolutely
everything.
But I still have it here because I still have some notes with attachments, but I'm trying
to get rid of them as much as I can.
Next we have a LANGTool.
LANGTool, there's an application you can download and run a server locally and then this
thing connects to that server.
It's supposed to be something kind of like Grammarly, I haven't really used it very much
so I can't tell you much about it, but that's where it is.
They provide a server, but you can also install it locally, that way you don't have to use
their server and it'll analyze your text and then tell you what it thinks about it or
tell you to not use the passive voice or whatever, that sort of thing.
I'm not sure why people hate the passive voice so much, but that's that.
It does other things too that are more interesting.
Next we have PDF tools.
It is for viewing PDF files in EMAX.
EMAX has its own thing that does that, that I believe is called DocView, but PDF tools.
It seems like it renders the PDF a little better, I think.
Next we have OrgNoder.
This is, I kind of like this one.
OrgNoder, it's like a package for opening and something like a PDF file or any other
document and taking notes on it while you are reading it, taking notes on the computer
and while you are reading this digital document like a PDF and it will record the location
for you automatically.
So I'm reading a page and then I say, oh, let me take a note about this and then I take
the note and OrgNoder will automatically add a little parameter, a attribute there showing
the location I was at in the file I am notating, showing me where I was when I took this note
and then you can navigate the notes and see the file next to it.
It will automatically scroll through the file as you scroll through your notes and vice versa.
Next we have Nav and OV, this is for reading EPUB files in EMAX, not too much to say about
that, pretty obvious, pretty clear.
Next we have EMAX everywhere.
EMAX everywhere is, I mean, that's kind of cool, I guess, when you are say in your browser
and you're going to type a comment or something, but you want to edit in EMAX because you're
so obsessed with EMAX, you can run EMAX client, I can see parentheses, EMAX everywhere close
parentheses and it will quickly open an EMAX frame and let you type what you want to type
in EMAX, then you close that frame and it's going to put what you typed in EMAX back
in the original thing you were in.
The reason that is sometimes useful is because you have so many more efficient editing commands
in EMAX, so a lot of times it is worth quickly editing it in EMAX and then going back to the
thing you were in before.
I used to do this quite a lot at work with Tridactyl and Firefox and Vim.
There is a command from Tridactyl to edit a text field in the web page to edit in Vim,
excuse me, and it works pretty well.
So unfortunately I don't think this would work on EMAX on Windows, so that's why I put
it in the file that only loads when I'm on Linux.
Moving on we have OcTech.
OcTech is the big Lattec editing package for EMAX.
This one I don't use use package within, to be quite honest I don't remember why, but
I decided not to use a use package, I just used straight directly and then I installed
OcTech from a certain location and then there are some commands you have to run to sort
of complete the installation.
So I run those there as well together.
It works just fine, I don't know if I'm not worried about it, so yeah.
And then I have some settings related to that, to setting up the certain locations for
things, et cetera.
And then I have EvalTech, EvalTech is Eval key bindings for Lattec editing.
Once I have Lattec preview pane, excuse me, Lattec preview pane will show me a preview
of my Lattec document in PDF, right?
I have a key that's Alt P, when I'm in my Lattec file, I can press Alt P and it will generate
the preview and show it to me, then I can press Q to close that or to bury that which is
kind of minimizing it, it's just the word they use in EMAX for that.
You press Q and then you go back to the Lattec file.
So then if I want to preview again, I just press Alt P, that's what the Lattec preview
pane does.
And finally adaptive warp, I don't remember what that is, I think it was OcTech on the
OcTech website, they said it's good to install that, but I don't remember why.
Moving on, I have dash docs, now this is like a section about some more programming stuff.
So dash docs, it's kind of nice, there's an application for Mac, apparently it's called
dash, that's a way to view documentation all together in the same kind of user interface.
So their documentation is available in a certain format, right?
And then this package lets you open and view those things in EMAX.
So with it, you can install different docs sets, which is what they call these, the documentation
packages.
So you run a command to install the docs set for Python, for example, and it'll install
it locally, and then you can also configure it to when you enter, when you open a Python
file, it'll automatically activate this docs set, the Python docs set for you.
And then it'll use that, like you can, as you're navigating your file, you can, depending
on where you are with the cursor, you can search, you can search for stuff in the docs
sets.
It's pretty nice, I thought, I think it's worth having it.
And then consult dash is the next package, and that's just for searching.
It's just exactly what I was just saying about searching for something at the cursor,
right, in your dash docs.
Okay, finally, I have not much, not much is an email indexing application that I quite
like.
To me, it's the best way to do email, and this is a package for using not much on EMAX.
So you can search and view all of your emails, you can, you know, do some pretty fancy
searches using your tags, and then of course, EMAX comes with a mail writing in commands
for sending an email and stuff like that, so you don't need any package for that.
So there are some configuration options here to do with sending email as well.
So yeah, not much, it's pretty nice.
You may remember from a previous episode, I used to use a lot.
A lot is a Python application that does a lot of the same things, so this is just that,
but on in EMAX, so I don't have to leave EMAX, because I don't want to.
And so with that, this file provides the would be package called init extra, and it ends
there.
So that is my EMAX configuration.
So you can just have create a directory in your home directory called dot emax dot d, and
then have these three little files in it, and then start EMAX, EMAX will automatically
install all of the packages and run all these configurations, and then you will have exactly
the same EMAX experience that I have every day at work on my personal laptop, and a bit
on termux, even to quickly check my agenda there on the phone.
I hope this will be useful to someone, you know.
I hope if you haven't tried EMAX, this will peak your curiosity, and maybe you'll try
my configuration here, maybe you'll like it.
If you use EMAX and you know other packages that you must tell me about, please do in
the comments, and thank you for tuning in.
Now you can do as I just did, and you know, after work, you have a few minutes, just sit
down, maybe in front of your computer, maybe not, and just start talking about something
that you can start talking about, something that you know something about, or maybe something
that you think something about, just pull up your phone and start talking into it, recording,
and then send it into Hacker Public Radio as a show.
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So if you are listening, I urge you to please record a show, even if it's just to say a
few things, whatever it is, I will enjoy listening to it.
Alright, thank you, and come back tomorrow for more.
Bye.
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