Tagged with: emacs

Indexing Info Manuals

I’ve been working around this issue for a while now.

By default, the C-h i binding in Emacs opens the list of available info manuals for you to browse through. Unfortunately, I would only be shown manuals that had been included with third-party Emacs packages like denote. System provided manuals, such as the one for Emacs itself, were nowhere to be seen:

File: dir,        Node: Top       This is the top of the INFO tree

  This (the Directory node) gives a menu of major topics.
  Typing "q" exits, "H" lists all Info commands, "d" returns here,
  "h" gives a primer for first-timers,
  "mEmacs<Return>" visits the Emacs manual, etc.

  In Emacs, you can click mouse button 2 on a menu item or cross reference
  to select it.

* Menu:

Emacs
* Denote Sequence: (denote-sequence).
                                Sequence notes or Folgezettel with Denote.
* Denote: (denote).             Simple notes with an efficient file-naming
                                  scheme.
* Eat: (eat).                   Emulate A Terminal.
* Embark: (embark).             Emacs Mini-Buffer Actions Rooted in Keymaps.
* Forge: (forge).               Access Git Forges from Magit.
* Ghub: (ghub).                 Client library for the Github API.
* Magit: (magit).               Using Git from Emacs with Magit.
* Magit-Section: (magit-section).
                                Use Magit sections in your own packages.
* Orderless: (orderless).       Completion style for matching regexps in any
                                  order.
* Tempel: (tempel).             Simple templates for Emacs.
* Transient: (transient).       Transient Commands.
* With-Editor: (with-editor).   Using the Emacsclient as $EDITOR.

However, I could clearly see files like /usr/share/info/emacs.info.gz on my system and I could access specific info nodes by evaluating expressions like (info "(emacs)Displaying Buffers").

I’ve now reached the point where it’s bugging me enough to actually dig in and try to figure out what is going on.

Blogging with Sphinx and denote.el

If you have spent any time following the Emacs community, you will have likely come across the denote.el project. denote.el defines a clever file-naming scheme and provides an associated Emacs package containing utilities for managing files which follow this naming scheme.

In this blog post I outline how I have adopted denote.el to manage the content on this site and how I’ve extended Sphinx to take advantage this.

Intstalling Emacs with systemd-sysext

One issue with building Emacs from source, or more specifically my hack to ensure that the required system libraries are available on Aurora, is that in some situations the system version of Emacs “wins”.

For example, I wanted to experiment with running the Emacs daemon through systemd:

$ systemctl --user start emacs

Which failed to load my config correctly. It was only after a closer look did I realise that despite specifying the --user flag, systemd was defaulting to the emacs.service file provided by the system emacs package in /usr/... and was therefore running Emacs v29 and not my v30 build.

But then I stumbled across systemd-sysext