RYAN MCGUIRE

My Emacs config on Github

The most popular post on this blog is Emacs as a powerful Python IDE. I get quite a few emails regarding that post and I realized the other day that I've done a lot of customizations to my .emacs, and subsequently that post is starting to get a little dated. Time is a curious creature, it seems like yesterday that I wrote that post, but it's been almost 9 months now.

I've been learning and playing around with git recently, so I've decided to post my entire .emacs config on github.

Here are the latest instructions for emulating my Emacs environment on Ubuntu 8.10:

• Enable the universe repository
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot git-core automake libgconf2-dev texinfo python-setuptools
• cd ~
• git clone git://github.com/EnigmaCurry/emacs .emacs.d
• cd ~/.emacs.d
• git submodule init
• git submodule update
• cd ~/.emacs.d/vendor
• ./vendor-compile.sh
• sudo easy_install "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/rope/rope-0.9.1.tar.gz?modtime=1225268769&big_mirror=0"
• sudo easy_install "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/rope/ropemacs-0.6.tar.gz?modtime=1223039342&big_mirror=0"

I've done some reorganization of the directory structure:

1. There actually is no ~/.emacs file anymore, having realized that Emacs looks for ~/.emacs.d/init.el. Convenient!
2. All third party packages are now installed in ~/.emacs.d/vendor. This was a great tip I saw in the Emacs Peepcode screencast. (it's $9, but worth it).
3. I've taken the suggestion that greg made in the comments to use submodules for some of the vendor packages. The vendor-compile.sh script does the compiling of those packages.
4. All private code goes in ~/.emacs.private. This lets me keep passwords and such outside of the main git repository and allows me to publish my config more easily. Before I did this I had to spend time sanitizing the code before each release.

I have appreciated your many encouraging Emails and comments. :)

Shortened URLs in Emacs using is.gd (like tinyurl)

I've casually been teaching myself emacs lisp lately. Today I wrote a utility that shortens long urls within regions using the http://is.gd URL shortening service. There's plenty of existing code out there that is more lisp like, but this is supposed to be a learning experience for me so I did it myself. I like python and so I used python for most of the heavy lifting.

I created a directory to hold all of my emacs specific python functions: ~/.emacs.d/ryan-pymacs-extensions

I wrote the following python function, shorten_url.py in that directory:

!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

__author__ = "Ryan McGuire (ryan@enigmacurry.com)"
__date__   = "Mon Sep 15 12:27:14 2008"

import doctest
import urllib2
import re

def shorten_with_is_gd(url):
    """Shorten a URL with is.gd

    >>> shorten_with_is_gd('http://www.enigmacurry.com')
    'http://is.gd/FFP'

    """
    u = urllib2.urlopen("http://is.gd/api.php?longurl="+url)
    return u.read()

def shorten_in_text(text):
    """Shorten all the urls found inside some text

    >>> shorten_in_text('Hi from http://www.enigmacurry.com')
    'Hi from http://is.gd/FFP'
    
    """
    replacements = {} #URL -> is.gd URL
    #Only check for urls that start with "http://" for now
    for m in re.finditer("http://[^ \n\r]*", text):
        try:
            replacements[m.group()] = shorten_with_is_gd(m.group())
        except:
            replacements[m.group()] = m.group()
    for url,replacement in replacements.items():
        text = text.replace(url, replacement)
    return text

if __name__ == '__main__':
    doctest.testmod(verbose=True)

and the following lisp makes "M-x shorten-url" do the rest of the replacement work:

;add ~/.emacs.d/ryan-python-extensions to python path
(pymacs-exec "import sys, os")
(pymacs-exec "sys.path.append(os.path.join(os.path.expanduser('~'),'.emacs.d','ryan-pymacs-extensions'))")

;;Shorten URLs with is.gd
(pymacs-exec "import shorten_url")
(defun shorten-url (start end)
  (interactive "r")
  (let ((region (buffer-substring start end)))
    (let ((rt (pymacs-eval (format "shorten_url.shorten_in_text('''%s''')" region))))
      (kill-region start end)
      (insert rt)
      )
  ))

Importing foreign (non-iCal) calendars into Google Calendar

Google Calendar is highly useful. I use it to keep track of all my appointments and due dates and I get helpful reminders when dates approach via email and SMS. Not only that, but it allows me to collaborate with other people's calendars as well, and they don't even have to use Google Calendar because Google supports the industry standard iCalendar format. Things are great.

Unfortunately, iCalendar format is pretty new, and not everyone is using it.

Because Google Calendar is so useful, it is annoying when you find a calendar that is not in iCal format. Two of note that I want to follow are

• New Hampshire Underground
• Free Keene

Both of these calendars are running Simple Machines Forum, version 1.x which does not support iCalendar format (presumably they will in 2.0).

So I wrote an exporter: Download SMF iCal exporter

The exporter scrapes the calendar page on an SMF enabled site and dumps out an iCal compatible file.

Usage: smf_ical_converter.py -u http://yourforum.com/index.php -o cal.ics

Download a SMF 1.x forum calendar and dump in iCal format

Options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -u URL, --url=URL     URL of forum (up to and including /index.php)
  -n Name, --name=Name  Name of the Forum / Calendar (name goes in .ics file)
  -i EXPR, --ignore-re=EXPR
                        Ignore any event containing this regular expression
                        (specify as many -i as you want)
  -o File, --output=File
                        iCal filename to write
  -v, --verbose         Be verbose about process
  --months-backward=NUM
                        Number of months to go backward
  --months-forward=NUM  Number of months to go forward

I have this tool running in a cron job to keep up to date with the two above mentioned calendars. You can import these URLs directly into your Google Calendar:

• NHUnderground.com iCal calendar
(Includes just events, I use "-i 'Birthdays:'" for this one)
• FreeKeene.com iCal calendar

Update 09/16/08: I uploaded version 2 of this application. It has a better README and it now supports user specific date ranges.

Emacs IRC (ERC) with Noticeable Notifications

I use ERC for all my IRC chatting. I finally got fed up with not noticing someones message because I didn't have emacs focused. So I spent my evening concocting a more noticeable messaging system through Pymacs and libnotify.

Half way though implementing this, wouldn't you know it, I found ErcPageMe which does exactly what I wanted. I figured I was learning quite a bit and I continued writing my own version. I expanded on their code and (at least for me) made some improvements. So kudos go to whoever wrote ErcPageMe :)

The following code will pop up a message on your gnome desktop alerting you whenever you receive a personal message or when someone mentions your nickname in a channel. It also avoids notification for the same user in the same channel if they triggered a message within the last 30 seconds.

Here is my lisp and embedded python/pymacs code:

(defun notify-desktop (title message &optional duration &optional icon)
  "Pop up a message on the desktop with an optional duration (forever otherwise)"
  (pymacs-exec "import pynotify")
  (pymacs-exec "pynotify.init('Emacs')")
  (if icon 
      (pymacs-exec (format "msg = pynotify.Notification('%s','%s','%s')"
                           title message icon))
    (pymacs-exec (format "msg = pynotify.Notification('%s','%s')" title message))
    ) 
  (if duration 
      (pymacs-exec (format "msg.set_timeout(%s)" duration))
    )
  (pymacs-exec "msg.show()")
  )

;; Notify me when someone wants to talk to me.
;; Heavily based off of ErcPageMe on emacswiki.org, with some improvements.
;; I wanted to learn and I used my own notification system with pymacs
;; Delay is on a per user, per channel basis now.
(defvar erc-page-nick-alist nil
  "Alist of 'nickname|target' and last time they triggered a notification"
  )
(defun erc-notify-allowed (nick target &optional delay)
  "Return true if a certain nick has waited long enough to notify"
  (unless delay (setq delay 30))
  (let ((cur-time (time-to-seconds (current-time)))
        (cur-assoc (assoc (format "%s|%s" nick target) erc-page-nick-alist))
        (last-time))
    (if cur-assoc
        (progn
          (setq last-time (cdr cur-assoc))
          (setcdr cur-assoc cur-time)
          (> (abs (- cur-time last-time)) delay))
      (push (cons (format "%s|%s" nick target) cur-time) erc-page-nick-alist)
      t)
    )
  )
(defun erc-notify-PRIVMSG (proc parsed)
  (let ((nick (car (erc-parse-user (erc-response.sender parsed))))
	(target (car (erc-response.command-args parsed)))
	(msg (erc-response.contents parsed)))
    ;;Handle true private/direct messages (non channel)
    (when (and (not (erc-is-message-ctcp-and-not-action-p msg))
               (erc-current-nick-p target)
	       (erc-notify-allowed nick target)
	       )
      ;Do actual notification
      (ding)
      (notify-desktop (format "%s - %s" nick
                              (format-time-string "%b %d %I:%M %p"))
                      msg 0 "gnome-emacs")
      )
    ;;Handle channel messages when my nick is mentioned
    (when (and (not (erc-is-message-ctcp-and-not-action-p msg))
               (string-match (erc-current-nick) msg)
               (erc-notify-allowed nick target)
	       )
      ;Do actual notification
      (ding)
      (notify-desktop (format "%s - %s" target
                              (format-time-string "%b %d %I:%M %p"))
                      (format "%s: %s" nick msg) 0 "gnome-emacs")
      )
    )
      
  )

(add-hook 'erc-server-PRIVMSG-functions 'erc-notify-PRIVMSG)

cycle_xrandr.py : dual and single displays on Ubuntu

Linux power management has gotten good recently. My last two laptops (HP dv9000 and Macbook Pro) have supported hardware suspend mode out of the box. I'm impressed!

Being that I hardly ever turn off the laptop (I just suspend now) I'm left with an annoyance: I use two displays at work and one everywhere else. In Ubuntu, I was easily able to setup dual and single modes such that when I boot up, Xorg detects how many displays are connected appropriately. But now that I don't turn off the machine, I want to be able to just plug in another monitor and go. I don't want to have to reboot the computer. I don't even want to have to log out. I want to plug the monitor in, leave all my apps running and in the state they are in.

Xrandr does this and it works great. But what if I'm in dual display mode but I only actually have one monitor connected? Can I get to an open terminal to use xrandr? Easily? Probably not.

I wrote the following python script to take care of this. It detects all of the modes that xrandr knows about and cycles to the next size listed. I then bind this script to a custom keyboard shortcut so I don't have to type or even see anything on the screen:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

__author__ = "Ryan McGuire (ryan@enigmacurry.com)"
__date__   = "Thu Jul 10 15:27:18 2008"

"""Cycle through all screen resolutions detected by xrandr"""

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
import re

size_re = re.compile("^   ([0-9]*x[0-9]*)\W*[0-9]*\.[0-9]*(\*)?")

def list_sizes():
    """List all sizes detected by xrandr,
    ordered by the next resolution to cycle to"""
    p1 = Popen(['xrandr'], stdout=PIPE)
    sizes = []
    current_size_index = 0
    for line in  p1.communicate()[0].split("\n"):
        m = size_re.match(line)
        if m:
            sizes.append(m.group(1))
            if m.group(2) == "*":
                current_size_index = len(sizes) - 1
    return sizes[current_size_index+1:] + sizes[:current_size_index+1]

if __name__ == '__main__':
    Popen(['xrandr','-s',list_sizes()[0]])