Multiple choices in yasnippets

I’ve written before about using yasnippet as a powerful text expansion and template tool in Emacs. In its basic form you type a keyword and press TAB to expand that into a template with active fields and then use TAB to move between the fields adding your content. I recently discovered that you can programme a snippet to contain multiple choices for fields.

For example, the following snippet uses the keyword test and inserts a template with the cursor initially in the first field and prompts the user to choose from the options “high”, “average” and “below average”. Selecting your choice and then hitting TAB takes you to the next field with options of “easy” and “hard”.

# -*- mode: snippet -*-
# name: test
# key: test
# --
Importance: ${1:$$(yas-choose-value '("high" "average" "below average"))}
Difficulty: ${2:$$(yas-choose-value '("easy" "hard"))}
$0

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Insert internal org-mode links the ivy way

Org-mode is a fantastic way to organise information in simple text files. I often use internal links to other sections in a document for navigation, but I’ve found that there is not a great mechanism to quickly insert an internal link. I wanted an interface that would provide me a list of headlines in the document that I could use to select a link target, so I put together the functions below.

These simple functions leverage the fantastic ivy and worf packages, so install them first. Then put the code below into your emacs config file. Then, invoking M-x bjm/worf-insert-internal-link provides an ivy completion interface for the list of headlines in the document. Once you select the headline you want as the link target, the link is inserted for you.

;; use ivy to insert a link to a heading in the current document
;; based on `worf-goto`
(defun bjm/worf-insert-internal-link ()
  "Use ivy to insert a link to a heading in the current `org-mode' document. Code is based on `worf-goto'."
  (interactive)
  (let ((cands (worf--goto-candidates)))
    (ivy-read "Heading: " cands
              :action 'bjm/worf-insert-internal-link-action)))


(defun bjm/worf-insert-internal-link-action (x)
  "Insert link for `bjm/worf-insert-internal-link'"
  ;; go to heading
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (cdr x))
    ;; store link
    (call-interactively 'org-store-link)
    )
  ;; return to original point and insert link
  (org-insert-last-stored-link 1)
  ;; org-insert-last-stored-link adds a newline so delete this
  (delete-backward-char 1)
  )

To eww or not to eww

Recent Emacs versions include a decent text based web browser called eww. There is a good example configuration here. I found that I like using eww for some things, but at other times I want to use a full GUI web browser (I like Firefox).

I set eww to be my default browser in Emacs with

(setq browse-url-browser-function 'eww-browse-url)

but then I create some wrapper functions for times when I want to use my system default browser (i.e. Firefox).

In mu4e emails, hitting g will now open a URL in eww, but with the following lines I can use G to open in Firefox:

;; open link in firefox rather than eww
(defun bjm/mu4e-view-go-to-url-gui ()
  "Wrapper for mu4e-view-go-to-url to use gui browser instead of eww"
  (interactive)
  (let ((browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-default-browser))
    (mu4e-view-go-to-url)))
;; bind it
(define-key mu4e-view-mode-map (kbd "G") 'bjm/mu4e-view-go-to-url-gui)

In elfeed, hitting b opens an article in eww if that is set to be the default Emacs browser. With the following lines I can hit B to open an article in Firefox. Note that I had to resort to calling the Mac open command to open the URL with the system default browser. On linux systems the xdg-open command should do the same thing.

;; browse article in gui browser instead of eww
(defun bjm/elfeed-show-visit-gui ()
  "Wrapper for elfeed-show-visit to use gui browser instead of eww"
  (interactive)
  (let ((browse-url-generic-program "/usr/bin/open"))
    (elfeed-show-visit t)))

(define-key elfeed-show-mode-map (kbd "B") 'bjm/elfeed-show-visit-gui)

A shorter shortcut to capture todo tasks

Org mode is wonderful for managing todo lists. Usually to add a task, I would run org-capture using the default C-c c and then select my todo template by hitting t. I do this so often that I wanted a shorter shortcut, so I defined a function to call org-capture with the specific template I wanted and bound this to a simple shortcut (I used C-9 after removing numeric prefixes):

;; function to capture a todo
(defun bjm/org-capture-todo ()
  (interactive)
  "Capture a TODO item"
  (org-capture nil "t"))

;; bind
(define-key global-map (kbd "C-9") 'bjm/org-capture-todo)

Now C-9 takes me straight to my todo capture template.