Emacs

The Cost of Decentralization I have been a happy Artix Linux user for several months. I had got the setup to be exactly as I liked. The choice of the distribution was prompted by a desire to contribute to the cause of keeping Linux decentralized. (See videos form Youtux.) Artix helped me retain the use of the package ecosystem of Arch while using an init system that isn’t systemd (something monolythic and centralizing) (I was using OpenRC), and without being tied to the wayland display server (which, again, seems to be pushed upon us by corporate forces in Linux (I was using XLibre, although, sadly, Artix just reverted to X.org). It needed more configuration than some of the other distros I have used. But for a one-time setup, I did not mind that. ...

Placing Images I could not find a way to automatically display the images. The best way seems to be to manually write the following. Replace image.png with the full path if the file is not in the immediate location as the org file. [[file: image.png]] With this, images can be toggled on and off with iimage-mode. You can make use of more options in the following manner. #+CAPTION: Penguin body mass #+ATTR_HTML: :width 600 [[./image.png]] Exporting to HTML I installed the package nice-org-html for exporting org files to html. Then the exporting is simply a matter of M-x nice-org-html-export-to-html followed by accepting the offered defaults. ...

The setup shown in SDS Project Configuration 2 involved opening the org file and running the my/sds... functions. The order mattered. I frequently found myself defaulting to the wrong environment. Also operating from a different folder was causing issues. It is demanding to remember that there exists a function outside that needs to be run for the notebook to work properly. With this update, I have eliminated the need to invoke those functions. This has added some extra lines in the org file itself, but all these are in the relevant notebook files. So while this is extra work during writing, there is less to remember while executing the notebooks. ...

This is continued from SDS Project Setup. Earlier, all the three languages were working together, but the values did not transfer across code blocks. For the different blocks to be able to communicate with each other, the language needs to run in the same session. Setting this up for Python and R was straightforward, but Julia had me stuck for a long time. The dataset used below is available at Allison Horst’s page. ...

Now that I have LaTeX and computations working in Emacs Org Mode (see LaTeX with Emacs and Setting Up Computational Notebook in Emacs), it is time to create an entire Statistics and Data Science Project covering a variety of topics. This note shall document the setup process. Prerequisites Basic Emacs Configurations. Note Git (Magit), Org Mode, Org Babel, Vterm, and the programming languages are properly configured. Emacs + LaTeX Configuration. Emacs + (Python + R + Julia). Project Structure Create the essential folders and files inside the appropriate directory. ...

In the equations rendering challenge described in LaTeX With Emacs, org-fragtog came to the rescue, finally providing something to toggle between mathematical symbols and LaTeX code. But a computational notebook needs more than just mathematical equations rendered properly. It needs to be able to display and run code. Specifically, in my case, it needs to be able to run Python, R, and Julia. Code Blocks In Org Mode, #begin_src language ..... #end_src allows for code to be written and displayed correctly. For example: ...

After considering Quarto for a long time (using instructions for the tarball version) and failing to make it work with Emacs properly, I decided to go all in on the computational notebook features of Org Mode. It is not that Quarto (with its .qmd files) does not work with my current setup. It does, and I was able to render something basic involving R, Python, and Julia using a complex setup (with Quarto using knitr along with reticulate and JuliaCall). But working with QMD files in Emacs was ugly. Quarto is designed for VSCode, Neovim, and others; the relevant Emacs package has not been updated in several years. ...

Notes on My Recent Exploration of Emacs I briefly tried to use Emacs Doom, but I quickly realized that configuring it properly would take up quite a while, and would involve deleting quite a lot. So I went back to modifying my own init file to suit my writing workflow. I saw that Doom divided up the config files by functionality, and I decided to give that a try. And so now my setup looks the way described below. Also, it has a lot more functionality than it did in my earlier basic config. ...

All I wanted was to use magit today, but Spacemacs, which I have used for years, wouldn’t allow me. I could not figure out what the problem was—it likely had something to with dependencies that were out of sync. Failing to resolve the issue, I decided to reinstall emacs and configure it from scratch (with some great LLM help). The fruits of this tinkering are in the init.el file below. It is only about 160 lines long, but covers the vast majority of my requirements surprisingly well. This is a brief log of how this config file came about. ...