Random Thoughts

While using the Emacs WordPress interface on various screens here, it became clear that the sloppy way I was laying out various tables just didn’t really work. I was using the `variable-pitch’ font and sort of eyeballing how much space each column would take and then using `display ‘(space :align-to 100))’ to line stuff up.

But the size of fonts varies wildly from computer to computer, and what looked nice on my HiDPI laptop didn’t line up at all on my LoDPI screen.

So I switched to using fixed-width fonts:

And I just thought, *sigh*.

It just looks so oldz. I spend a lot of time in Emacs in eww which does nice fonts, so I’ve grown less used to the er starkness of tables like this.

Surely there has to be a way to do tables with proportional fonts, and of course there is: eww/shr lays stuff out without a problem, so I just had to take a similar approach here.

And behold:

The package is on Microsoft Github now.

This also allowed me to implement table headings that you can click on to sort the table on the different columns. And I wanted to keep the interface really simple, because I have to say that I hate working with the tabulated-list.el interface, which is a mess of buffer-local variables and magic always happening wherever you’re not looking in the code.

So the interface is one simple function that takes obvious parameters: A list of column names and max widths, and then a list of row contents:

(variable-pitch-table
 '((:name "First" :width 10)
   (:name "Second" :width 5))
 '(("A thing" "Yes")
   ("A wide thing that needs chopping" "And more")
   ("And the last one" "Foo")))

But you’d normally pass in strings that are made with something like

(propertize "At thing" 'face 'variable-pitch)

to get whatever proportional font you want on each element.

In the previous episode of this blog, I mused about how Emacs should perhaps handle non-text yanking (i.e., HTML and images).

I didn’t really want to write a mode to examine the clipboard and the selections, but I did anyway just now, and I discovered something kinda interesting.

Well I never!

Anyway, this is basically what the mode looks like:

It just lists all the types of selection that exist under the primary/secondary selections, as well as the clipboard. In this instance, I’ve done a “Copy image” in Firefox. So I can inspect the text/html “version” the image…

Which turns out to be the <img;> bit, logically enough.

And the image/png is the image itself, even more logically enough.

But here’s the slightly interesting bit: If you mark some text in Firefox (i.e., put the text into the primary selection in nerd speak), you get these selection types:

And the TEXT bit is as you’d expect…

But what’s that text/x-moz-url-priv?

It’s the URL of the page you marked the text on! This can obviously be used for UX purposes, like providing a function that’d simultaneously quote something and do the link at the same time. Like this:

So something like:

  (when-let ((url (x-get-selection-internal 'PRIMARY 'text/x-moz-url-priv)))
    (insert (format "On <a href="%S">somebody</a> wrote:\n\n"
                    (ewp-decode-text-selection url))))
  (insert "<blockquote>\n")
  (insert (substring-no-properties (current-kill 0)))
  (insert "</blockquote>\n\n")

You can find this stuff on Microsoft Github.

Chrome isn’t as helpful as Firefox here, you just get a very minimal selection list when marking some text there:

(Oh, yeah, I added a command to do screenshots directly from the ewp composition buffer. Otherwise this blog would have taken me HOURS and HOURS to make.)

Of course, how useful this stuff is outside of a writing-for-the-web context is debatable…

PERSON A: It’s not useful!

PERSON B: Oh, OK.

Well, that was a short debate!