Here are some of my latest thoughts on emacs… 
Articles on this page
- Musa Al-hassy's Personal Glossary
- Powering-up Special Blocks: EmacsConf 2020 slides
- org-special-block-extras: Make your own blocks and links
- org-special-block-extras: The block and link types
- org-special-block-extras: Write Once, Export Everywhere
- Holy Books: Quran & Bible look-ups in Org-mode
- Projects
- AlBasmala:
Blogging with Emacs & Org-mode (•̀ᴗ•́)و - Automatically Generate PDFs upon Save
- 💐 Repl Driven Development: /Editor Integrated REPLs for all languages/ 🔁
- Arabic Roots: The Power of Patterns
- 💐 Making VSCode itself a Java REPL 🔁
- 💐 VSCode is itself a JavaScript REPL 🔁
- Typed Lisp, A Primer
- An Interactive Way To C
Musa Al-hassy's Personal Glossary
Powering-up Special Blocks: EmacsConf 2020 slides
org-special-block-extras: Make your own blocks and links
Every block and link above is made with the very tools below, so a new one of our own is a
defun away.
org-special-block-extras: The block and link types
﴾What You Write﴿
It can be useful to draw attention to some important text by enclosing it in a [[doc:org-block/box][box]]. #+begin_box Uses of callout boxes Such boxes often callout tips, warnings, cautionary info or emphasises core information. #+end_box
﴾What You Get﴿
It can be useful to draw attention to some important text by
enclosing it in a boxEnclose text in a box, possibly with a TITLE.
By default, the box’s BACKGROUND-COLOR is green for HTML and red for LaTeX;
for LaTeX, there are also FRAME-COLOR and TITLE-BACKGROUND-COLOR.
SHADOW is an alternate style of boxing: It shows the contents in a centred
box with a shadow colour being the given non-nil value of SHADOW.
If SHADOW is a hexadecimal colour, it should be a string enclosed in double quotes.
More accurately, the following are all valid uses:
#+begin_box title :shadow t
#+begin_box title :shadow inset
#+begin_box title :shadow "pink"
#+begin_box title :shadow pink
#+begin_box title :shadow (cyan pink orange yellow)
#+begin_box title :shadow (cyan "inset pink" orange)
#+begin_box title :shadow (:left cyan :right pink :deep-right orange :deep-left yellow)
Notice that prefixing colours with ‘inset’ causes the colour to be within the box,
rather than spread, with blur, around the box. The use of ‘inset’ swaps left and right.
The HTML export uses a padded div, whereas the LaTeX export
requires the tcolorbox package; Markdown, sans colours, gets a quote opening with TITLE in bold.
Regarding the Lisp function:
+ BACKEND refers to the current export backend.
+ RAW-CONTENTS refers to the text as the user wrote it, sans its least indentation.
⇒ You may mention CONTENTS to refer to the ‘org parsed’ version of user text.
⇒ CONTENTS and RAW-CONTENTS are identical whenever key CONTENTS-OCCUR-AS-LINK-DESCRIPTION is non-nil.
For example, upon LaTeX export, the Org special block
#+begin_box
Hello, world
#+end_box
is rewritten to the result of the call
(org-block/box ‘latex "Hello, world").
Uses of callout boxes
Such boxes often callout tips, warnings, cautionary info or emphasises core information.
﴾How It’s Implemented﴿
org-special-block-extras: Write Once, Export Everywhere
Holy Books: Quran & Bible look-ups in Org-mode
Org-mode links like quran:1:1 and bible:John:3:16 fetch and inline their verses upon export, with tooltips in Emacs and Lisp look-ups to boot.
Projects
Things I've built. Each write-up is the project's literate source —the very file that tangles to its code— so the prose here and the code on GitHub never drift apart. Like one? Star it, fork it, or open an issue on GitHub; that's where the code lives.
AlBasmala:
Blogging with Emacs & Org-mode (•̀ᴗ•́)و
How my blog is setup (•̀ᴗ•́)و
Here are some notable features of my blog.
- Org-mode, a rich markup, to write articles ♥‿♥
- Tags and per-tag RSS feeds —§RSS feeds
- A nice blog banner —§https://alhassy.com/AlBasmala#blog-banner
- Dynamically highlighting code from references in prose —§https://alhassy.com/AlBasmala#blog-banner
- Tooltips, folded regions, and badges ---
- Overall nice looking HTML style ---org-notes-style
- Beautiful math using LaTeX notation, \(\forall \phi ⇒ \exists \phi\) —§https://alhassy.com/AlBasmala#MathJax-Support
- A floating, yet unobtrusive, table of contents —§https://alhassy.com/AlBasmala#floating-toc
- Articles have images and abstracts, shown as cards on the index —§https://alhassy.com/AlBasmala#Images, §https://alhassy.com/AlBasmala#Index
- Each article links its colourised Org source and its Github history, right under its image —§https://alhassy.com/AlBasmala#footers
- Article titles may contain arbitrary
@@html: ...@@yet still render nicely in both the frame tab and page title, thanks toblog--sanitise-title-js—§the header. - A reading-time clock that adjusts as you scroll —§https://alhassy.com/AlBasmala#footers
- Style inline code and tables —§https://alhassy.com/AlBasmala#curvy-blocks
- Unfurling links —§https://alhassy.com/AlBasmala#unfurling
Automatically Generate PDFs upon Save
Here is my ~/.latexmkrc file: It previews PDFs using Emacs, uses LuaLaTeX for making PDFs, and to update the PDF viewer
please change focus to the PDF file.
💐 Repl Driven Development: /Editor Integrated REPLs for all languages/ 🔁
The 
That is, with Repl aided development, you make software by starting with an already working program (i.e., the repl) then incrementlly “teach it” to be the program you want, by defining & redefining things. Until satisfied, loop: Type/modify code in your editor, press some keys to evaluate what you wrote/modified in the currently running system, and explore/test the resulting runtime.
RDD is programming emphasising fast & rich feedback from a running system. RDD is fantastic for quickly teaching/exploring an idea; as such, the running example of this article will be on servers —no prior experience with servers is assumed. The main examples will be in JavaScript, Python, and Java. (Since JavaScript is just Lisp in C clothing, we will not discuss Lisp.) Since Java is verbose, the power of REPLs really pays off when exploring a new idea. We see how many imports and setup-code simply disappear in the RDD approach, letting you focus on the core idea you're exploring/teaching. For comparison, a traditional self-contained Java server program is ~30 lines long whereas the focused RDD approach is ~4 lines long.
tdlr: This library provides the Emacs built-in C-x C-eC-x C-e ∷ eval-last-sexp
Evaluate sexp before point; print value in the echo area.
Interactively, EVAL-LAST-SEXP-ARG-INTERNAL is the prefix argument.
With a non ‘-’ prefix argument, print output into current buffer.
This commands handles ‘defvar’, ‘defcustom’ and ‘defface’ the
same way that ‘eval-defun’ does. See the doc string of that
function for details.
Normally, this function truncates long output according to the
value of the variables ‘eval-expression-print-length’ and
‘eval-expression-print-level’. With a prefix argument of zero,
however, there is no such truncation.
Integer values are printed in several formats (decimal, octal,
and hexadecimal). When the prefix argument is -1 or the value
doesn’t exceed ‘eval-expression-print-maximum-character’, an
integer value is also printed as a character of that codepoint.
If ‘eval-expression-debug-on-error’ is non-nil, which is the default,
this command arranges for all errors to enter the debugger.
(fn EVAL-LAST-SEXP-ARG-INTERNAL)
behaviour for
arbitrary languages, provided they have a primitive cli REPL.
Arabic Roots: The Power of Patterns
Image credit: “Holy Karbala street signage” by أخٌفيالله, Unsplash License.
I want to quickly introduce the Arabic language, through its “root system” —i.e., most words have 3-letters at their core— and how these roots can be placed in “patterns” to obtain new words.
I'd like to take a glance at Arabic's Verb Forms: These give you 10 words for each root!
Some interesting concepts will also be mentioned, for those curious, but should be ignored on a first reading. These will be hidden away in clickable/foldable regions.
These are notes of things that I'm learning; there's likely errors.
💐 Making VSCode itself a Java REPL 🔁
VSCode evaluates Java code wherever it sees it, by sending it to a JShell in the background, and echos the results in a friendly way!
This is achieved with a meta-extension for VSCode that makes VSCode into a living, breathing, JS interpreter: It can execute arbitrary JS that alters VSCode on-the-fly. (Inspired by using Emacs and Lisp!)
The relevant docs show how to make a similar REPL for Python, Ruby, Clojure, Common Lisp, JavaScript, Typescript, Haskell, and of-course Java.
💐 VSCode is itself a JavaScript REPL 🔁
A meta-extension for VSCode that makes VSCode into a living, breathing, JS interpreter: It can execute arbitrary JS that alters VSCode on-the-fly. A gateway into the world of Editor Crafting!
| (Inspired by using Emacs and Lisp!) |
Typed Lisp, A Primer
Let's explore Lisp's fine-grained type hierarchy!
We begin with a shallow comparison to Haskell, a rapid tour of type theory, try in vain to defend dynamic approaches, give a somewhat humorous account of history, note that you've been bamboozled —type's have always been there—, then go into technical details of some Lisp types, and finally conclude by showing how macros permit typing.
Goals for this article:
- Multiple examples of type constructions in Lisp.
- Comparing Lisp type systems with modern languages, such as Haskell.
- Show how algebraic polymorphic types like
PairandMaybecan be defined in Lisp. Including heterogeneously typed lists! - Convey a passion for an elegant language.
- Augment Lisp with functional Haskell-like type declarations ;-)
Unless suggested otherwise, the phrase “Lisp” refers to Common Lisp as supported by Emacs Lisp. As such, the resulting discussion is applicable to a number of Lisp dialects —I'm ignoring editing types such as buffers and keymaps, for now.
An Interactive Way To C
Do you know what the above program accomplishes? If you do, did you also spot a special edge case?
We aim to present an approach to program proving in C using a minimal Emacs setup so that one may produce literate C programs and be able to prove them correct –or execute them– using a single button press; moreover the output is again in Emacs.
The goal is to learn program proving using the Frama-C tool –without necessarily invoking its gui– by loading the source of this file into Emacs then editing, executing, & proving as you read along. One provides for the formal specification of properties of C programs –e.g., using ACSL– which can then be verified for the implementations using tools that interpret such annotation –e.g., Frama-C invoked from within our Emacs setup.
Read on, and perhaps you'll figure out how to solve the missing FixMe pieces 😉
The intent is for rapid editing and checking. Indeed, the Frama-c gui does not permit editing in the gui, so one must switch between their text editor and the gui. Org mode beginning at the basics is a brief tutorial that covers a lot of Org and, from the get-go, covers “the absolute minimum you need to know about Emacs!”
If anything, this effort can be construed as a gateway into interactive theorem proving such as with Isabelle, Coq, or Agda.
The article aims to be self-contained –not even assuming familiarity with any C!
The presentation and examples are largely inspired by
- Gilles Dowek's exquisite text Principles of Programming Languages.
- It is tremendously accessible!
- Allan Blanchard's excellent tutorial Introduction to C Program Proof using Frama-C and its WP Plugin.
Another excellent and succinct tutorial is Virgile Prevosto's ACSL Mini-Tutorial. In contrast, the tutorial ACSL By Example aims to provide a variety of algorithms rendered in ACSL.
There are no solutions since it's too easy to give up and look at the solutions that're nearby. Moreover, I intend to use some of the exercises for a class I'm teaching ;-)
Life & Computing Science by Musa Al-hassy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License