2012-06-20

who holds this value?

Something from the category of useful things hiding in emacs… Suppose you are looking for the variable that holds a certain value. How to find it?

Easy: M-x apropos-value

So, for example, finding all variables that hold your e-mail address:

M-x apropos-value RET me@example.com RET

and you'll get all the matches in the *Apropos*-buffer. HT: Stephen Eglen.

Also check the various other M-x apropos-... commands, they all help you find useful information if you can remember a word. Except for… M-x apropos-zippy… eh?

2012-06-06

euro 2012 games in your org-mode agenda

Things have been rather quiet at emacs-fu - reason for this is that most of my emacs hacking time has been spent on mu4e, the emacs e-mail client I wrote. It's been shaping up pretty nicely, I should probably write some emacs-fu posts about it :)

Another interesting pastime (esp. in Europe) is football/soccer, in particular the Euro2012 games; long-time readers will remember the schedule for world cup games; I made a new one for Euro2012: https://github.com/djcb/org-euro2012.

In order to have the games show up in your agenda, make sure the file is in your org-agenda-files. If needed, you could add it with something like this in your org-mode settings (change the directory path to wherever you have put euro2012.org):

(add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/org/euro2012.org")

One small issue with the schedule is that it uses the central-european summer time (UTC+2), and there is no automatic way to adjust times for the local time zone. As a work-around, Juan Pechiar provided the following function which makes it easy to update all org-timestamps in a file:

(defun update-org-hours (n)
  "Change all org-mode timestamps in the current buffer by N hours."
  (interactive "nAdd hours: ")
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (re-search-forward "[[<]" nil t)
      (when (org-at-timestamp-p t)
        (org-timestamp-change n 'hour)))))

Evaluate this function. After that, you can go to the file with the schedule, and give an M-x update-org-hours, provide the offset for your timezone, compared to UTC+2.

Let the games begin!