Sacha Chua’s Emacs News is a great way to learn about new things in Emacs. And, she updates it frequently with cool contents. Also, she uses Org-mode and a git repository, see here!
So… Why not create an Emacs command to download all news and show the latest one? In fact, why not download it every day and alert if something new is founded!?
Well, this Elisp code can do that and a little more:
Every day it does the following things:
- Clone or update Sacha Chua’s repository in your computer.
- Search the latest new in it.
- Alert if there is a new blog post (a new header in the index.org).
- Fold the categories that you don’t want to see first.
The git command must be available at the terminal.
notify-sendis used to alert on new posts. This is optional.mpv,mplayerorogg123to alert with sounds. This is optional and can be configured to use another sound player.
When sachac-news is loaded it will activate the timer automatically. It is setted to update the local data once per day. If a new post is detected, an alert (a sound and a notification message) is displayed along with the last-news buffer.
If you call M-x sachac-news-show-last-new it will download the data if needed and it will show the latest news.
The local data is a git repository cloned from Sacha Chua’s emacs-news and it is updated using the git pull command. If you have problems with the git command, see sachac-news-git-command customization option.
By default the local repository is cloned in the emacs.d/sachac/git directory. See help:sachac-news-data-directory and sachac-news-git-dirname customization options: both of them are used to create the path.
A local elisp data file is maintained under the sachac-news-data-directory path. This data file contains information about the last update and the last post title. The filename is “data.el” by default, check sachac-news-data-file to use another filename or change it.
It is possible to change the default repository by customizing sachac-news-sacha-repository-url variable. Set the new git clone/pull URL as a value to your favourite git repository.
Sacha Chua exports the index.org and most-recent.org in other formats: ASCII text (txt) and HTML. To use them instead of the default most-recent.org file, set sachac-news-use-git-file customization variable to any of the repository files.
Also, your Emacs can export Org-mode to other formats. If you want to read to a particular format that is not present on the git repository, sachac-news-after-download-function can be set to the Org-mode export function you prefer.
For instance, supose you want to read the latests Emacs News in Markdown, and you have installed org-md package, set sachac-news-after-download-function to #'org-md-export-to-markdown function, and sachac-news-use-git-file to most-recent.org. When the timer reachs zero seconds, it will update the git repository downloading all its files, open the most-recent.org one, and tries to export it to Markdown. The resulting file is shown to the user.
Remember, if sachac-news-after-download-function is nil, then it defaults to display the file specified on sachac-news-use-git-file. This is the default behaviour. Also, if the new file is not Org-mode, the automatic folding is not supported (see below, Section Folding unwanted categories).
The alarm sound used to alert on new posts can be any sound file reproducible by the first program founded in the system: mpv, mplayer or ogg123.
The program notify-send is called along with the alarm sound. This is optional and nothing happens if it is not founded.
If you want to create your own notification function, take a look at the hook sachac-news-alarm-functions-hook.
You can customize sachac-news-fold-category-regexp-list variable with the matching text of the section you want to see folded.
For example, if you are not interested in the “Emacs development” nor in the “Emacs configuration” sections, simply add those strings at the variable. The result can be a list like the following:
("Emacs config" "Emacs development")The first section that matches one of these strings will be folded when you call M-x sachac-news-show-last-new.
The interactive function M-x sachac-news-fold-categories also works on the main Emacs-news index.org file.
These are some of the defined functions callable with M-x:
- help:sachac-news-show-last-new
- Show only the latest news.
- help:sachac-news-open-index-file :: Open the complete emacs-news (the index.org file). Try to not edit this file because it is used for searching new titles.
- help:sachac-news-show-update-time
- Display all the time information about the last updated time, the last timed update, etc.
- help:sachac-news-update-git
- If a the interval time has passed, update the git repository. Force the update with C-u.
- help:sachac-news-fold-categories
- If the current buffer is an org file (the latest news or the index.org), fold the parent items (used as categories) that are listed in the sachac-news-category-regexp-list customization option.
- help:sachac-news-activate-timer
- Activate the timer. If the timer is already activated, then reset it. The timer is configure to update the repository (the index.org file) after the hours indicated at the customization option sachac-news-update-hours-wait.
- help:sachac-news-deactivate-timer
- Deactivate the timer.
- help:sachac-news-timer-status
- Show if the timer is activated or not.
This work is under the GNU General Public License version 3. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html for more information.