Temp Solution For When Text Copying Does Not Work in Emacs Under Windows Subsytem for Linux

• emacs

One of the problems I was having with my Emacs environment under WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux, aka. Bash On Windows) is that I could not copy text from WSL Emacs to other Windows applications. Copy and pasting from Windows to Emacs works without any problems so it's weird it does not work the other way around.

I tried a lot of solutions from Google but none of them seem to work. There was an emacs package called simpleclip that worked but the results were not consistent.

I then realized that a temporary solution would be to make use of Windows' clip.exe command line utility which can bme seen below.

(defun arebel-set-clipboard-data (str-val)
  "Puts text in Windows clipboard. Copying to Windows from WSL does 
not work on my end so this one is a temporary solution.

This function is called from within the simpleclip package when copy 
or bgcopy command is issued."
  (start-process "cmd" nil "cmd.exe" "/C" (concat "echo " (replace-regexp-in-string "\n" "\r" str-val) " | clip.exe")))

It works quite nicely especially after integrating it with simpleclip. This would do for now until I find a better solution.

EDIT (2017-10-01): Turns out the original code could not copy a region with multiple lines due to the difference in carriage return characters. This is now fixed with (replace-regexp-in-string "\n" "\r" str-val).

emacs windows linux

Converting org-journal entry to org-page post

• org-mode

Since my recent switch from Wordpress to org-page I wanted a way to convert my org-journal entries to org-page posts. Instead of copying each entry by hand and pasting to an org-page new page buffer I decided to make an elisp code that would do it automatically which can be seen below:

(defun arebel-org-journal-entry-to-org-page-post ()
  "Copy the org-journal entry at point and then convert it to a org-page new post buffer."
  (interactive)
  (if (eq 'org-journal-mode major-mode)
      (let ((headline-text (nth 4 (org-heading-components)))
        (entry-text (org-get-entry)))
    (funcall-interactively 'op/new-post "blog" (concat (buffer-name) "-" headline-text))
    (goto-char (point-max))
    (insert entry-text))
    (message "This function can only be called inside org-journal-mode.")) )

The function is simple and uses functions from org-mode and org-page.

  • First, it checks if the current buffer is in org-journal-mode
  • Then it gets the headline text and entry texts
  • It then calls op/new-post. It does it interactively so that it will trigger the prompts needed to populate the template. (Also notice that it takes the org-journal buffer name plus time as the blog post's org file name. This way I don't have to specify it.)
  • It then inserts the entry-text at the end of the buffer.

From here I am free to edit, commit, then publish.

It's working great. As proof this post you are reading right now has been made with the code above.

emacs org-mode

Converting org-journal entry to org-page post

• emacs

I needed a way to minify JSON files from Emacs so I made the short function below.

(defun arebel-minify-buffer-contents()
    "Minifies the buffer contents by removing whitespaces."
    (interactive)
    (delete-whitespace-rectangle (point-min) (point-max))
    (mark-whole-buffer)
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (search-forward "\n" nil t) (replace-match "" nil t)))

The function is very simple. First it deletes the whitespaces for the whole current buffer then removes every newline.

This effectively turns this:

{
    "glossary": {
        "title": "example glossary",
        "GlossDiv": {
            "title": "S",
            "GlossList": {
                "GlossEntry": {
                    "ID": "SGML",
                    "SortAs": "SGML",
                    "GlossTerm": "Standard Generalized Markup Language",
                    "Acronym": "SGML",
                    "Abbrev": "ISO 8879:1986",
"GlossDef": {


                          "para": "A meta-markup language, used to create markup languages such as DocBook.",
                        "GlossSeeAlso": ["GML", "XML"]
                    },
                    "GlossSee": "markup"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

To this:

{"glossary": {"title": "example glossary","GlossDiv": {"title": "S","GlossList": {"GlossEntry": {"ID": "SGML","SortAs": "SGML","GlossTerm": "Standard Generalized Markup Language","Acronym": "SGML","Abbrev": "ISO 8879:1986","GlossDef": {"para": "A meta-markup language, used to create markup languages such as DocBook.","GlossSeeAlso": ["GML", "XML"]},"GlossSee": "markup"}}}}}

It works for my current needs but have not fully tested it yet. It works for emacs lisp buffers too.

emacs