A picture is worth a thousand words, so here's all you need to know about Emmet.

Emmet is available for a number of IDE's and editors, including Emacs. If you've ever written any CSS you'll feel right at home with how selectors and identifiers work.

Emacs is a great platform for many things, and in just a few steps it can be setup for distraction free writing.

You'll need a copy of darkroom-mode, which can either be downloaded from the darkroom-mode homepage, or installed using M-x package-install darkroom.

Once installed it's good to go, but I prefer slightly different settings to the default.

I use use-package to manage my configuration, but the setup is pretty much the same without it (just use the contents of the progn expression). The following will set the font to be larger and will limit the page to 80 columns wide:

(use-package darkroom-mode
  :commands darkroom-mode
  :init
  (progn
    (defvar darkroom-mode-face-foreground "Inconsolata")
    (defvar darkroom-mode-face-size 160)
    (defvar darkroom-mode-center-margin 80)
    (define-key global-map [f12] 'darkroom-mode)))

Once everything is configured, hitting <f12> will toggle darkroom mode.

To remove the title bar and go into full-screen mode, you'll need a little extra trickery:

(defun pn/full-screen-toggle ()
  "toggle full-screen mode"
  (interactive)
  (shell-command "wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -btoggle,fullscreen"))
(global-set-key (kbd "<f11>")  'pn/full-screen-toggle)

The code above will bind <f11> to toggle window decorations and go full-screen (linux/mac only).

Recently I've been using electric indent mode to handle automatic indentation. It's very useful when writing code, as it indents blocks automatically when the enter key is pressed. But some of that behaviour isn't desirable when using other modes, such as org mode.

One thing I like about org-mode is the keyboard shortcuts for inserting new headlines and todo items. For example, ALT+ENTER will create a new headline beneath the current line at the correct depth.

Unfortunately, when using electric indent the headlines are indented:

Thankfully the solution is relatively simple. Placing either one of the following pieces of code in your Emacs intialization file will disable electric indentation when working with org files.

;; Method one.
(add-hook 'electric-indent-functions
	  (lambda (x) (when (eq 'org-mode major-mode) 'no-indent)))

;; Method two.
(add-hook 'org-mode-hook
	  (lambda () (electric-indent-local-mode -1)))

So now you'll get the expected behaviour:

This is one of those strange things that really came out of nothing. This morning @bmndr tweeted the following:

RT @ClarissaAdjoint: Beeminder, Org Mode, and Mental Illness http://t.co/cE147buSje

— Beeminder (@bmndr) March 21, 2014

It really struck a chord with me. All of my income comes from freelancing, so it's pretty important for me to be as productive as possible.

Most of my work these days is done in Emacs, and I use it for managing my various projects and todo lists. I've also been using Beeminder for the last few years to keep me on the straight and narrow.

At the end Clarissa mentions that it would nice if moving a task from TODO to DONE in Emacs could notify Beeminder. This is something I've wanted for a while, but my lisp skills are limited at best.

Thankfully Sacha Chua posted a great comment with some code that started me on the right track, and after a couple of hours of research I managed to come up with something that works.

beeminder.el is a simple extension for Emacs that adds some limited Beeminder functionality, such as fetching goals or adding data. It also integrates with org-mode, and can be configured so that closing a TODO item will add a data point to a Beeminder goal.

And it all came from just one tweet. Weird.

Project page: beeminder.el

2013 was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Overall it was very successful, but I feel it was as balanced as I would have liked. I certainly did much better from a business standpoint, but as a result my personal projects suffered.