I recently realized how easy it is to make emacs automatically do even more repetitive things I used to do manually.

Emacs is great for easily automating repetitive tasks, from macros to the design that every manual action performed in emacs is available in elisp as a function. While I have been aware of this and leverage it regularly to automate tasks within emacs, I have never really thought about using emacs to do the kind of work I typically write a shell script to do. This is probably because I’m usually always in emacs anyway, so my typical workflow for automating a task is to write a function to do it, and then bind that function to some key.

Some scenarios lend themselves more to a shell script style of automation, however; yet, the task may still involve nontrivial text processing or emacs-specific things. In these cases, the workflow is really only slightly different. Again, I write a function to do it, test with that function, and once it is ready I place the body of the function in its own file and run it with

emacs -Q --load <the-file.el>

Note that this will open a new gui instance, which may be desirable – it means that the “script” behaves exactly as if the task was done manually. (The slowdown and popping up of windows can probably be mitigated by using -nw, but then some things that may only load when in X mode won’t be available.) Emacs also provides a --script switch (use it instead of --load) which won’t open the gui and does other nice things like exiting emacs automatically at the end, but it sometimes doesn’t behave exactly the same way as when X is used. I suspect that certain libraries aren’t loaded with that option (similar to -nw not loading X-related settings). This has tripped me up in the past when trying to automate exporting org files: the exported files are monochrome using --script, but colored using --load!

Example: generating agendas for others

One of the typical cases where I want to script emacs is exporting information from org mode for non-emacs users to consume. For example, the agenda provides such a convenient and automatic way to organize and represent information that I use it any time I have a timeline of tasks to complete. This kind of situation often occurs in group contexts as well, but of course rarely does anyone else use emacs, never mind org mode. So I often find myself in a situation where I would like to build and export custom agenda views for non-emacs users to have. Additionally, as the project progresses I may want to add tasks or mark tasks completed, and re-generate agendas for the others to see the progress.

Org mode makes it pretty easy to do this, so it’s simple to write a quick script that will automatically generate the necessary agenda views. One of the ways that I like to do this, for example, is to tag every task with the person it is delegated to. Then, I can create custom agenda view todo lists for each person by just filtering the agenda based on their tag and then exporting the view. I also like to leverage the CATEGORY property to provide more context in the agenda view for where tasks belong.

Below is an example script that exports agenda views to postscript files using the above strategy.

(setq org-agenda-exporter-settings
      '((ps-left-header (list 'org-agenda-write-buffer-name))
        (ps-right-header
         (list "/pagenumberstring load"
               (lambda () (format-time-string "%d/%m/%Y"))))
        (ps-print-color-p t)
        (ps-font-size '(14 . 11))       ; Lanscape . Portrait
        (ps-top-margin 55)
        (ps-left-margin 35)
        (ps-right-margin 30)))
(setq org-agenda-scheduled-leaders '("" "** LATE .%2dx: **"))
(setq org-agenda-span 'year)
(setq org-agenda-show-all-dates nil)

(find-file "</path/to/the/source.org>")
(org-agenda-file-to-front)
(org-agenda-list)

(defun export-view-for (tag)
  (defun insert-tag ()
    (insert (format ":\\(%s\\|all\\):" tag))
    (execute-kbd-macro (kbd "RET")))
  (run-with-timer 0.1 nil #'insert-tag)
  (call-interactively #'org-agenda-filter-by-regexp)
  (org-agenda-write (format "%s.ps" tag))
  (org-agenda-filter-remove-all))

(export-view-for "joe")
(export-view-for "schmoe")
(export-view-for "fred")

(save-buffers-kill-terminal)

This could also pretty easily be abstracted to take a configuration file with the path to source and names to export views for.

An extra fun fact is that exporting the views after updating the org source can be made easy with a link in the source that runs the script.

[[elisp:(async-shell-command "emacs -Q -l ./export-views.el")][export agenda views]]