Tagged Emacs Lisp
Google Reader alternative for Emacs Ninjas
Posted on by Idorobots
With Google Reader being discontinued and everyone looking for alternatives I've decided to look for a little less "standard" solution, and hey, it turns out Emacs can be a pretty powerful RSS reader.
Newsticker.el
News Ticker is a built-in Emacs feed reader that doesn't get much attention for some reason. It is feature-rich, handles both RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds and has quite a bunch of tweakable options. Here's a simple setup to start with:
(require 'newsticker)
; W3M HTML renderer isn't essential, but it's pretty useful.
(require 'w3m)
(setq newsticker-html-renderer 'w3m-region)
; We want our feeds pulled every 10 minutes.
(setq newsticker-retrieval-interval 600)
; Setup the feeds. We'll have a look at these in just a second.
(setq newsticker-url-list-defaults nil)
(setq newsticker-url-list '("..."))
; Optionally bind a shortcut for your new RSS reader.
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c r") 'newsticker-treeview)
; Don't forget to start it!
(newsticker-start)
System monitor in Emacs mode-line
Posted on by Idorobots
Resistance is futile...
As we all know Emacs is a great operating system and a decent editor, and as such it has been serving me really well - I find myself assimilating more and more of my tools and daily activities into the Emacs collective. Recently I realised that Conky just wouldn't cut it anymore...
First of all, I barely look at my desktop. There's just no reason to do that other than checking some of the system stats such as memory usage or CPU load when I'm hacking arround and testing stuff.
For this particular use-case I figured the Emacs mode-line would be perfect to display all the relevant statistics directly in Emacs in such a way that I could glance through them without interrupting my workflow - giving me real-time feedback with minimal distraction.
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