CLCL Customization for Emacs

Way back in 2017 I wrote an introduction to CLCL¹, the clipboard manager that I prefer.  That post described how to add the supplementary Edit tool.  Today I’ll describe how to make CLCL work with Emacs.

By default, CLCL is set up to “listen” to the keystrokes Ctrl-x and Ctrl-c for pushing a selection to its stack of clipboard items, and Ctrl-v for popping the latest item into the focused application.  But Emacs’ standard keystrokes are Ctrl-w for “cutting,” Alt-w for “copying,” and Ctrl-y for “pasting.”  The terms “cutting,” “copying,” and “pasting” are in quotations because Emacs uses “killing” for “cutting” and “yanking” for “pasting.”²   And the keystrokes are described in Emacs-speak as C-w and C-y respectively.  The Emacs function “kill-ring-save” is like copy; it’s bound to M-w on my system.³

Anyway, to get a CLCL item yanked into the Emacs buffer, I add the Ctrl-y keystroke to CLCL.  You can do this on the Key tab of the Options dialog while Emacs is open.  Here's how.

Click the Add... button and scroll the Present Window List until you find a row whose title matches the text in the title bar of your Emacs application.  For me, that’s “GNU Emacs 25.2.1: *scratch*”, which is shown highlighted below.  Select that line and then click the down arrow button (or just double-click the line) to transfer the settings into the edit portion of the dialog box.

The Emacs title bar may include the name of the buffer.  In my example, that’s “*scratch*.”  But since the buffer name will vary, we need to replace it with the asterisk wildcard.

Click in the textbox below Copy and press Ctrl-w.⁴  Likewise, click in the textbox below Paste and click Ctrl-y.  The dialog should look similar to the one below.  Note that CLCL shows uppercase versions of W and Y in the Copy and Paste boxes; if you had pressed Ctrl-Shift-W it would display Ctrl + Shift + W instead.  OK your way out.

Now when you choose an item from CLCL while visiting a buffer in Emacs, it will be yanked into the buffer as expected.

Do you have a CLCL tip that you’d like to share?  Please let me know.  Add a comment below or email me.

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¹ https://ludditegeek.blogspot.com/2017/11/introduction-to-clcl-tools.html

² And to further confuse the issue, Emacs maintains it own “clipboard” which is called the “kill ring.”  Somehow, Emacs on Windows will yank from the Windows clipboard or yank from its kill ring depending on which was modified last.

³ Please see https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CopyAndPaste for more details.

⁴ Actually, configuring Copy not not be necessary.  Emacs on Windows seems to kill to the Windows clipboard, and CLCL adds each new clipboard item to its stack.

Add Command Prompt Here to Explorer Without Mucking About With the Registry

Windows 10 computers are missing the “Open Command Prompt Here” on the shortcut menu.

You can find a registry change online that will bring it back. But that “fix” involves changing the Permissions / Ownership of that part of the registry, so I declined to try it.

Instead I came up with a solution that uses the SendTo feature to call a batch file that calls CMD with the /K switch. To use it, create a batch file in your SendTo directory called OpenCMD.cmd. Add the content below, between the “BEGIN--------” and “END--------” tokens, and save it. Then Right-Click any file, choose SendTo OpenCMD.cmd, and a command prompt will be opened in the directory in which that file resides (if the path is on a local hard drive or mapped drive).

The SendTo directory can be found under your user profile; the <UN> in the path below is your user name:

C:\Users\<UN>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

You can also enter the following in the explorer address bar to navigate to SendTo: shell:SendTo

Here’s the batch file source code. Please note that most of the lines are either comments (which start with REM) or debugging statements (which start with Echo). In fact the only lines that are necessary are the ones between the labels :OpenCMD and :END.  And please don't include the “BEGIN--------” and “END--------” tokens

Begin--------

REM OpenCMD.cmd (c) 2022 Luddite Geek

REM Opens the command prompt in the directory of the given path

REM

REM 2022-11-04 LG Created.

GOTO OpenCMD

GOTO BEGIN

cmd /?

:BEGIN

@echo off

Echo %0 %1

Echo DRIVE: %~d0

Echo PATH: %~p0

Echo NAME: %~n0

Echo EXT: %~x0

Echo.

Echo Drive and Path of parameter 1: %~dp1

pause

:OpenCMD

%~d1

cd %~dp1

CMD /D /K CLS

:END

End--------

Open Org Mode Links With Default Windows Application

I've been using Org Mode for several years.

One Org Mode quirk is that the links in Org files always open in the Emacs editor, by default.  Click a link to Emacs_reference_card_v25.pdf on your hard drive and you might end up with a buffer that starts with this content...

%PDF-1.5
%    
3 0 obj
<<
/Length 4340      
/Filter /FlateDecode
>>
stream

I finally figured out a way to tell Emacs to open such "external" links with the default Windows application.  The multi-part solution involves first specifying all such links with a Special Prefix.  I chose "file:".  It's lame, I know, but it's also how you'd prefix an address for your web browser to open a local file.

So, for the PDF above, the link would look like this:
file:C:\emacs-25.2_64\doc\Emacs_reference_card_v25.pdf

The second part of the solution is to figure out which application on Windows you'd like to use to open the file "properly."  Rather than specifying multiple programs, such as a PDF reader for PDF files, a spreadsheet program for XLS/ODS, a word processor for DOC/ODT, etc., I decided that the single Windows command START already knows how to open all the programs on my computer.

If you were to enter the following in a command prompt, the program associated with the PDF extension would open the target file (assuming the file exists).

START C:\emacs-25.2_64\doc\Emacs_reference_card_v25.pdf

But there's a slight complication.  If the link contains a space or other delimiting character, you'll need to surround the file path with quotes like this: "C:\Path With Spaces\My PDF.pdf".  Unfortunately, START interprets quoted content as the title specification. Therefore, invoking the following would merely open a command prompt window with the title C:\Path With Spaces\My PDF.pdf

START "C:\Path With Spaces\My PDF.pdf"

So to get START to work as intended, you'd want to invoke it thusly:

START "DUMMY_TITLE" "C:\Path With Spaces\My PDF.pdf"

So having figured out the proper way to open file links, we create a function to implement it:

(defun ludditegeek-open-ext (path-to-media)
 (shell-command (concat "start \"ludditegeek-open-ext\" " path-to-media)))

Note that I chose to use the function name as the text for the title.  No matter, if all goes well, START will close the command prompt after it carries out the command -- most likely you'll never see the window.  For debugging, you could include the /WAIT switch, in which case you'll see the window, and the application will be listed in Task Manager with the title included.

Another thing to note here is that strings are defined in Lisp as characters enclosed in double-quotes.  But the title also requires double-quotes!  So I used a backslash character to escape the double-quote characters that are used to define the title.

The third part of the solution is to employ org-add-link-type to define the "file" link:

(org-add-link-type "file" 'ludditegeek-open-ext)

I call it with eval-after-load.  Here, finally, is what you can put in your .emacs:

(eval-after-load "org"
  '(progn
     ;; Create links in Org thusly:
     ;; [[file:/path/to/ppt.pptx][name of ppt]]
     ;; [[file:"/path with spaces/to/pdf.pdf"][name of pdf]]
     ;; [[file:/path/to/video.mkv][name of video]]
     (defun ludditegeek-open-ext (path-to-media)
       ;; Use Windows start command to open default application.
       ;; Note that first parameter to START is the command prompt window's title,
       ;; necessary for links that are enclosed in "", such as links with spaces.
       (shell-command (concat "start \"ludditegeek-open-ext\" " path-to-media)))
     (org-add-link-type "file" 'ludditegeek-open-ext)
     ))

I hope you find this useful!

Show Column in Outlook With Email Purge Date

If you're running Outlook in an Exchange environment, and the administrator has defined a Retention Policy, you can use the following kludge to configure Outlook to display a column of dates that the emails will be deleted on.  It's a kludge because the configuration doesn't actually retrieve the Retention Policy from Exchange -- it's up to you to find out what it is and then add it to the configuration.

Select your Inbox and then right click on the message list header and select Field Chooser.

Click the down arrow next to Frequently-used fields and scroll down to User-defined fields in folder.

Click New... and then enter PurgeOn in the Name box, and scroll down the Type box and select Formula.

Enter in the Formula box the DateAdd function that will return a date that's X number of days or months after the message Received date.  For example, if the Retention Policy is 18 months, enter this into the box: DateAdd("m",18,[Received]).  (The first parameter "m" specifies "Month" as the interval.  The number in the second parameter defines the number of intervals, or months in this case.  The third parameter represents the each message's received date.) Then click OK.

Drag the new PurgeOn field that you just created to the header in the position that you'd like the column to appear.

Close Field Chooser and resize the columns so that the dates in the new PurgeOn field display properly.

Note that the dates in the PURGEON column are 18 months later than the dates in the received column.

Unfortunately it seems that each folder (Inbox, Sent Items, etc.) requires its own User Defined Field. The [Received] field is appropriate for use in the Inbox. You might use DateAdd("m",18,[Sent]) in the Sent Items folder.

Again, this is a kludge. If an administrator changes the Retention Policy on the Exchange Server, your new field will ignore the change and blithely continue to show dates based on the old policy.  It may be possible to write a VBA procedure that would run on startup, retrieve the Retention Policy from Exchange and define the PurgeOn field programmatically.  Let me know if you get that working!

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A subset of this solution appeared on Microsoft TechNet on 2018-08-09.

Introduction to CLCL Tools

CLCL is the clipboard manager that I prefer.  But it’s lacking in extensive documentation, at least for those who don’t know Japanese.  I figured out how to configure the Tools that it comes with, so I thought I’d share that with you.

This procedure assumes that you already know how to download, install and run the main program.

Download the Tools from http://www.nakka.com/soft/clcl/index_eng.html .  There are two ZIP files (tltxt002_eng.zip and tlutl002_eng.zip, as of this writing) that provide DLLs with the functions that serve as tools.  Copy the DLLs from those ZIP files into the directory in which the CLCL executable resides.  While you’re at the Nakka website, you might as well download the other ZIP files that provide ability to manage as wider range of file formats.  Copy their DLLs, too.  As of this writing, there are two: fmtrtf002_eng.zip; fmtmeta002_eng.zip .

Invoke Tools from the Viewer menu, then choose Tool Setup…

Click the Add… button.

In the DLL textbox, enter the path and filename of one of the tool DLLs, for example, C:\Program Files (x86)\CLCL\tool_text.dll .  If you click the Browse button, you can use a File Dialog box to navigate to and select the DLL.

Now choose one of the Tools to add.  I find &Edit to be useful, so choose that.  OK your way back out.

Now when you press your hot key to call up the clipboard list, you can right-click on a text entry, then click on Edit to open a simple editor to modify the text.  When you’re done, you can click OK to put the edited content onto the clipboard, replacing the original entry.

Use the same procedure to try out the other tools.

Hard Drive Thrashing? Maybe It's Windows Update

In a previous post, I wondered if my computer problems were due to AntiVirus interfering with Windows Update.

Perhaps.  But there's definitely a problem with Windows Update. The following seemed to get rid of the excessive and endless thrashing of the hard drive:

http://www.cagedrat.com/microsoft-windows/microsoft-windows-updates-cab-files-filling-up-hard-drive/

And yes, I plug in my computer and set it to Stay Awake before downloading and installing updates.

Notes on Setting Up Windows 7

Recently I had to set up fresh installations of Windows 7 on two computers.  Here are some tips to make that process go a bit smoother...

1. Windows Update #1 -- Microsoft has released hundreds of recommended and important updates for Windows 7 since it was introduced.  All that data is a burden for Windows Update, and the update process can bog down on slower computers.  To remedy this, you'll want to download the update associated with KB3102810 first before you even check for updates.  Adjusting your computer's Power Options so it stays awake during the long update process may also help.

2. Windows Update #2 -- I wrote about this before.  Unless you want to upgrade to Windows 10, you'll want to hide the update KB3035583, or uninstall it if it already got onto your system.

3.  Gadgets -- Third party gadgets are no longer supported due to "serious vulnerabilities" in the Windows Sidebar.  You'll still be able to add the default Microsoft ones, such as "Clock," "Calendar," "Slide Show" and "CPU Usage" (my favorites).  But I also liked the third party "Network Meter," which I'd use often to verify download rates.  Since Network Meter is no longer available, I figured out that I can use ResMon to do something similar.  To have ResMon (almost) mimic Network Meter I minimize the various components in the left pane of ResMon and resize the window so that only the network graphs show up.  And I add a shortcut to ResMon.exe in my StartUp folder.

Do you have any tips for setting up Windows 7?  Please share them!

How About Never?

A coworker had just bought a refurbished computer with Windows 7 OS and was dutifully applying updates.  He noticed a new icon in the taskbar tray and clicked it.  The program presented him with the opportunity to upgrade to Windows 10.  It implicitly asked when would you like to download Windows 10?  The dialog box offered two buttons labeled "Upgrade now" and "Upgrade tonight."

How about Never?  That was not an option.

The Gwx.exe and GwxUX.exe programs make it easy for users to reserve their free copy of Windows 10.  They appear after the user applies the update associated with KB3035583.  And they disappear after the user uninstalls that update.

This "How To Geek" article describes it all in detail.

My previous post discusses why you might want to avoid upgrading.