WEBVTT

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Hello all! Welcome to EmacsConf 2021.

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I'm Tom Gillespie.

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Thank you to the organizers for

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all your hard work,

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and for inviting me to

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give this short talk on

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"Org as an executable format".

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The links to the talk page,

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the GitHub page for the project,

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and the package on MELPA

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are listed on the right.

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Let's start with one of the motivating

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use cases for executable Org files.

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Many users keep global configuration

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for Org in an init.el file,

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which works for many workflows.

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However, for reproducible research,

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this is a challenge

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because if an Org file is

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dissociated from the init.el file,

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then often it will no longer

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function as expected.

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One potential solution to this problem

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is to be able to include all of the

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global configuration for Emacs

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and the environment in the Org file itself,

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in which case when you

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go to reuse the Org file,

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it will work as expected.

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What does an executable Org file

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look like in action?

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Here's a demo of an executable Org file

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running in Bash, Dash, Zsh, and PowerShell.

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So, we are currently in Bash,

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and we can run our demo,

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and it will print some stuff,

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and wait for input.

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We can also run it in Dash,

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which is the default for Debian

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and derivatives.

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Same program works as expected.

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Zsh also. And lastly PowerShell,

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if we try to run demo.org itself,

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we see (that) we get an error

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because PowerShell cares

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about file extensions,

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so, if we symlink to ps1,

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then it works as expected,

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and there are ways to alias this,

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so that you can run it as a program

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without the ps1 extension.

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So, how does this work?

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There are three components

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to an executable Org file

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that all need to be present

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in order for this to work.

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Starting from the top of the file,

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we have a shebang block.

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Next we have an Org Babel block

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written in Emacs Lisp,

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which is what we actually saw executing,

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and then there are some

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eval local variables or Elvs

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that are involved in making this

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actually executable.

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Let's start with the shebang block.

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Org syntax does not have support

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for shebang lines.

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However, it supports the shebang block.

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This is because Org comments, blocks,

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keywords, etc. that start with the

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sharp sign have the same syntax as

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comments in POSIX and PowerShell.

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This block is in fact valid

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Bash, Dash, Zsh, PowerShell,

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and maybe some other shells as well.

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In essence what it does is,

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perform some setup

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to avoid polluting standard output,

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and then it runs Emacs

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to load the file itself.

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The Elisp that is passed on the command line

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is explicated over here on the right,

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and in essence what it does is,

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to keep the startup time minimal

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and as low as possible,

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it loads the absolute bare minimum

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needed for Babel,

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and then it calls hack-local-variables

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triggering the eval-local-variables.

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What do the eval-local-variables do,

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and how those work?

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The essence of the approach is to

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use org-confirm-babel-evaluate

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to allow Babel execution.

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We can't set it to nil because that is

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an arbitrary code execution vector,

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which we don't want if we're sharing files.

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Instead what we do is,

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we use the fact that it can be a function,

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and we normalize the block of code,

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we checksum it, and then we check

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that it matches this checksum up here

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at the top of the file,

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and then sort of inside there,

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inside of org-sbe,

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which is Org source block evaluate,

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we call the block.

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The actual implementation of this

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is somewhat more complicated.

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However, it's small enough to fit in

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the local variables at the end of the file.

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One thing to note is that

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if you are using PowerShell,

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PowerShell parses the whole file

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which means that

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for any normal Org content,

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you need to put it in

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a multi-line PowerShell comment,

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and close it.

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So, once we hit

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hack-local-variables at the end,

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we run the eval-local-variables block,

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then we enter this Elisp block,

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and you can write whatever you want.

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All the power of Org Babel is

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now at your fingertips

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in order to do what you need

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for this file.

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Finally, let's do a quick demo

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of how to use this to make

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your own Org files executable.

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Orgstrap is available on MELPA as mentioned,

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and it can be installed using package.el

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by calling package-install orgstrap.

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It will download, and it will install.

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Then you can open an existing file

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or a new file. In this case,

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let me open a file called example.org.

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And then orgstrap provides

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command called orgstrap-init.

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What orgstrap-init does is,

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it populates a file with the machinery

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needed to run an orgstrap block.

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We're just going to do a message

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"hello orgstrap!".

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If you look up at the top,

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you will see that the

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orgstrap-block-checksum will change

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when I save the file.

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This makes it much easier to author files

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with orgstrap blocks.

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And then we need one last piece

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of machinery,

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which is the shebang block.

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I am just going to steal

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the shebang block from

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this other file over here

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since it is available.

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You can also get it from shebang.org,

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and I have plans to add a command

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to insert this into the file directly,

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which may actually be done by the time

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this video is actually posted and visible.

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There's one last step,

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which is that we need to run dired

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in order to… There we go.

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So, we use Shift m, capital m,

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in order to make our

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example file executable,

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and then if we come back to here,

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we see that example.org is now executable,

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and we can run it.

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"hello orgstrap!", and we're done.

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So, that's the basic workflow

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for getting orgstrap files

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to be executable.

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I will be around to answer questions live,

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and I will be also available in

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the #emacsconf IRC channel all day.

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I hope you have found this useful,

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and thank you very much for watching.

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[captions by bhavin192 (Bhavin Gandhi)]