Emacs and Astrobotany (publ. 2024-06-21)

I gave Astrobotany a try this last week. It is kind of fun, but I quickly realized I didn't want to manually water my plant each day. Emacs to the rescue! First I needed a function to water the plant:

(defun water-plant ()
  (interactive)
  (message "watering plant")
  (start-process "gmni" nil "gmni"
                 "-I"
                 "-E" (concat plant-cert ":" plant-key)
           "gemini://astrobotany.mozz.us/app/plant/water"))

This requires gmni to be installed. It uses the appropriate cert and key from the corresponding identity generated by lagrange.

(defvar plant-cert "/home/christopher/.config/lagrange/idents/<snip>.crt")

(defvar plant-key "/home/christopher/.config/lagrange/idents/<snip>.key")

Emacs has a timer library, so I just need some code in the init.el to start a timer:

(run-at-time "04:00" 86400 'water-plant)

That will run at 4am every morning so long as Emacs is running, which for me is pretty much 24x7. There is an oddity in the design of run-at-time, such that if the time of day is already past 4am when run-at-time is called (i.e., when the init.el file is loaded) then water-plant will immediately be run once. So the plant gets an extra watering every time I restart Emacs. But fortunately in Astrobotany watering attempts are automatically cancelled if the plant is already 100% hydrated.

Here are the public links to my plant:

Your plant

Your plant (with color)

I also wrote a little function to view the plant inside Emacs, so that I wouldn't have to bother switching over to Lagrange:

(defun view-plant ()
  (interactive)
  (get-buffer-create "*plant*")
  (with-current-buffer "*plant*" (erase-buffer))                      
  (call-process "gmni" nil "*plant*" nil
                 "-E" (concat plant-cert ":" plant-key)
                 "gemini://astrobotany.mozz.us/app/plant")
  (switch-to-buffer "*plant*")
  (goto-line 29 "*plant*")
  (view-mode t))

The lines at the end basically scroll down a bit to get the plant in view, and then it switches the buffer over to view-mode so I can just press "q" to close the buffer.

Copyright

CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed