tvl-depot/tools/emacs-pkgs/passively/README.md
Vincent Ambo 4adab5f7b9 feat(tools/passively): Bootstrap new Emacs package 'passively'
Passively is a tool to help people learn information via Emacs,
designed for language learning.

As of this CL, the actual implementation still lives in
//users/tazjin/russian/russian.el but I am generalising it here.

Change-Id: Iac5a8cfc78415496637a7ba5ddc4c2a1aa6bee26
2021-12-03 11:26:12 +00:00

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<!-- SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT -->
passively
=========
Passively is an Emacs Lisp library for passively learning new
information in an Emacs instance.
Passively works by displaying a random piece of information to be
learned in the Emacs echoline whenever Emacs is idle for a set amount
of time.
It was designed to aid in language acquisition by passively displaying
new vocabulary to learn.
Passively is configured with a corpus of information (a hash table
mapping string keys to string values) and maintains a set of terms
that the user already learned in a file on disk.
## Configuration & usage
Configure passively like this:
```lisp
;; Configure the terms to learn. Each term should have a key and a
;; string value which is displayed.
(setq passively-learn-terms
(ht ("забыть" "забыть - to forget")
("действительно" "действительно - indeed, really")))
;; Configure a file in which passively should store its state
;; (defaults to $user-emacs-directory/passively.el)
(setq passively-store-state "/persist/tazjin/passively.el")
;; Configure after how many seconds of idle time passively should
;; display a new piece of information.
;; (defaults to 4 seconds)
(setq passively-show-after-idle-for 5)
;; Once this configuration has been set up, start passively:
(passively-enable)
;; Or, if it annoys you, disable it again:
(passively-disable)
```
These variables are registered with `customize` and may be customised
through its interface.
### Known terms
Passively exposes the interactive function
`passively-mark-last-as-known` which marks the previously displayed
term as known. This means that it will not be included in the random
selection anymore.
### Last term
Passively stores the key of the last known term in
`passively-last-displayed`.
## Installation
Inside of the TVL depot, you can install passively from
`pkgs.emacsPackages.tvlPackages.passively`. Outside of the depot, you
can clone passively like this:
git clone https://code.tvl.fyi/depot.git:/tools/emacs-pkgs/passively.git
Passively depends on `ht.el`.
Feel free to contribute patches by emailing them to `depot@tazj.in`
## Use-cases
I'm using passively to learn Russian vocabulary. Once I've cleaned up
my configuration for that, my Russian term list will be linked here.