Using ChatGPT via gptel to make my Emacs nutrition tracker smarter
Introduction
Back in April 2020 I shared how I built a nutrition tracker in Emacs that leveraged org-capture templates and or-ql to record foods, recipes, and meals. At that time, I relied on an org-mode based database and manual updates to keep track of calories, protein, carbs, and fat. While the system worked, maintaining that data was both tedious and error-prone. Each time I needed to insert a new food, I had to do an internet search to find the nutritional information and then manually update my org-mode files.
This is not a blog post. This is my Emacs powered nutrition tracker!
No, I mean it!
It’s the one file that contains all the code, templates and data of my tracker, exported in html.
Keep reading, to see how you can harness the power of emacs and org mode to track your nutrition and even generate cool graphs like:
For quick demo you can check this short Youtube demo: Nutrition tracking using Emacs.
Overview
This is a small post that describes how I made authoring markdown, org-mode etc easier by using snippets that help me handle links like a pro.
Prologue
I am a heavy user of org-mode. I use it for taking notes, writing blogs, presentations and so on. As a software developer I often use markdown too. In both cases at some point I have to deal with links.
Embarrassingly enough, I used to rely on my browsers bookmarks to handle links, so my workflow looked a little like:
Prologue
Lately I keep hearing about “how much software development has changed over the last half of the decade”. This usually refers to the adoption of containers, cloud etc. I would like to focus on an other factor of the change and that is the plethora of development related systems and services.
So its typical for a team to have:
- version control
- code review systems
- code analysis systems
- project management
- issue trackers
- continuous integration
- chat / messaging
Add email to that and you realize that most of development related tasks now days take place in the browser. Unfortunately, browsers by nature are unaware of the content they serve, so its not trivial to automate your workflow in the browser. So, if the browser is not going to play the role of ‘Swiss army knife’ for development then what?