In the pursuit of an optimized Emacs setup, I focused on enhancing defaults and minimizing the number of installed packages to maintain simplicity and efficiency:

• The initial step involved creating minimal-emacs.d, a project that has resonated with the Emacs community, providing a foundational template for many users’ init.el and early-init.el vanilla Emacs configuration.

• Next, I experimented with hundreds of Emacs packages, carefully selecting the most valuable ones that, ideally, leverage built-in Emacs functions. (This is why I chose corfu chosen over company, eglot over lsp-mode, and flymake over flycheck, etc.)

In this article, I will share the Emacs packages I use daily for software development and text editing. Please share in the comments the Emacs packages you are using!

Where can I find the third-party packages listed below?

The following Emacs packages installed whether from MELPA or ELPA.

Category: Code completion

• corfu: A completion framework that integrates with the built-in completion system in Emacs. For example, it can complete Python code when using the eglot package and a Python language server such as Pylsp.
• prescient: Provides smart completion suggestions based on history and context. For example, it can enable fuzzy completion with Corfu/Cape or anticipate your next input based on previous selections.
• cape: A completion-at-point extension for various completion frameworks in Emacs, enhancing Corfu.
• nerd-icons-corfu: Integrates Nerd Icons with the Corfu completion framework, enhancing the appearance of completion candidates.

Category: Software development (General)

• eglot (built-in): An LSP client that provides features like code completion, diagnostics, formatting, and more, powered by language servers. For example, it can be used to add Python code completion using the language server Pylsp. There are many language servers available for many other programming languages.
• outline-indent: Enables code folding based on indentation levels. This package is useful for editing indentation-based text files, such as YAML, Python, and other indented text files.
• treesit (built-in): This package provides a way to work with tree-sitter, a syntax code parser that performs syntax highlighting, code navigation, and structural editing across various programming languages.
• hl-todo: Highlights TODO keywords in your code, helping to track tasks and reminders.
• highlight-symbol: Highlights occurrences of symbols in your code.
• reformatter: Define commands which run reformatters on the current Emacs buffer
• flymake (built-in): An on-the-fly syntax checking system that works well with eglot.
• indent-bars: Provides indentation guide-bars.
• paren (built-in): Matching parenthesis highlighting.
• ws-butler: Automatically trim extraneous white-space only in edited lines.
• yasnippet: A template system for Emacs that allows for easy insertion of code snippets, improving coding efficiency. (The author is also using ultyas to share the same code snippets in Emacs and Vim)
• rainbow-delimiters: Colorizes matching parentheses, brackets, and braces, improving code readability.
• dtrt-indent: Automatically adjusts indentation based on the surrounding context in code files, improving code readability.

Category: Version Control System

• magit: A comprehensive interface for Git within Emacs, allowing for easy version control operations.
• diff-hl: Displays git diff information in the fringe of your Emacs window.
• git-gutter: Displays git diff information in the fringe of your Emacs window. (alternative to diff-hl.)

Category: Better minibuffer

• consult: Provides intelligent search and navigation commands, powered by the Emacs completion function, completing-read.
• vertico: A performant and minimalistic vertical completion UI based on the default completion system
• marginalia: Enhances the display of completion candidates in the minibuffer.
• embark: Enhances minibuffer completion and interaction with various Emacs commands and actions.
• wgrep: Allows for in-buffer editing of grep results, improving the usability of search results. It can be used with Consult/Embark.

Category: Session management / persist and restore

• easysession: A lightweight Emacs session manager that can persist and restore file editing buffers, indirect buffers/clones, Dired buffers, the tab-bar, and the Emacs frames (with or without the Emacs frames size, width, and height).
• saveplace (built-in): Persist and restore your current cursor position.
• savehist (built-in): Persist and restore your Emacs command history.

Category: Themes

• tomorrow-night-deepblue-theme: A blue color theme for Emacs inspired by the Tomorrow Night color scheme.
• ef-themes: A collection of light and dark themes for GNU Emacs whose goal is to provide colorful themes.

Category: Vim emulation

• evil: An extensible vi layer for Emacs, providing a modal editing experience similar to Vim.
• evil-collection: A collection of Emacs packages that integrate with Evil mode to provide consistent keybindings across multiple modes.
• evil-snipe: Provides enhanced search and jump functionality for Evil mode.
• evil-surround: Enhances text object handling in Evil mode, allowing for easier manipulation of surrounding characters.
• vdiff: Provides a visual interface for comparing two versions of a file that is similar to the Vim editor.
• vim-tab-bar: Provides a tab-bar interface reminiscent of Vim, allowing for better management of multiple buffers and windows in Emacs.

Category: Terminal Emulators

• eat: A terminal emulator, written in Elisp.
• vterm: A terminal emulator for Emacs, written in C.

Category: Undo/Redo

• undo-fu: An advanced undo/redo system that enhances the default undo behavior in Emacs.
• undo-fu-session: Integrates with undo-fu to provide session management for undo history, enhancing undo capabilities across sessions.

Category: Miscellaneous file types

• org (built-in): A powerful mode for organizing notes, tasks, and project planning within Emacs.
• org-appear: Improves the visibility of Org mode elements in the buffer by automatically toggling visibility based on context.
• toc-org: Automatically generates a table of contents for Org mode documents.
• rainbow-mode: Provides colorized display for hex color codes in the buffer.
• markdown-mode: Provides major mode support for editing Markdown files.
• markdown-toc: Automatically generates and manages a table of contents for Markdown files, making navigation easier.
• git-modes: A collection of major and minor modes for various Git-related files, improving the editing experience.
• lua-mode: Provides major mode support for editing Lua files.
• php-mode: Provides major mode support for editing PHP files.
• dockerfile-mode: Provides syntax highlighting and editing support for Dockerfile files.
• jenkinsfile-mode: Provides syntax highlighting and editing support for Jenkinsfile.
• groovy-mode: Provides major mode support for editing Groovy files.
• yaml-mode: Provides major mode support for editing YAML files, complete with syntax highlighting and formatting commands.
• ansible-doc: Provides documentation lookup for Ansible modules.
• flymake-ansible-lint: Provides on-the-fly syntax checking for Ansible playbooks and roles, ensuring code quality.
• flymake-bashate: Integrates bashate for syntax checking of Bash scripts in real-time within Emacs.

Category: Elisp

• easy-escape: Simplifies the process of escaping Elisp characters in strings.
• aggressive-indent: Automatically keeps your code indented as you type. The author mainly uses this package with Elisp.
• erefactor: Assists in refactoring Elisp code.
• elisp-autofmt: Automatically formats Emacs Lisp code.
• paren-face: Visually enhances Elisp parentheses.
• elisp-refs: Provides tools for managing and browsing references to Emacs Lisp functions and variables.
• package-lint: Lints Emacs Lisp packages to ensure compliance with best practices and package standards.
• page-break-lines: Highlights page break lines in the buffer, improving visual flow and navigation.
• helpful: An improved help system for Emacs, providing better documentation lookup.

Category: File Manager

• dired (built-in): File manager.
• nerd-icons-dired: Enhances Dired mode with icons from Nerd Fonts, improving file browsing.
• dired-hacks: Extends the functionality of dired.

Category: Other packages

• expand-region: Expands the selected region in code, making it easier to select logical blocks of code or text.
• disable-mouse: Disables mouse support within Emacs, encouraging keyboard-centric navigation and editing. This can be beneficial for some users who prefer a more traditional text editor experience.
• sdcv: Bring the Stardict’s dictionary functionality directly into your Emacs workflow. This will turn Emacs into a dictionary.
• fasd: Offers fast access to files and directories based on your history and usage patterns, optimizing file navigation.
• dir-config: Automatically find and evaluate .dir-config.el Elisp files to configure directory-specific settings.
• exec-path-from-shell: Ensures Emacs uses the same environment variables as your shell.
• abbrev (built-in): Create abbreviations that expand into longer snippets of text.
• jinx: Provides on-the-fly spell checking.
• which-key (built-in): Displays available keybindings in a popup, helping users learn and remember key combinations in Emacs.
• nerd-icons: Adds support for Nerd Fonts in Emacs, improving visual aesthetics in various modes.

By focusing on these essential packages that favor built-in Emacs functions, the Emacs configuration was simplified while still maintaining a highly functional setup.

And you, what Emacs packages are you using?

Over at the Emacs subreddit, FirmSupermarket6933 asks who really created Emacs. He cites various sources claiming that RMS did or did not create it. Is he responsible only for GNU Emacs or was he there from the beginning? Sadly the commenters purporting to answer his question have no more idea than FirmSupermarket6933 about the editor’s origin.

All of this was long ago and far away but almost everyone who has a reasonable grasp of Emacs’ history agree on some basic facts:

• Emacs began circa 1976 as a set of macros for the TECO editor. That’s where the macs in “Emacs” comes from. The origin of the E is more controversial. Some say it stands for “Editing” but Stallman and others say it was chosen for more pragmatic reasons.
• Stallman was heavily involved from the beginning. Guy Steele has produced some email threads that show this definitively.
• Many others including Steele, David Moon, and James Gosling were instrumental in moving the effort forward. The end of this process is what we now know as GNU Emacs

Even the original effort was more curation than invention. The original TECO macros were collected from the macros that people in the AI Lab were using. The idea was to have a standard set of macros that everyone could use. Even so, there was a surprising amount of work to get everything working. See Steele’s email threads for the details.

All of this began almost 50 years ago so memories are dim and, sadly, many of the principals are nearing the end of their lives so it’s important to get these facts right while we can.

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nbIaGw9tsA

I will do a live stream this Thursday. The idea is to answer any question from those who join the stream. The topics can be about anything, from Emacs to philosophy, to life in general.

If there are no questions, then I will do some maintenance of my Emacs packages (not sure which ones, but there is always something).

Depending on how things go, the event will be around two hours long. I am happy to run it for longer (four hours maximum because then the sun sets and I have to switch off the computer).

The event will be recorded. No worries if you cannot make it.

For me, there is only one answer to "What do you want to be?".

I want to be content.

I want to be content with what I do for a living, I want to be content with where I reside, and more importantly, I want to be content with who I am.

While I do have specific plans for my future, in the end, nothing else matters if I am not content.

I can't find true fulfillment in material things; it has to come from the work I put in. I have to work diligently, I have to always take the long road, and build myself with blood, sweat, and tears. So that I can cherish everything I have, as I will know for sure that they were deserved.

I also have to build my surroundings. We are reflections of our friends. That means I have to look up to and be proud of people whom I call friends. A fellow blogger, Marcel, has a great blog post called "Life-Affirming Choices". In that blog post, he says

"I want to be, and surround myself with, people who are willing to put in the effort to live a life their future selves will thank them for—people who make scalable, life-affirming choices because they know these actions grow and compound over time, leading to greater, unexpected benefits."

I recommend checking out his post as he has been a great inspiration for this.

While I am proud and happy with everything I've achieved up until now, I also know my potential. I know that I can do great things that can change the world for the better, and I want to live up to it.

In the end, our life is too fleeting not to do great things.

Charles Choi has a new announcement about his Casual package. Several of his users encouraged him to offer Casual to Emacs core or Elpa. He did that and, of course, he got push back. The main complaint was that there were too many apps.

I’ve always felt that having separately installable apps was an advantage. Others disagree and so Choi has implemented a new package that includes all the casual apps and has announced that he will remove the current apps from MELPA shortly. Take a look at Chou’s post for the details.

I don’t understand why any of this is necessary. The purists insist that MELPA is an illegitimate repository because … reasons. But the truth is that almost every popular Emacs package is curated there and that for all intents and purposes, MELPA is Elpa. I would have been happier if Casual had remained on MELPA and the various apps had remained separately installable.

Regardless, if you like the Casual apps—and there’s a lot to like—you will need to take action to update your configuration. Perhaps the Casual apps will one day be absorbed into Emacs core and all this silliness will be unnecessary but until then you will have to update your init.el to keep using them.

Full disclaimer first: I am not a statistician nor well versed in statistics. But I was recently very interested in knowing more about MELPA and how it was used. I did a bit of research, wrote a little data massaging script, compiled data here, and went on to gather a few basic statistics about MELPA.

1First glance

At the time of writing this and when the data massaging script was ran, MELPA had

• 4,548 packages
• 1811 package owners
• 180,821,044 total downloads

2Timeline

The first thing I wanted to know was how many packages were added by year. MELPA started in 2012 and since then its biggest year was 2013 with 755 new packages accepted into the repo. Since then, it has been on the decline.

3Sources

No surprises here but over 95% of packages are hosted on github.com.

4Downloads

The basic stats are:

• average of 39,908 downloads for a package
• but a median of 1,831 downloads
• with standard deviation of 148,129 downloads
• the package with the fewest downloads was just added and sits at 7 downloads
• the packages with the most downloads is at 2,693,349 downloads

This translates into a very long tail distribution with a huge quantity of packages with "few" downloads and outliers with a very large number of downloads.

Not very useful. There are definitely fancy ways of representing long tail data but it will have to be for another time.

More interesting to compare is downloads to months since published.

We can see that a lot of packages stay at a relatively low number of downloads over time meanwhile newer packages can reach a large number of downloads quickly.

Without thinking much, I compared the length of a package name to its download count.

It seems that packages with shorter names get more downloads. My two cents theory is that they are evocative enough or a library with catchy name (ie. dash). On the other hand, packages with very long names can be extensions of extensions like (company-XXX) with more of a niche aspect to begin with.

5Owners

Earlier I mentioned 1811 unique package owners. I was interested in seeing how many packages does one owner have. Obviously it averages to 2.45 packages per owner, but if I break down into buckets of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 and over packages I get this:

Which tells us that about 63% of owners published only 1 package to MELPA.

6Further steps

I had quite a bit of fun looking at these numbers. I could foresee going back to the data with different questions. It would also be neat to get information about the code repositories themselves and interact with the github API to get things like total contributors per packages and number of commits.

And who knows, maybe an interactive page to see charts in more details.

My Emacs "birthday" is January 21, 2014. That's right-- I just started using Emacs this year! While it's not quite my one-year birthday, I thought I'd take advantage of the annual review blogging tradition to do a retrospective on my first year in Emacs. Note: much of the following chronology takes place during an extended romp through Asia.

I installed Arch Linux in the Fall of 2013. When using Linux, you often need to edit configuration files. The friend who helped me set me up with Vim. I learned the basics--how to insert, save, and quit--and not much else.

In January, I decided it might be fun to give Emacs a try. Here is a picture of Marina Bay in Singapore, taken just before or while I did the Emacs tutorial:

As a life-long user of keyboard shortcuts, I appreciated Emacs' notation for key bindings. The tutorial begins with basic cursor controls; easy enough, but nothing exciting. I could see the line, sentence, and buffer equivalents being useful. But my jaw dropped when it taught me C-t, transpose-chars. I knew that mastering just that command would probably save me a lot of pain and typos, and that was probably the least of what Emacs could do.

#Emacs: using transpose-chars is a litmus test. If you care enough to save keystrokes to internalize C-t, then you must be a power user.

— Fredrik Appelberg (@appelberg) November 28, 2014

While the Emacs tutorial probably isn't meant to take more than an hour or two on the first try, it took me probably twice as long. This was because I made Anki cards. Some people say that Emacs' learning curve is steep. For myself, I've found Emacs' learning curve to be gentle, but (pleasantly) endless. Then again, it was probably making Anki cards that made the learning curve less steep for me.

A variation of this card was probably one of my first Emacs cards:

Cloze deletion cards like this one are very convenient for this kind of thing. One reason is that it's easy to add new, related information later:

In February, the battery on my little Arch laptop died. I spent most of the month without a laptop, waiting for a new battery to arrive by mail. I borrowed my friend and travel partner's machine to review my Anki cards. Still, I did manage to have a little time to develop my Emacs-fu.

In Hanoi, the hotel room we stayed in had a (virus-ridden) Windows machine. What else could I do but install Emacs? At this time, my Emacs configuration was not that complex, so it wasn't worth adapting. As it turned out, that time with a bare Emacs proved especially helpful for mastering some of the key Emacs concepts that I hadn't quite made use of yet; in particular, I got the hang of using multiple buffers in one session. By the the end of February, my new battery had arrived, and I was back in the Emacs saddle.

In March, I converted my my Emacs configuration to an Org-literate format, and started tracking it with Git. This was really the first project that I used Git for, and it gave me an opportunity to learn Git.

Thank you Magit for teaching me git #emacs4life

— ionrock (@ionrock) December 22, 2014

The other highlight of March was starting to learn a little Elisp. I found Robert Chassell's "An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp" especially helpful. Chassell's overview and Org-mode's fantastic documentation helped me to write my first significant piece of Elisp (some org-capture templates).

April started off with a bang when my Emacs configuration was featured in a major motion picture, Tron Legacy. But that wasn't nearly as exciting as making my first major mode, tid-mode.

In late June, Artur Malabarba launched his Emacs blog, Endless Parentheses. One of his early posts was about hungry-delete. I was excited about it, but found that it did not work with transient-mark-mode. Artur encouraged me to write a fix. I was very excited when Nathaniel Flath, the maintainer, agreed to merge my patches into hungry-delete. At about the same time, Artur posted an adapted version of my narrow-or-widen-dwim function to Endless Parentheses. Sacha Chua, Nathaniel Flath, and some other Emacs Lisp hackers also offered suggestions.

At the end of July, I started learning Clojure, and added an initial CIDER configuration. While reading the Clojure Cookbook, I decided to hack out a function that turned the pages. Ryan Neufeld, one of the co-authors, merged my pull request, and a while later, I saw my function mentioned on Planet Clojure.

In October, I purchased a Mac for a Clojure contracting job. (Knowing Emacs helped me get the job!) Adding the :ensure keyword to my use-package declarations made the Emacs configuration portion of my OS X set-up process near-instant and pain-free. It was a really cool feeling to be using the same Emacs configuration on two different machines. By the end of the month, both were running on the newly-released Emacs 24.4.

Once Emacs 24.4 was out, Artur posted an Emacs 25 wishlist to Endless Parentheses. I responded with this tweet:

#Emacs 25 wishlist: putting people like @bruceconnor @wilfredh @sachac @sanityinc @nicferrier all in one room for a hackathon...

— Michael Fogleman (@mwfogleman) October 29, 2014

This tweet indirectly led to the happy occasion of the Emacs Hangouts.

That just about brings us to this post. In retrospect, I can't believe it's been less than a year, or that I've learned so much. Thanks to everyone who has helped me so far on the endless path of mastering Emacs, especially Ben, Eric, Sacha Chua, Artur Malabarba, and Bozhidar Batsov.

I want to close this post out with Sacha's tweet about 2015:

What are your Emacs resolutions? In 2015, I want to get the hang of refactoring, syntactical editing, dynamic autocompletion, and testing.

— Sacha Chua (@sachac) December 16, 2014

Like Sacha, I want to learn how to write and run tests in Emacs. I want to learn more about org-mode's features and possible workflows. More broadly, I'd like to make more posts about Emacs, and find other ways to contribute to the Emacs community. I'd like to learn more about Emacs core development. In terms of contrib, I'd like to help accelerate the release of Magit's "next" branch. Above all, I'm sure I'll keep tweaking my configuration.

UPDATE: I'm moving Emacs News to the info-gnu-emacs mailing list instead of emacs-tangents. If you're subscribed to Emacs News through emacs-tangents, you may want to switch your subscriptions. Emacs News will also continue to be available on the web and through RSS. I'll post to both info-gnu-emacs and emacs-tangents for a little while.

• Emacs 30.0.92 pretest is available (Reddit, Irreal)
• Upcoming events:
  • Emacs Berlin (virtual, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Oct 30 1030 America/Vancouver - 1230 America/Chicago - 1330 America/Toronto - 1730 Etc/GMT - 1830 Europe/Berlin - 2300 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Oct 31 0130 Asia/Singapore
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Nov 1 0900 America/Vancouver - 1100 America/Chicago - 1200 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Sat Nov 2 0000 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs Paris: S: Emacs workshop in Paris (online) https://emacs-doctor.com/ Tue Nov 5 0830 America/Vancouver - 1030 America/Chicago - 1130 America/Toronto - 1630 Etc/GMT - 1730 Europe/Berlin - 2200 Asia/Kolkata – Wed Nov 6 0030 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #14 2024 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/4e3c90f8-e673-40a9-8825-d3717ba8237e Thu Nov 7 1900 CET
  • Atelier Emacs Montpellier (in person) https://lebib.org/date/atelier-emacs Fri Nov 8 1800 Europe/Paris
  • EmacsConf 2024 schedule Dec 7 and 8 (@sacha@social.sachachua.com)
• Beginner:
  • How to Install Emacs on macOS: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners (05:33)
  • TheMKat: Read documentation from the comfort of Emacs - man-pages, developer documentation and more
• Emacs configuration:
  • Quicker access to Emacs Info manuals (@spnw@gts.plexwave.org)
  • Summer Emacs: Universal Keybind
  • Charles Choi: Announcing Casual (Redux) and Reorganization
  • Emacs Twist - reproducible package and configuration management for Emacs (@arialdo@mastodon.online)
  • Bz01: Optional dependency loading in Emacs, a good idea?
• Emacs Lisp:
  • A fork of restclient with graphql support & graphql explorer/builder (YouTube, Reddit)
  • Emacs Lisp is pleasant after hash-table and list libraries and plenty of macros | Hacker News
• Appearance:
  • Function for toggling between wrapping and truncating of lines
  • A progress bar in the echo area (Reddit)
  • James Dyer: selected-window-accent-mode with window colour blending options
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: modus-themes version 4.6.0
• Navigation:
  • [New Package] empx.el is Extended xref.el forward and backward navigation, more ways to mark the current point.
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: beframe version 1.2.0
  • Emacs Treemacs auto-toggling in text and prog-modes. Author: @ichernyshovvv (@shegeley@fosstodon.org)
• Dired:
  • Alvaro Ramirez: Hide another detail (Irreal, lobste.rs)
• Writing:
  • Minor modes for flagging poor grammar (@howard@pdx.sh)
• Org Mode:
  • Search other org headings with a link to the current one - org-ql (@Re420@tooting.ch)
  • Erik L. Arneson: Examining To-Do Lists in Org-mode
  • Emacs as your Intellectual HQ (01:02:48)
  • MOOC on reproducible research, includes a path for Emacs (French with French and English subtitles)
  • Deep linking with Org mode and Zotero (@spnw@gts.plexwave.org)
  • org-catch: A concise and more flexible alternative to org-capture (Reddit)
  • Sacha Chua: Insert a link to an Org Mode heading from an org-refile prompt
  • You don't need org-alert, Emacs has it built-in (kinda) (Reddit)
  • hyperdrive-org-transclusion v0.3.0
  • TheMKat: How I blog with Emacs - Org-Mode, Jekyll, Github Actions and interesting tidbits
• Coding:
  • Magit amend commit author (@xenodium@indieweb.social)
  • woolsweater/gambol.el: Emacs text actions using LSP symbol information - Codeberg.org (@woolsweater@social.lol)
  • Andrea: A useful function to contribute to Scala Metals lsp server with Emacs (Reddit)
  • Prolog大好きおじさん　ver3.36で仕切り直しです。Emacsは無理かも。 (04:39)
• Mail, news, and chat:
  • mastodon.el 1.1.0: link cards, grouped notifications, lots of updates
  • Summer Emacs: ERC Flipping Buffers
• Community:
  • Weekly Tips, Tricks, &c. Thread
  • [BLOG] #12 [[bbb:OrgMeetup]​] on Wed, Oct 9, 19:00 UTC+3
  • Irreal: What Keyboard Are You Using With Emacs
  • Keynote presentation by Hal Abelson and Gerald Sussman at the fourteenth RacketCon - YouTube (@hadi@fosstodon.org)
    • "The real thing I love is Emacs" - Gerald Sussman (Reddit)
  • Neovim Origin Story, An Emacs User's Perspective
  • Hofstadter on Lisp: Atoms and Lists, re-printed in Metamagical Themas. · GitHub (1983, lobste.rs)
• Other:
  • Using sort-regexp-fields to sort a list of device serial numbers (letters + numbers) by numerical part only
  • Revisitng and refactoring demo-it - demonstrations in Emacs, Part II (@howard@pdx.sh)
  • Code to modify PDF metadata (such as its outline and pagination) (Reddit)
  • trueroad/tr-emacs-ime-module: Emulator of GNU Emacs IME patch for Windows (tr-ime) (@aoetk@fedibird.com)
• Emacs development:
  • emacs-devel:
    • "Final" version of tty child frames
    • Discussion of buffer synchronization as a user-visible feature
    • Comparing EIEIO with org-element plists, also this note
    • Why it's hard to implement truncate-string-to-pixel-width
    • Asking for ALPN support for GnuTLS connections
  • vc-git-log-edit-toggle-amend: Honor vc-allow-rewriting-published-history
  • Add delete-selection-local-mode.
  • cond*: Add support for Pcase patterns
  • Implement drawing text with DirectWrite on MS-Windows.
  • Improve drag and drop on MS-Windows (bug#3468)
  • vc-clone: Make interactive; call vc-guess-url-backend
  • Mark if-let and when-let obsolete
  • ; Update the NEWS entry to mention project-prompter correctly
  • Support modifying VC change comments for Git
  • Add 'native-compile-directory' (bug#73303)
  • Fix a race condition when running Eshell startup scripts
• New packages:
  • earl: Erlang distribution protocol implementation (MELPA)
  • visual-replace: A prompt for replace-string and query-replace (MELPA)

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, r/planetemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, communick.news, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

Intro

In the name of bringing the kitchen sink inside of Emacs, I manage my mails here as well. Mu4e is my choice of a mail client.

As a quite opinionated fellow when it comes to my tools, I tend to change stuff a lot. This includes extending functions and commands that are delivered with Mu4e by default. Or even creating new ones.

Barring changes in Mu4e or related updates, these functions should remain relevant. However some where created a good while ago. Which in turn might result in “obsolete” code or easier solutions.

Commands and Functions

timu-mu4e-in-new-tab

I always, I mean ALWAYS open Mu4e in a new tab. This one does it for me with a custom keybinding.

(defun timu-mu4e-in-new-tab ()
  "Open `mu4e' in a new tab with `tab-bar-new-tab'."
  (interactive)
  (progn
    (tab-bar-new-tab)
    (mu4e)))

timu-mu4e-quit

Since I always open Mu4e in a new tab, this function allows me to close the “mail-tab” upon quitting Mu4e.

(defun timu-mu4e-quit ()
  "Quit `mu4e' and close the tab with `tab-bar-close-tab'."
  (interactive)
  (progn
    (mu4e-quit)
    (tab-bar-close-tab)))

timu-mu4e-execute-no-confirm

Executing marks – moving, deleting, archiving mails and more – in Mu4e (mostly in headers view) happens many many times a day. Having to confirm all of those action would result in me throwing my Mac out of the window after a while. The following function helps execute marks without confirmation.

(defun timu-mu4e-execute-no-confirm ()
  "Execute all without confirmation.
Use the argument NO-COMFIRM in the command `mu4e-mark-execute-all'."
  (interactive)
  (mu4e-mark-execute-all 'no-confirm))

timu-mu4e-jump-to-maildir

To simplify mailbox navigation, I use completing-read with the command below, bound to J..

(defun timu-mu4e-jump-to-maildir ()
  "Use `completing-read' to jump to a maildir.
Credit: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/47580/30874
Credit: https://arupajhana.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/mu4e-with-helm."
  (interactive)
  (let ((maildir (completing-read "Maildir: " (mu4e-get-maildirs))))
    (mu4e-headers-search (format "maildir:\"%s\"" maildir))))

timu-mu4e-attach-file

This one helps add attachments to a compose buffer with completion in the minibuffer (read-file-name).

(defun timu-mu4e-attach-file ()
  "Attach a file to an email.
Use the built-in function `mml-attach-file'."
  (interactive)
  (let ((default-directory "~/"))
    (let ((file (read-file-name "Select a file to attach: ")))
      (mml-attach-file (expand-file-name file)))))

timu-mu4e-view-save-attachments

The default command for saving attachments, mu4e-view-save-attachments automatically chooses a – in the variable mu4e-attachment-dir – predefined directory. This is fine and dandy, but I mostly want to select the directory my self – on a case-by-case basis.

(defun timu-mu4e-view-save-attachments ()
  "Save all attachements in a selected directory.
This is `mu4e-view-save-attachments' with prefix Argument."
  (interactive)
  (let ((current-prefix-arg '(4))
        (embark-confirm-act-all nil))
    (call-interactively #'mu4e-view-save-attachments)))

timu-mu4e-get-mail

The variable mu4e-get-mail-command defines which CLI command to use to fetch emails with Mu4e. In my case – using the isync program (mbsync) – I want sometimes to only fetch mails per account or all accounts.

(defun timu-mu4e-get-mail ()
  "Select the Account before syncing.
This makes the syncing of mails more flexible."
  (interactive)
  (let ((mu4e-get-mail-command
         (concat
          "/opt/homebrew/bin/mbsync "
          (completing-read
           "Which Account: "
           '("icloud" "aimebertrand" "moclub" "--all")))))
    (mu4e-update-mail-and-index t)))

Commands and functions to deal with signatures

The following two commands are extensively covered in the previous post “Signature above the cited text in mu4e”.

(defun timu-mu4e-message-insert-signature (&optional force)
  "Insert a signature at the end of the buffer.

Original command is `message-insert-signature'.
See https://macowners.club/posts/signature-above-cited-text-mu4e/ for reasons.

See the documentation for the `message-signature' variable for
more information.

If FORCE is 0 (or when called interactively), the global values
of the signature variables will be consulted if the local ones
are null."
  (interactive (list 0) message-mode)
  (let ((timu-message-signature timu-message-signature)
        (message-signature-file message-signature-file))
    ;; If called interactively and there's no signature to insert,
    ;; consult the global values to see whether there's anything they
    ;; have to say for themselves.  This can happen when using
    ;; `gnus-posting-styles', for instance.
    (when (and (null timu-message-signature)
               (null message-signature-file)
               (eq force 0))
      (setq timu-message-signature (default-value 'timu-message-signature)
            message-signature-file (default-value 'message-signature-file)))
    (let* ((signature
            (cond
             ((and (null timu-message-signature)
                   (eq force 0))
              (save-excursion
                (goto-char (point-max))
                (not (re-search-backward message-signature-separator nil t))))
             ((and (null timu-message-signature)
                   force)
              t)
             ((functionp timu-message-signature)
              (funcall timu-message-signature))
             ((listp timu-message-signature)
              (eval timu-message-signature t))
             (t timu-message-signature)))
           signature-file)
      (setq signature
            (cond ((stringp signature)
                   signature)
                  ((and (eq t signature) message-signature-file)
                   (setq signature-file
                         (if (and message-signature-directory
                                  ;; don't actually use the signature directory
                                  ;; if message-signature-file contains a path.
                                  (not (file-name-directory
                                        message-signature-file)))
                             (expand-file-name message-signature-file
                                               message-signature-directory)
                           message-signature-file))
                   (file-exists-p signature-file))))
      (when signature
        (goto-char (point-max))
        ;; Insert the signature.
        (unless (bolp)
          (newline))
        (when message-signature-insert-empty-line
          (newline))
        (insert "...... ")
        (newline)
        (if (eq signature t)
            (insert-file-contents signature-file)
          (insert signature))
        (goto-char (point-max))
        (or (bolp) (newline))))))

(defun timu-mu4e-message-insert-signature-at-point (pmode)
  "Function to insert signature at right point according to PMODE.
Uses `timu-mu4e-message-insert-signature'.
This is a modified version of `message-insert-signature'."
  (when pmode (message-goto-body))
  (interactive)
  (require 'message)
  (message-goto-body)
  (newline)
  (message-goto-body)
  (save-restriction
    (narrow-to-region (point) (point))
    (timu-mu4e-message-insert-signature))
  (message-goto-body))

Automatically switching the context

Whenever switching to specific mailbox, I want to be in the right mu4e-context. This is in short a setting set. In my case to mostly identify the correct account.

Based on my current research, there is no built-in solution to automatically switch contexts. I use the following function as a mu4e-headers-found-hook to achieve this.

(defun timu-mu4e-switch-context ()
  "Switch context of the current maildir.
Uses `mu4e--search-last-query' and regex to get the context."
  (let ((new-context
         (timu-get-mu4e-context)))
    (if new-context
        (mu4e-context-switch t new-context)
      (mu4e-context-switch t "icloud"))))

… Which in turn uses the following function.

(defun timu-get-mu4e-context ()
  "Extract context from `mu4e--search-last-query'."
  (if (string-match "/\\(.+?\\)/.*" mu4e--search-last-query)
      (match-string 1 mu4e--search-last-query) ""))

You can find more details in the older post “AutoSwitch Mu4e context depending on mailbox”.

timu-mu4e-msmtp-select-account

When sending emails, which use the CLI program msmtp in my configuration, the ‘from’ address should be pre-populated with the correct sender address.

(defun timu-mu4e-msmtp-select-account ()
  "Select the right account/context according to the from line."
  (if (message-mail-p)
      (save-excursion
        (let*
            ((from (save-restriction
                     (message-narrow-to-headers)
                     (message-fetch-field "from")))
             (account
              (cond
               ((string-match timu-personal-icloud-email from) "icloud")
               ((string-match timu-personal-aimebertrand-email from) "aimebertrand")
               ((string-match timu-personal-moclub-email from) "moclub"))))
          (setq message-sendmail-extra-arguments (list '"-a" account))))))

Hey guys! I have gotten a sudden motivation to refactor my nixos dotfiles, and I have an idea, don’t know if it’s good or not so here it is:

While developing code, I feel like your system should have 0 development dependencies, all of them should be project dependencies instead. However my text editor has certain configuration files for all languages, so it has packages installed for all of the possible languages and frameworks and tools that i’ll be using.

Instead of that, would it be a wise decision so that emacs only loads code and installs packages related to the project I’m currently working on? I’d love to hear your opinions! Reach out to me at Fosstodon: @binarydigitz01@fosstodon.org, or mail me at binarydigitz01 at protonmail.com.

I just published the latest stable release of the Modus themes. The change log entry is reproduced further below. For any questions, feel welcome to contact me.

I will soon install the changes in emacs.git so please wait a little longer for the updates to trickle down to you.

• Package name (GNU ELPA): modus-themes (also built into Emacs 28+)
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes
• Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-changelog
• Colour palette: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-colors
• Sample pictures: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-pictures
• Git repositories:
  • GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes
  • GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes
• Backronym: My Old Display Unexpectedly Sharpened … themes.

4.6.0 on 2024-10-27

This is a small release that makes minor refinements to an already stable base.

Command to rotate between selected Modus themes

The command modus-themes-rotate switches from one theme to the next in the list defined in the user option modus-themes-to-rotate. The default value of the user option covers all the Modus themes, though users may prefer to set it to a small subset thereof.

Rotation works in such a way that (i) if the theme-to-be-loaded is already the current one, the next in line is loaded instead, and (ii) the next candidate is always to the right of the currently loaded theme.

The rotation is done from left to right. When at the end of the list, “right” points to the beginning.

The command modus-themes-rotate complements the existing commands modus-themes-toggle (which reads the user option modus-themes-to-toggle to switch between two themes) and modus-themes-select to select one among all the Modus themes using minibuffer completion.

More accurate faces for Org agenda dates

We now adopt a more semantically consistent approach to the use of font weights and colour intensity when styling all the permutations of scheduled date and deadline faces. Pressing tasks stand out more, while those that do not require immediate attention are rendered in a more subtle style.

Thanks to Adam Porter (aka GitHub alphapapa) for suggesting this revision and discussing the technicalities with me. This was done in issue 102: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/102.

A slightly revised red-cooler palette entry

The value of this named colour now has a lower contribution from the blue channel of light, meaning that it looks less pink and more rosy red. The change is small, though it contributes to a more harmonious distribution of colour in certain major modes that have preprocessor constructs (e.g. for the C language).

red-cooler is also used in some contexts in Org and Org agenda buffers.

Completion popups are monospaced if modus-themes-mixed-fonts is non-nil

The user option modus-themes-mixed-fonts ensures that spacing-sensitive constructs are always rendered in a monospaced font (technically, they inherit the fixed-pitch face). This is especially useful when enabling variable-pitch-mode in, say, an Org buffer that has tables and code blocks.

The popup produced by the corfu and company packages will also be rendered in a monospaced font if the necessary conditions are met, ensuring proper alignment of all the elements.

Directory icon colours are in line with each theme’s palette

The directory icon presented by the all-the-icons and nerd-icons packages is now rendered in the style of a semantic palette mapping from the active theme, instead of using a hardcoded faint cyan colour. This is to ensure that styles are consistent and that users with deuteranopia or tritanopia get the desired colours while using the relevant Modus themes.

For those who define palette overrides to refashion the themes, the mapping is called accent-0: it is used in places where one or more colours are needed for variation, such as what orderless does in the minibuffer or magit in its status buffer.

Refined support for embark and forge packages

We now cover more of their faces, have updated the relevant symbols of those faces, and have made stylistic tweaks in the interest of theme-wide consistency (i.e. the kind of quality you only appreciate over time).

Support for the built-in hexl-mode

It was using some background colour values that were somewhat hard to read. Those are replaced with appropriate foreground colours.

Documentation on how to support some packages

These are:

• combobulate. Thanks to Damien Cassou in issue 108: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/108.
• engrave-faces.
• howm. Thanks to Jabir Ali Ouassou for the discussion in issue 117: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/117.
• meow. Thanks to ZharMeny in issue 116: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/116.

Those are not covered by the themes for a variety of reasons, but that may change in the future.

Updated a colour value about the solaire package

This is another package whose support we only document. The manual was referring to a colour that has long been removed from the themes.

Thanks to Edgar Vincent for bringing this matter to my attention. This was done on the GitLab mirror, issue 316: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/-/issues/316.

Removed some needless :set values from defcustom forms

We did this after reviewing the state of the code following a discussion with shipmints and Adam Porter about the behaviour of the setopt macro when setting user options from the Modus themes. There should be no visible change for users, though the edit is still useful for the maintainability of the code. This was done in issue 118: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/118.

Switched to if-let* and its variants everywhere

Emacs 31 deprecates the forms of these macros that lack the asterisk. We can comply right away since the functionality is the same.

Andrea Corallo just announced that Emacs.30.0.92, the second pretest for Emacs 30.1, is now available from https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-30.0.92.tar.xz. The associated signature file is at https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-30.0.92.tar.xz.sig. If you can, the developers would like you to try it out and report any problems. You can view a summary of the changes by reading https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/etc/NEWS?h=emacs-30, an online version of the NEWS file.

It’s really important that the pretest get as much testing as possible so that we can move on to the release candidate(s) and finally Emacs 30.1 itself. Help out if you can.

This one’s for you Vimistas. It’s an old meme, for sure—indeed, the post is 10 years old—but still good for a laugh. I vaguely remember a couple of (non-editor) products named “Emacs” but “Vim” definitely has the cleanser market cornered.

The thing about posts like the above is that they’re trolls trying to provoke a reaction from those who see it. In that respect, it was a great success. There were plenty of comments and a few of them joined in the fun but the majority simply took the bait and reinvigorated the editor wars. There’s even someone claiming that Notepad (!) is the best editor, although that’s probably another troll.

Read the comments and enjoy the fun. You have all weekend to recover.

Álvaro Ramírez has another tweak to his Dired display environment. This time it’s a patch to hide the absolute path of the current directory in Dired listings. Ramírez likes to display minimal information in his Dired listings because, as he says, the full listing is only a toggle away so why clutter up your display with a bunch of information.

I’ve never understood this. I always want to see as much information as possible and I don’t want to do anything extra to see it. The last time I ranted about this, commenters jumped in to say it was all about not having enough screen real estate but even with my flagging eyesight, I’ve always been able to fit the whole Dired file listing in a split window of my 13″ laptop. Even if that’s not the case, removing the line at the top of the listing with the absolute path does nothing to decrease the width of the display.

Still, lots of folks have other values and really do want to see only the information they absolutely need. As usual, Emacs lets us have it our way. You can display all the available information or you can opt for abreviated information and simply toggle the display if you need more.

If you’re in the abbreviated information camp, take a look at Ramírez’s post to see how to prune the display. If you’re in my “show me everything” camp, the good news is that you don’t have to do anything: Emacs will show it all to you¹.

(setq diredp-hide-details-initially-flag nil)

I often want to link to an Org heading from somewhere in my org-refile-targets, which includes my agenda files and other things. I don't want to think about where the heading is, I just want to link to it. I could use C-u C-c C-w (org-refile) to go to the heading, use C-c l (my shortcut for org-store-link), head back with org-mark-ring-goto, and then insert it with C-c C-l (org-insert-link).

Or I can use this code to make an Embark command that hooks into minibuffer prompts that include "goto" or "refile", so I can link to something with C-. i right from a refile or goto query.

(defun my-embark-org-insert-link-from-path (path)
  (interactive (list (car (org-refile-get-location))))
  (let* ((extra (if org-refile-use-outline-path "/" ""))
         (tbl (mapcar
               (lambda (x)
                 (if (and (not (member org-refile-use-outline-path
                                       '(file full-file-path title)))
                          (not (equal filename (file-truename (nth 1 x)))))
                     (cons (concat (car x) extra " ("
                                   (file-name-nondirectory (nth 1 x)) ")")
                           (cdr x))
                   (cons (concat (car x) extra) (cdr x))))
               org-refile-target-table))
         link)
    (insert (save-window-excursion
              (save-excursion
                (org-goto-marker-or-bmk
                 (elt
                  (org-refile--get-location path tbl)
                  3))
                (org-store-link nil))))))
(defvar-keymap my-org-path-map
  :doc "Shortcuts for working with Org paths from `org-refile'."
  "i" #'my-embark-org-insert-link-from-path)
(with-eval-after-load 'marginalia
  (add-to-list 'marginalia-prompt-categories '("Goto\\|Refile" . my-org-path)))
(with-eval-after-load 'embark
  (add-to-list 'embark-keymap-alist '(my-org-path . my-org-path-map)))

There are more Embark shortcuts in my Embark configuration.

As many of you know, I’m fascinated by nontraditional users of Emacs. By “nontraditional users” I mean people outside of engineering and the sciences. I like to hear how novelists and people in the humanities leverage the power of Emacs in their work.

Almost all those nontraditional users learned to write their papers with—and are mostly still expected to use—the death traps that are Microsoft Word and Google Docs. It takes, therefore, an extraordinary commitment on their part to move to Emacs. Almost all who do, never look back.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, DevMahasen, who describes himself as a novelist and filmmaker, was already halfway there because he was a devoted NeoVim user. Still, he wanted to try Emacs but he couldn’t get his mind around it. Then he found the Emacs-kick repository, an kickstarter for Vim/NeoVim users. Once he tried that, everything clicked. Now he’s on his way to being another nontraditional Emacs user.

The Emacs-kick configuration is meant for Vim/NeoVim users and makes the transition as easy as possible. As you all know, I went through a similar transformation but I just took the plunge and started using vanilla Emacs. Honestly, it wasn’t that much of a problem but, of course, I’m not a nontraditional user and editors of various sorts seem natural to me so my experience may not be relevant to those who are.

Whatever type of user you are, if you’re considering transitioning from Vim/NeoVim to Emacs, you should give the Emacs-kick repository a look.

Debian uses Git repository tags to notice when to update packages. I kept forgetting to tag subed's versions, so now I made a git post-commit hook which I think will do the trick. I based it on https://gist.github.com/ajmirsky/1245103, just updated for Python 3 and tweaked to work with how I do versions in subed.el. I've also added it to my README.org.

#!/usr/bin/python

# place in .git/hooks/post-commit
# Based on https://gist.github.com/ajmirsky/1245103

import subprocess
import re

print("checking for version change...",)

output = subprocess.check_output(['git', 'diff', 'HEAD^', 'HEAD', '-U0']).decode("utf-8")

version_info = None
for d in output.split("\n"):
    rg = re.compile(r'\+(?:;;\s+)?Version:\s+(?P<major>[0-9]+)\.(?P<minor>[0-9]+)\.(?P<rev>[0-9]+)')
    m = rg.search(d)
    if m:
        version_info = m.groupdict()
        break

if version_info:
    tag = "v%s.%s.%s" % (version_info['major'], version_info['minor'], version_info['rev'])
    existing = subprocess.check_output(['git', 'tag']).decode("utf-8").split("\n")
    if tag in existing:
        print("%s is already tagged, not updating" % tag)
    else:
        result = subprocess.run(['git', 'tag', '-f', tag])
        if result.returncode:
            raise Exception('tagging not successful: %s %s' % (result.stdout, result.returncode))
        print("tagged revision: %s" % tag)
else:
    print("none found.")

beframe enables a frame-oriented Emacs workflow where each frame has access only to the list of buffers visited therein. In the interest of brevity, we call buffers that belong to frames “beframed”.

• Package name (GNU ELPA): beframe
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/beframe
• Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/beframe-changelog
• Git repositories:
  • GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/beframe
  • GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/beframe
• Video demo: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2023-02-28-emacs-beframe-demo/
• Backronym: Buffers Encapsulated in Frames Realise Advanced Management of Emacs.

Below are the release notes

Version 1.2.0 on 2024-10-23

Beframe is in a stable state. This version includes three new commands as well as quality-of-life improvements.

Assume or unassume buffers using a regular expression

There two more commands to assume/unassume buffers from/to the current frame:

• beframe-assume-buffers-matching-regexp
• beframe-unassume-buffers-matching-regexp

They both work by matching a regular expression against the global list of buffer names. When called with a prefix argument, the regular expression is matched against the buffer name or the name of the buffer’s major mode.

This is a convenient way to, for example, collect all email or IRC buffers in a single frame and work with them as you will.

Delete buffers matching a regular expression

Following the same principle as above, we have the command beframe-kill-buffers-matching-regexp. The regular expression is matched against the buffer name or the name of the major mode when called with a prefix argument.

Since this is a destructive operation, the command prompts for confirmation to operate on the buffers it has found. Users who do not like this check can set the new user option beframe-kill-buffers-no-confirm to a non-nil value.

Note that Emacs may still prompt for further confirmation if the given buffer is unsaved, has a running process, and the like. Also note that this operation applies to all frames because buffers are shared by the Emacs session even though Beframe only exposes those that pertain to a particular frame (when beframe-mode is enabled).

Commands that assume/unassume buffers report on their status

All relevant commands will now log a message about what they did. If, for example, beframe-assume-buffers-matching-regexp assumes two new buffers into the current frame, the message will be something like:

Assumed into current frame 2 buffers: (name-of-buffer-one name-of-buffer-two)

Similarly:

Unassumed from current frame 2 buffers: (name-of-buffer-one name-of-buffer-two)

If the command does not change the frame’s buffer list, it will report as much:

Did not modify the frame's buffer list

Several internal refinements

• The way we derive the “global buffers” (buffers that are available in all frames, per the user option beframe-global-buffers) is more efficient. Thanks to Bruno Boal for the contribution in pull request 7: https://github.com/protesilaos/beframe/pull/7. Bruno has assigned copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

• We now have a single function to get a list of buffers, given certain parameters. Part of this work is by Bruno Boal, from the aforementioned pull request. The rest is from me, which includes the addition of the functionality about matching buffers with a regular expression (as seen in the new commands described herein).

• Inferring the name of a project among those known to project.el no longer fails when the path is abbreviated (like ~/path/to/repo). Thanks to Fritz Grabo for the contribution and for Bruno Boal for double-checking it. This was done in pull request 6: https://github.com/protesilaos/beframe/pull/6. The change is small, meaning that Fritz does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

• The subroutines to assume/unassume buffers are consolidated into one function. It not only provides a single point of entry, but also takes care to carry out its operation only when it will yield a change to the current frame’s buffer list.

A month ago I opined that no true Scotsman Emacser would view anything but the Space Cadet Keyboard as the apotheosis of keyboards for Emacs users. I was promptly schooled that, to the contrary, most Emacs users today have no desire for a Space Cadet Keyboard. I remain firm in my desire for one but I bow to the prevailing view.

But if the Space Cadet Keyboard is not the pinnacle, what is? The TL;DR is that no one knows. Everyone, it seems, has their own idea of the ideal Emacs keyboard. Over at the Emacs subreddit, yibie asks what keyboards will people be using for Emacs in 2025. The striking thing is that there are almost as many answers as there are comments. Everyone appears to have their own preferred keyboard that they swear by.

I remained convinced that the most important thing in choosing an Emacs keyboard is mappings for Hyper and Super. Every modern keyboard has Ctrl and Meta (as Alt) covered but there is no standard way of mapping Meta and Super.

In any event, if you have your own views, feel free to jump in and share what you’re using.

I have enhanced selected-window-accent functionality with blending options to blend colourize the selected window (see below):

This means that not only will the mode-line, fringes and header be accent coloured, but also the whole selected window background colour, tinted to the alpha chosen.

The features added are as follows:

• Introduced selected-window-accent-use-blend-background and selected-window-accent-use-blend-alpha to allow blending of the accent colour with the background of the selected window a selected alpha amount.
• Introduced new toggle functions and added to transient:
  • selected-window-accent-toggle-blend-background
  • selected-window-accent-toggle-pywal
• Added function selected-window-accent-blend-colors to support blending of two colours.
• Updated selected-window-accent--set-foreground-color and selected-window-accent functions to incorporate new blending feature.
• Improved existing functions for setting and toggling accent features, ensuring consistent style and formatting.
• Cleaned up indentation and formatting inconsistencies across the file for better readability.

Example use of new selected window blending functionality:

(use-package selected-window-accent-mode
  :config (selected-window-accent-mode 1)
  :custom
  (selected-window-accent-fringe-thickness 10)
  (selected-window-accent-use-blend-background t)
  (selected-window-accent-use-blend-alpha 0.2)
  (selected-window-accent-tab-accent t)
  (selected-window-accent-custom-color "cyan4")
  (selected-window-accent-mode-style 'default))

(use-package selected-window-accent-mode
  :config (selected-window-accent-mode 1)
  :custom
  (selected-window-accent-fringe-thickness 10)
  (selected-window-accent-use-blend-background t)
  (selected-window-accent-use-blend-alpha 0.1)
  (selected-window-accent-tab-accent t)
  (selected-window-accent-custom-color "orange")
  (selected-window-accent-mode-style 'subtle))

A recent effort to try to publish the Casual packages on ELPA resulted in push-back: There are too many of them. After a bit of contemplation and external input, I made the decision to consolidate the Casual packages as follows:

1. A new base package named casual would be created to contain all user interfaces for the built-in Emacs modes it supported. The following packages would be superseded by casual:

   • casual-agenda
   • casual-bookmarks
   • casual-calc
   • casual-dired
   • casual-editkit
   • casual-ibuffer
   • casual-info
   • casual-isearch
   • casual-lib
   • casual-re-builder

2. Casual packages reliant on a third-party package would still be distributed as a separate package. Two such packages exist in this category:

   • casual-avy
   • casual-symbol-overlay

3. The package casual-suite would still serve as an umbrella package, in this case installing the following packages as dependencies:

   • casual
   • casual-avy
   • casual-symbol-overlay

I’m happy to announce that today that consolidation work is largely complete and available to the public. The consolidated package casual is now available on MELPA and that the related packages casual-avy, casual-symbol-overlay and casual-suite have all been updated to reflect said changes. To help distinguish these aforementioned packages from the past organization, all of them have been bumped to a major version of 2.

The packages superseded by casual will eventually have their distribution on MELPA removed, likely within a week or two of this post’s date. They have been recently updated to issue a warning to upgrade to casual.

Configuration Changes

If you have an installation of a Casual package prior to 2.x, your configuration for the Casual user interfaces should require no changes, particularly if you do not use use-package.

On the other hand, users who have configured Casual with use-package will likely need to take into account the consolidated package casual, particularly if it is used to download/update the package.

While we are on the topic of use-package, I have also made the decision to not provide guidance on using it to configure Casual user interfaces. This is largely due to the fact that I do not regularly use use-package so my knowledge about it is poor as well as my ability to verify its behavior. Rather than give bad guidance on use-package, I have chosen to not offer it. That said, I encourage knowledgeable use-package users to provide support for it in the Discussions section of the casual repository.

Closing Thoughts

For everyone who has been along with me in this journey of using Casual, I thank you and also appreciate your patience with these changes. Hopefully they will improve your user experience with Casual once all the dust settles.

If this is all new to you, then welcome! I invite you to try Casual out.

I am always open to feedback on Casual; please share your thoughts on it at its discussions section.

References

• Announcing Casual Suite

When you are self-employed, you need to be very well organized. There is never anybody looking over your shoulder, reminding you of everything on your to-do list. You don’t have a project manager reminding you of every step in your big projects. I use Org-mode in Emacs to manage all of my tasks, to-do lists, and projects.

Many people have already written about why Org-mode is a good choice for this, so I am not going to. I will just mention that many years ago, perhaps around 2007, I read Getting Things Done by David Allen and got inspired to implement something like it in Org-mode. The system has slowly evolved over the years, but it has also become unweildy.

For the past few years, I had been tagging my tasks with the states TODO, NEXT, and DONE, primarily. I had some extra states sitting around for things that got canceled or delegated, and at some point I added a WAITING tag for when I needed somebody else to finish something, first. But the problem was, the TODO items really piled up. They became uncomfortable to sort through.

Inspired by a blog post by Sacha Chua earlier this week, I cleaned up my to-do states. I added STARTED and SOMEDAY, then went through the big list of outstanding items and re-evaluated their proper states. SOMEDAY won in 80% of cases, which really cleaned up the list. Now I can begin my day with a custom agenda command that looks for just NEXT and STARTED tasks, so I know what is most important. And I can end my day looking at TODO tasks to see if any should be switched to NEXT.

Here is what my configuration looks like now. First, I configure org-todo-keywords to handle the various states that my to-do items need. I am hoping that someday I’ll pare this down, but for now, this works.

(setq org-todo-keywords 
      '((sequence "TODO(t)" "NEXT(n)" "STARTED(s!)" "WAITING(w@/!)" "|" "DONE(d!)")
        (sequence "SOMEDAY(o)" "|")
        (sequence "|" "DELEGATED(g@/!)" "CANCELLED(c!)")))

I then added a “daily driver” command to my agenda to let me see the most important tasks today. This would probably be a good place for add-to-list instead of setq, but it’s just an example!

(setq org-agenda-custom-commands
      '(("n" "Next tasks" ((todo "STARTED")
                           (todo "NEXT")))

Next, after Sacha suggested it in a post on Mastodon, I configured to-do items to automatically switch to the STARTED state when I clock-in to them.

(setq org-clock-in-switch-to-state "STARTED")

Finally, I have been playing around with configuring org-stuck-projects to be more useful. I tag all of my projects with a @project tag, and then have my to-do entries underneath them as keywords. I do not think that this works as intended yet. I don’t think I will be able to figure out the proper settings here until I have another stuck project; let’s hope that never happens, and I never need this report.

(setq org-stuck-projects '("+@project/-DONE-SOMEDAY"
                          ;; Keywords to identify non-stuck projects
                          ("TODO" "NEXT" "STARTED")
                          ;; Keywords to identify stuck projects.
                          ("WAITING")
                          ""))

The only lesson that I can really hope to share with you, dear reader, is that it is a good idea to examine your task management system regularly to fine-tune it to your needs. What I have noticed is that I can come up with great task management plans, but the implementation rarely survives contact with the real world.

If, upon reading this, you have questions or suggestions, especially for org-stuck-projects, I would love to hear about it in the comments, or on Mastodon. Thank you for reading!

Over at DyerDwelling there’s another great example of using a bit of Elisp to sand down the friction of a recurring task. The task in question is generating an Org link with attributes for an image file in Dired to be inserted into a blog post.

Capturing a file link from Dired is easy, of course, but the goal of this hack was to add some size attributes along with the link. If you know a little Elisp, it’s easy to imagine the necessary code. In any event, the code is there in the post.

It’s just another example of how Emacs makes it easy to automate a lot of routine tasks. One could, of course, simply add the attributes manually or even use something like yasnippet to insert them but a little bit of Elisp make the problem disappear.

If you’re a blogger and sometimes want to add images to your posts, take a look at the DyerDwelling post. Even if it’s not exactly what you want, it should be easy to adapt to your needs.

• Emacs 30:
  • New stuff in Emacs 30 (July 2024)
  • Twitch video on latest Emacs features from master, buffer/file registers, golang ts tests features and more (@pizzatorque@emacs.ch) (video available temporarily)
• Upcoming events:
  • Emacs APAC (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/ Sat Oct 26 0130 America/Vancouver - 0330 America/Chicago - 0430 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/GMT - 1030 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs Berlin (virtual, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Oct 30 1030 America/Vancouver - 1230 America/Chicago - 1330 America/Toronto - 1730 Etc/GMT - 1830 Europe/Berlin - 2300 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Oct 31 0130 Asia/Singapore
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Nov 1 0900 America/Vancouver - 1100 America/Chicago - 1200 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Sat Nov 2 0000 Asia/Singapore
• Emacs configuration:
  • Exploramos las opciones para instalar paquetes en Emacs con package.el
  • diegs' Emacs Config: nix, Emacs .el, meow
  • BuddhiLW's Emacs Config: Doom Emacs
  • jjba23's Emacs Config: nix, Emacs init.el
  • Developers Have Jobs to Do (Part 2) - someone sharing notes on a product-manager-ish way of approaching making a new distribution focused on Python and React development
  • Instalar paquetes en Emacs (0x0004) - FTV (@barocio@techhub.social)
• Emacs Lisp:
  • TheMKat: Write your own Emacs Lisp macros - a short introduction
  • Marcin Borkowski: substitute-command-keys (Irreal)
  • show-conses.el (2024)
  • Lección 1: Introducción | Curso de UI Emacs Lisp (@csantosb@sigmoid.social)
• Appearance:
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: remap font size in the minibuffer
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: the Modus themes have a new ‘rotate’ command
  • No more drugs, punch-line is here - mode line
  • Emacs purple theme inspired by Plasma cookies
  • HTML Renderer: CSS Support
• Org Mode:
  • Emacs para ciencias del dato (@Jose_A_Alonso@mathstodon.xyz)
  • Sacha Chua: Thinking about 12 aspects of personal information/knowledge management
  • Sacha Chua: Shuffling my Org Mode unscheduled tasks
  • Sacha Chua: Change Org Mode TODO keyword color based on the state and the current Modus theme
  • Function for calculating all TBLFM lines for the current table in order
  • James Dyer: Transforming Dired File Paths into Org Links (Irreal)
  • rtrppl/website2org: Turn any website into a minimal Orgmode buffer or .org file (@laotang@mastodon.social)
  • Como exportar desde orgmode a pdf en castellano - Cyberiadas (@hispa@emacs.ch)
• Completion:
  • Alex Popescu: An Intro to Emacs packages Vertico, Consult, Marginalia, Orderless, Embark by Protesilaos Stavrou
• Coding:
  • Using Emacs Lisp in a Makefile by setting SHELL=emacs and setting SHELLFLAGS (@mekeor@mastodon.catgirl.cloud)
  • Insert bug ticket cookie in vc-log for the current thread being read in Gnus (@viz@mastinsaan.in)
  • Arne Bahlo: Jujutsu in practice - version control
• Web:
  • Sacha Chua: Yay Emacs 6: Inserting links with consult-omni
• Multimedia:
  • shenshou (subtitle downloader) 0.2.0 is published (Reddit) - support OpenSubtitles.com REST API
  • Irreal: Emacs Drawing Tools
• EXWM:
  • Emacs: edytor jako window manager? Oct 26 2024, Rybnik (@JesienLinuksowa@fosstodon.org)
• AI:
  • Spiffying up automatic smerge insertions + animated regions M-x chatgpt-shell-quick-modify-region, M-x chatgpt-shell-fix-error-at-point (@xenodium@indieweb.social)
• Community:
  • Weekly Tips, Tricks, &c. Thread: key combos, repeat, exwm, use-package
  • That Lightbulb Moment with Emacs - novelist/filmmaker who switched from NeoVim (Irreal)
  • Why do you think emacs is so low in popularity?
  • Why you switched to Emacs?
  • Kent Pitman's memories of TECO and the early history of Emacs (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social)
  • Eric MacAdie: 2024-10 Austin Emacs Meetup - new organizers; smex, amx, org-jira, eat, dslide, org-sidebar (lemmy.ml)
  • encontro emacs brasil? - Lemmy
• Other:
  • Making the Most of Terminal Emacs - System Crafters Live! (02:07:05)
  • jh-mustache-csv.el: Convert CSV to Text using Mustache templates - also has decide-with-probabilities
  • The Ultimate Collection of Emacs Resources (2011, Reddit)
  • martianh/nc.el: Work with Nextcloud shares in Emacs - Codeberg.org (@mousebot@todon.nl) - work in progress
• Emacs development:
  • emacs-devel: Re: Improving Emacs' iCalendar support - looking for feedback on ical library, esp. from Org/Gnus/diary developers
  • Add ability to crossfade between songs in 'mpc'
  • Hide default-directory absolute file name in dired-hide-details-mode
  • ; * etc/NEWS: Shorten find-function-mode entry back to single line.
  • Add notifications support to 'mpc' (Bug#73538)
  • Add support for chaining conditionals in Eshell
• New packages:
  • just-ts-mode: Justfile editing mode (MELPA)
  • tp: Utilities for transient menu that POST to an API (MELPA, NonGNU ELPA)

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, r/planetemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, communick.news, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

This post is not about the Japanese martial arts Jiu-jitsu, it’s about a new VCS, or version control system. There are some great tutorials and introductions for Jujutsu, short jj, so I want to give some insight in how I use it day to day for this website.

Initialize a repository

You can initialize jj in an existing git repository like this:

$ jj git init --git-repo .

This will create a .jj directory next to .git. You can now use both git and jj, although I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s a work-in-progress native storage backend, but since all my projects are git repositories anyway, this works great for me.

Note that this is non-destructive; if you want to go back to git, all it takes is a rm -r .jj.

Get an overview

Running jj log in the repository for this very website gives this output:

$ jj log
@  qzsvtxpv hey@arne.me 2024-10-21 09:58:06 e18f7532
│  Add blog/jj-in-practice
│ ○  yoxxsupn hey@arne.me 2024-10-20 22:55:03 ae5d9109
├─╯  Add library/calibans-war
│ ○  tvkvwslw hey@arne.me 2024-10-20 22:49:54 5e4dee1f
├─╯  Add library/the-posthumous-memoirs-of-bras-cubas
│ ○  pywmtrys hey@arne.me 2024-10-20 21:20:11 7bda14b7
│ │  Add atoms/1
│ ○  xnlzypwn hey@arne.me 2024-10-20 21:20:10 8a004404
├─╯  Add atoms functionality
◆  wxxtrmqk hey@arne.me 2024-10-20 16:18:15 main HEAD@git 1eb46c81
│  Add weekly/166
~

This already shows one of the biggest differences, compared to git: There’s no branches, other than main. You can create branches, which are called bookmarks in jj, but you don’t need to. Instead, you work mostly with changes¹.

The terminal above shows the change w (you can use the first letter to reference changes, on your terminal it’ll be highlighted as well) as a parent to x, t, y and q. All these child-revisions don’t have a branch/bookmark, but they don’t need one. You can see what’s in-flight at this repository better than with any git repo, especially if branches haven’t been cleaned up in a while.

Create a revision

My usual flow with git, is to leave chages in the staging area until I’m ready to commit. Sometimes, if I have to switch branches or want to save my work, I’ll stash or create a WIP commit.

In jj, there is no staging area—everything is a revision. Let’s create a new revision on top of my revisions where I add atoms functionality:

$ jj new -r p

Running git log again:

$ jj log
@  kxqvnxnw hey@arne.me 2024-10-21 10:03:20 22c020cf
│  (empty) (no description set)
○  pywmtrys hey@arne.me 2024-10-20 21:20:11 HEAD@git 7bda14b7
│  Add atoms/1
○  xnlzypwn hey@arne.me 2024-10-20 21:20:10 8a004404
│  Add atoms functionality
│ ○  qzsvtxpv hey@arne.me 2024-10-21 10:03:18 27229dca
├─╯  Add blog/jj-in-practice
│ ○  yoxxsupn hey@arne.me 2024-10-20 22:55:03 ae5d9109
├─╯  Add library/calibans-war
│ ○  tvkvwslw hey@arne.me 2024-10-20 22:49:54 5e4dee1f
├─╯  Add library/the-posthumous-memoirs-of-bras-cubas
◆  wxxtrmqk hey@arne.me 2024-10-20 16:18:15 main 1eb46c81
│  Add weekly/166
~

You’ll notice that our active revisions are now left-aligned, and the one to add this very blog post has moved to the right. There’s no hirarchy, they’re all descendants of Add weekly/166.

After doing some work, e.g. addings a new atom, I can describe that revision with jj describe. This is comparable to git commit, but it doesn’t actually create a commit or a revision, it only describes the current one.

Sometimes I want to update a previous revision, in this case Add atoms/1. I can run jj squash to merge the current one with its parent.

Push and pull

To fetch new revisions, I run jj git fetch, to push branches/bookmarks, I run jj git push. This uses the same git server it was using before.

Before pushing, I need to move my bookmark to the revision I want to push. I push the main branch to deploy my website, so if I wanted to publish my atoms functionality (should I?), I would run jj bookmark set main -r p before pushing.

Rebase and split

Sometimes I need to rebase. Fortunately that’s a lot simpler than it is in git: I can run jj rebase -s <source> -d <destination> to move revisions around. If I wanted support for atoms for this blog post, I would run jj rebase -s q -d p and it would move the revision for this blog post on top of “Add atoms/1”.

jj also does automatic rebasing, e.g. if you squash changes into a revision that has descendants.

And if I have a revision that I’d like to be two, I run jj split and interactively select what belongs to which revision.

Undo

Undoing an (interactive) rebase in git is not fun. jj undo undoes the last jj operation, doesn’t matter if it’s abandoning (deleting) a revision or doing a rebase. This is a life saver! You can also run jj op log to display your last jj operations.

Things I stumble upon

I’ve been using git for a long, long time. My brain assumes that after a commit, I’m working on the next one. It also assumes that jj describe does the same as git commit (it’s not). I often describe a revision and continue editing files, which then erroneously get added to the current revision. I’m not saying this is wrong, it makes sense in the jj world, but I keep tripping over that and have to run jj split to pull changes out again.
alterae on Lobste.rs pointed out that you can describe and immediatly create a new revision on top of it with jj commit. Thanks!

One other thing is that you cannot check out a revision directly (or maybe I just don’t know how to), so when I’ve moved to a different revision and want to move back, I run jj new <revision>, which creates an empty revision on top of it. This means that if I’m not done with the revision, I have to keep running jj squash to move changes into it.
gecko on Lobste.rs pointed out that you can check out a revision directly with jj edit <revision>. Thanks!

Why it works for me

A week ago, I removed jj from my website’s repository, to see if I’d miss it. I added it back the same day. Jujutsu feels lighter than git, while at the same time giving you a full overview of what’s in-flight right now². Having no staging area means I only need to worry about revisions (see caveat above).

If trying new things sounds fun to you, give Jujutsu a spin!

Further reading

• Official Jujutsu Tutorial
• Comparison with Git
• Steve’s Jujutsu Tutorial
• Chris Krycho’s jj init essay
• Chris Krycho’s video on jj

I enjoyed listening to Podcast #1,029: Treat Your To-Do List Like a River, and Other Mindset Shifts for Making Better Use of Your Time | The Art of Manliness (thanks @ctietze@mastodon.social for the recommendation) and checking out the Autofocus method (main website with translations) for reviewing your TODO list without worrying too much about prioritization. I also had an opportunity to reflect on similar topics in a conversation with John Wiegley and Adam Porter about personal information management (which I'll be blogging about once John has a chance to review the draft).

This nudged me to experiment with randomizing my unscheduled task list. I'm not trying to finish everything on my list, I'm just mixing it up so that I enjoy keeping things on my radar and picking something to do. org-ql lets me create randomly-sorted views, so I wrote some code to show me a shuffled list of my unscheduled TODO tasks and SOMEDAY tasks.

(defun my-org-ql-shuffle-todo ()
  (interactive)
  (org-ql-search (org-agenda-files)
    '(and
      (todo "TODO" "STARTED")
      (not (done))
      (not (scheduled))
      (not (deadline))
      (not (ts-active))
      (not (tags "cooking")))
    :sort 'random))

(defun my-org-ql-shuffle-someday ()
  (interactive)
  (org-ql-search (org-agenda-files)
    '(and
      (todo "SOMEDAY")
      (not (done))
      (not (scheduled))
      (not (deadline))
      (not (ts-active))
      (not (tags "cooking")))
    :sort 'random))

I can't make it part of my org-agenda-custom-commands yet because of an open issue, but having separate commands is a starting point. It's surprisingly fun. I used org-agenda-follow-mode to quickly flip through the tasks while looking at the agenda. I've already noticed some tasks to cancel and picked some tasks to do. Could be neat!

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a nice post on the Emacs substitute-command-keys command. The TL;DR is that it’s a way of mapping a command name to its keybinding. I’ve long been familiar with it but only in the context of Emacs Doc strings. For example, here’s the Doc string from one of my custom macros:

  "Convenience macro to generate a key sequence map entry
for \\[prettify-key-sequence]."

the \\[prettify-key-sequence] is mapped to whatever the current binding for prettify-key-sequence is. It’s nice because I can change the binding without having to worry about updating the documentation.

Mbork’s post tells us that my use above is really just a special case of a more general facility: substitute-command-keys. You can programmatically convert a function name to its binding by calling substitute-command-keys.

I’m not sure where you’d want to use this other than in a Doc string (or maybe an Org doc) but I’m ready to be educated on the matter. I can’t remember where I learned about using \\[...] in the Doc string. It was probably from seeing it in some function in Emacs core. One thing for sure, it’s not easy to discover without looking for it explicitly or stumbling across it like I probably did.

In any event, this is a useful thing to know. It’s a great example of how Emacs is self documenting.

I just added a new command to rotate across a list of Modus themes: modus-themes-rotate. In interactive use, it uses the value of the new user option modus-themes-to-rotate. When called from Lisp, it accepts any list that consists of Modus themes.

The way I implemented this feature, we get the following behaviour:

• Check which is the current Modus theme and find its position in the list of the themes that are in rotation.
• Move to the next item on the list, reading from left to right.
• If the next item is the current theme, move to the one after.

This is a nice little command that complements the existing modus-themes-toggle (switch between two themes, per modus-themes-to-toggle) and modus-themes-select (choose a theme from the entire family using minibuffer completion).

The new functionality will be available to all users as part of Modus themes 4.6.0. If you do try it before then, let me know if something is amiss.