Planet Emacslife

In https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/36240/47342, CodyChan provides a few options "to better distinguish between focused window." But the one I like best is highlight-selected-window, which, rather than highlighting the selected window, changes the background color of all the unselected windows. The effect is that the active window stands out in comparison to the others.

The especially neat thing about this solution is that when the minibuffer is active, the background of all the windows is altered. So it's obvious even when Emacs is expecting input -- something I often miss.

I've changed the color of the buffer-face-set background from "#111" (sienna4) to "antiquewhite2" because I still need to read the content of inactive windows. The original color is too dark.

I've also adopted flash-active-buffer, which sets the background color of the active window temporarily. I changed the color to palegreen just because. I use s-? as a keybinding. It's a bit awkward, but it's as if I use "?" to ask, "Where am I?" The function highlight-selected-window works so well that I don't think I'll need flash-active-buffer.

The color names that Emacs understands are stored in color-name-rgb-alist.

See also https://www.color-hex.com/color-names.html, but note that Emacs does not support every color name listed here.

Watch on YouTube

linkarzu wins the clip-off thanks to his fancy AI-powered clipping process! Here's a snippet from our conversation today. He'll be posting more clips, and I'm also going to edit the transcript of the conversation. Fun fun fun!

Additional notes:

• Substitution: I use (add-hook 'substitute-post-replace-functions #'sacha-substitute-save-common-edits) to save the changes. sacha-substitute-save-common-edits Edit text has functions like sacha-subed-fix-common-errors-in-text that apply those changes to my speech recognition results and sacha-subed-fix-common-errors-from-start that apply them to already-prepared transcripts.
• sachac/whisper.el has my fork of natrys/whisper.el to support voice commands. speech-input has a bunch of other things, too, and of course my Emacs config.
• I've been using phony to define more voice commands using a parser.
• Apparently I cannot spell when thinking out loud. It is Orgzly Revived, not ogrzly.
• This actually doesn't use generative AI in the sense of Gemini or Claude, except for the conversational French demo. I use a local speech recognition model (currently Orukeet) and local speech synthesis (Kokoro FastAPI), So depending on your feelings about large language models, the models might be small enough to be fine with you. Alternatively, there are classical approaches to both speech recognition and speech synthesis like kaldi and espeak-ng.

Transcript and screenshots

0:00 Voice commands that mishear

Sacha: It turns out I cannot say start streaming reliably. Sometimes I say start screaming.

Linkarzu: Or like if I say Neovim, it doesn't get it. It says "New of him". I want to take a look at what you were sharing a moment ago. The speech to text, and it happens in real time, right?

Sacha: Oh yeah, yeah.

0:20 How the live transcript works

Linkarzu: But I don't do stuff real-time the way that you're doing right now. The transcription happens when we're done with the call and the process starts automatically. And a few hours after, I have the clips in my dashboard that I can upload if I want, right? But it's not real-time and I'm like, oh, and I saw how you did it on your side and it's pretty accurate. Like, what's the magic? What are you doing there? You're sending it somewhere, right?

Sacha: No, this is an entirely local model and I'm running it in a computer with hardly any GPU. So I'm actually just making it use CPU only for the speech recognition because I have a Lenovo P52 from 2018, I think. So it doesn't do this GPU thing very well. I think you're usually On a Mac, so you're spoiled for choices there. But speech recognition has gotten really good over the last few years. I'm using Orukeet at the moment. It's a multilingual model, so it can handle my poor French pronunciations just as fine as my English ones. I can press my keyboard shortcut. For example, I can say, this is a test during a chat with linkarzu. And then, because I've modified my dictionary, your channel name actually shows up properly. Oh, okay. Okay, okay, okay. We are talking about speech-to-text, dictation, all sorts of other things like that. Oh, where's my phone?

Linkarzu: Okay, yeah, so it just puts it in. It's pretty accurate. It's extremely accurate. What's the name you said? Because I use Wispr Flow, a local model as well. I do the transcript locally on my Mac. Wispr Flow is what the AI decided to use and I'm like, oh, it gets it, but not...

Sacha: Yeah, the model I'm currently using is called Orukeet. I think it's based on Parakeet, but it's been tweaked for more performance and less memory. But there are so many new models coming out. It's really quite interesting because every day or every other day, there's like, oh, try this new model. I'm not good enough to keep on top of all those changes. If I can manage to get the AI to generate me a server that has an OpenAI interface, I can plop it right into my Emacs setup and it will just work. So I'm happy with that. And this is fast enough that I can use it to think and then when I have the text, I can rearrange it however I'd like.

2:52 Playing with voice commands

Sacha: So for example, "prepare to fast forward." We're here.

Linkarzu: I have a similar command. Let me see if it works. Hold on. You see my terminal right now, right? Yes. I don't know if you can see my screen. Virgin mode off.

Sacha: Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw that.

Linkarzu: It didn't work. But it changes my wallpaper and it changes my...

Sacha: I have one too. Laser. Look, I changed my cursor to a laser so I can say, here's my mouse cursor, right?

Linkarzu: Okay. Pretty cool.

Sacha: Yeah, so the nice thing about it... Oh, it's still listening. Okay. Let me just turn off laser mode here. Oh, ah! Laser. Laser. Laser.

Linkarzu: It happens to me as well.

Sacha: Edit, retry. Laser. Yeah, okay, there you go.

3:51 Speech commands enable more shortcuts

Sacha: The nice thing about speech commands is that it opens up a whole lot of other ways to run commands without necessarily having to memorize keyboard shortcuts. And you can have more fun with it too. So for example, now I have this command. It turns out I cannot say "start streaming" reliably. Sometimes I say start screaming. Or at least that's... Well, I know sometimes I accidentally say that and sometimes that's what the speech recognition hears. So instead, my command for starting this stream, because of course Emacs controls my OBS through WebSockets, is "let's go live". And my command for stopping the stream is "over and out". And just because it's a little more fun to say, it becomes easier for me me to remember what I need to say in order to make this happen.

4:37 Does it handle hard words?

Linkarzu: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, why is it accurate? And you have a dictionary of like the difficult words. Like if I say Neovim, it doesn't get it. It says "New of him", or it just puts whatever it wants, whenever it wants. Sometimes it puts something random out there. What do you do for yours?

Sacha: "Neovim is okay, I guess." Let's see if it does a thing. Yeah, it got that without my needing to correct things. Let's pick a harder word. Anti-disestablishmentarianism. Close enough. Okay, you know, that requires very little editing. What's a difficult word? Oh, actually, let's pick a different name. Sometimes it gets Prot's name wrong. "Prot does a lot of videos on Emacs." Oh, no, it got him too. If there was a thing that is difficult to say... What was that? Okay. "Heisenbug is making org.nvim." That one. Okay, here we go. "Heisenbug is making org.nvim." I mean, it's getting him.

5:51 Thanking sponsors and members

Linkarzu: Let me thank my YouTube members, the CEOs are shown on screen, web2three, web2trhee.com, TED, cpnllc.com, and also Gallo, these are the three CEOs, and I just want to thank the rest of the YouTube members, which are the ones that are shown here, so just appreciate each one of the members for supporting the channel, okay?

6:14 Fixing misrecognized words with a shortcut

Linkarzu: So, it's a local model, interesting. It is a local model. Do you feed it a dictionary at some point?

Sacha: If I do need to change things... Okay, so if I need to change things, let's say for example, Orgzly Revived, you probably can't get that one. "I use Orgzly Revived on my phone to check my tasks." Oh yeah, so here, right?

Sacha: It says Orgsley Revived. What is that even? But I can press Ctrl+; and it uses substitute.el.

Sacha: Orgzly Revived here. And what that does, in addition to the substitutions that happen throughout the buffer, so for example, if I'm adding a transcript, it will change that all throughout the transcript. I've also added some code because this is Emacs, I can just do that. that saves this in common errors or commonly misrecognized words. And then when I recognize text, whether it's before a voice command or if I'm just doing this or whatever, it will apply all of those common fixes. Common edits.

Sacha: Here we go. So it automatically adds it to this thing here, which gets saved automatically for me. And that's the change that I've just added.

Linkarzu: Interesting. Pretty cool.

Sacha: So it's really nice to have that kind of [dictionary] shortcut built into the way that I edit things. All I know is I just hit Ctrl+; and put in what it's supposed to be. And then it gets not only fixed in my current file, but in the future as well.

Linkarzu: Yeah, I need to work on my transcript game.

7:51 How the live transcript began

Sacha: Like many things in Emacs, this came out of a bunch of small, seemingly unrelated hacks. One was, I was having this conversation with a French tutor and I was like, man, I am having a hard time making sure... Like, he would switch into lecture mode and I was trying to have more conversation mode so I could practice some more, right? So I think I've got this right. Anyway, so I had a large language model generate a Python server, because sometimes I'm like, I just want a proof of concept for this. I don't necessarily know all the details of how to work with the Silero voice activity detection thing. Anyway, so make me a server that can listen to my audio devices in real time without messing up my actual microphone use if I'm on stream. Okay, so I have this Python server and then I wanted to visualize it within Emacs. I got that visualizing inside Emacs. Then I wanted to say, all right, you know, why don't I have speech recognition listening on this thing so that if I say something, it can check it off, like playing bingo, you know, if I say it, then it gives me a note that I've actually said that word or phrase. And so it could show me a list of the words or phrases that I still want to say in conversation. And then, as we're preparing for this conversation, I was like, you know what would be really cool is if I could have that speech recognition, which is running anyway, give me a transcript of the current conversation in a way that I can use it. I could then clip if I wanted to because sometimes I'll be doing a live stream and I'd be like, you know, that was a really cool demo and I should grab that. So that I can just grab the screenshot or put it into a blog post or just get a text or extract a clip out of it, turn it into a video, right? And so now I have this thing where, hang on a second, if I'm somewhere else, for example, it's easy for me to get to.

9:53 Prepare to fast forward

Sacha: I have a voice command for it. "Prepare to fast forward", which is of course a Spaceballs reference. It'll show me then this thing. And if we are... Let me load this real quick. It will show me the video that we have or at least the recording that I've got of it. That's on the right side. Here, this MPV is controlled by Emacs. If I go here... Let's say this one. So here's your waveform for it. If I play it back: "which is of course a Spaceballs reference", it'll show me then this thing. And I can copy the text if I wanted to, or I can extract this into its own video.

10:41 Talking with Emacs

Linkarzu: What other tricks do you want to show us there? What other things do you want to share about, brag about your Emacs workflow?

Sacha: It's really hard to say. I told you how M-x doctor was the beginning of my experience, right?

Linkarzu: Your journey, yep.

Sacha: Yes, yes. So this is the doctor. You can say things like, "I'm feeling happy today," as I said, right? And then it uses that to generate its response. But I have this conversation mode. "Yes, especially when I get to tinker with Emacs." And then, uh... "What happened when you get to tinker with Emacs?" Did that...? Does the TTS come through? Yeah, it does. And the reason I did this was because after I showed off my vocal commands to Emacs Paris, they were like, oh, you know, what if you can have a conversation? So I was like, OK, let's come back full circle to the thing that got me curious about Emacs in the first place, and voice enable that. And then, of course, this is a very old AI. It's much more interesting if you apply it to the new models. So if I want to, for example, practice French. This is one of my voice commands here. Then I can...

Doctor: "What would happen? I would appreciate it if you would continue."

Sacha: Okay, here we are. Then I might say, "Je parle avec linkarzu." And then I think... There you go. It will eventually... Maybe? Thank you.

Gemini: "Ah, c'est super de discuter avec lui ! C'est toujours enrichissant de partager (to share) ses passions en direct. Quel sujet abordez-vous ensemble aujourd'hui?"

Sacha: Alright, so this now uses a large language model. This one uses Gemini because gptel makes it super easy to plug in different models. So if I wanted to practice French, but I don't necessarily want to bug people because I take a while to think about my words and sometimes I'm looking stuff up, then at least I can simulate that kind of conversation. And there are a gazillion apps that will sell you a subscription to do this. But because it's here and it's plain text and I can control it, then I can more easily go through it afterwards and analyze the vocabulary or correct the things that it didn't get right, which I know is because of the speech recognition and not because of me or whatever, right? So it's so much fun to be able to tinker with Emacs to do what I wanted to do.

13:19 Life in tiny time chunks

Linkarzu: How long do you spend sitting? Like do you spend sitting most of the day?

Sacha: Most of the time, actually, I have to go help out the kiddo, right? So that keeps me away from the computer, which is one of the reasons why I've had to learn how to deal with very fragmented time. Not much time sitting in front of the computer to focus on something. Everything that I want to do has to be something that I can do in 5, 10, 15 minutes, maybe 30 minutes. There might be... At the moment, she is fairly independent, but I can still be interrupted by somebody who needs breakfast or somebody who needs a hug and whatever. So I need to be able to capture a thought, get it out of the way and work on things in tiny chunks.

Linkarzu: I've seen my wife, how she handles things. And I'm like, man, it's a lot of mental overhead, you know? That's a whole other conversation to say, see, men are the ones that make progress, build their professional careers and wives, you know, usually take care of the kids. It's a huge sacrifice. What do you think? How do you feel about all that?

Sacha: I signed up for it totally knowing what I was getting into. I was like, okay, there's a lot involved in being the default parent, right? The primary person who patches up. But I think partly because of Org Mode and Emacs, it's been very, very helpful to me to be able to say, "Yeah, that's a great idea. I'm going to write that down in my phone or on my computer" - usually on my phone back in the early parenting days. I'm away from my computer. I'm at the playground. So the fact that I can capture a note into Org Mode and then know that I can get back to it in several years when I have more free time, or that Org Mode can keep track of the deadlines that might be a year from now, like when I need to renew my passport, and just have that surface the reminder, at the right time with the notes on exactly what I need to do, and the links to wherever I need to go, I think that has been very, very helpful for me.

15:23 Capturing tasks on phone and computer

Linkarzu: Good point that you brought up because I don't know, quite a few days ago I just came up, well, the clanker came up with a method, we could say, of me just tapping it, saying something to it, and when I come to my computer, the task is there in Neovim, right? Yes. Because I forget, I'm outside, I'm like, okay, I have to remember this, I have to, I'm not gonna remember it, it's just gonna go away. So I do it on the phone, shows up in Neovim. It's a huge benefit. How do you do it

Sacha: For my phone, I often just put it into Orgzly Revived, sometimes with dictation, sometimes just typing in a few keywords to help me remember. A lot of times, if I'm coming across...

Linkarzu: Orgzly Revived, what is it?

Sacha: (Hah, I clearly can't spell) ogrzly?

Linkarzu: If you want to show it, I don't know.

Sacha: It's on my phone. I'm gonna say, okay, because this is what, Orgzly.

Linkarzu: Is it like an app?

Sacha: Yeah, so I use an Android phone. And now there are actually a gazillion apps that talk Org Mode and can synchronize with your files and whatever. I'm currently still just using Orgzly Revived as an app on my phone with Syncthing, With Syncthing being the free synchronization that I can use to just get my files back and forth. But there are lots of other alternatives, so you can find something that fits you well. I am very tempted to figure out finally how to use Emacs native, because there's an Emacs port for Android. Especially if I can get my speech synthesis and speech recognition working on it. I think that would be amazing to have this kind of conversation with Emacs along the way.

17:05 Capturing tasks by voice

Sacha: And then on the computer, if I need to capture something quickly, oh, I can show you this one. Let's see. Okay. "Remind me to put together a quick description of my to-do workflow." And it will take that note and it will stick it into an inbox.

Sacha: Here I'm in live mode so my public tasks don't get mixed in with my private tasks. If I do an agenda, it should just be limited to the public stuff. Anyway, so the remind me created the note for me. It includes the audio in case the speech recognition didn't get anything right. And it includes a screenshot so that in case I'm doing this from a different application because my keyboard shortcut is global, I can still see the context and find that sort of stuff. So yeah.

18:01 Building workflows out of little bits of time

Linkarzu: Quite interesting. Quite advanced. Quite complex. It must have taken you months, years to set all of this up.

Sacha: As I said, I can only work in thirty minutes or so. So this one, I think was a 10, 15 minute hack. Okay. Little bits of time. This link here to whatever I was looking at, you got that free from Org Mode. This thing here with a recording, I got that because I already wanted to save my recordings anyway, so it was just a matter of adding a link to the file name that I already had saved. This screenshot, you know, another five minutes, because I already had Spectacle capturing the screenshot of both screens. So it's fairly simple. It will even work for things like, "remind me next month to follow up with linkarzu to see whether he's switched to Emacs."

Sacha: So this one here, for example, it says, remind me next month, et cetera, et cetera. And it has scheduled it for next month.

Linkarzu: That's pretty cool.

Sacha: I'm not actually going to pressure you to switch the Emacs. You can keep using Neovim and just borrow all the interesting ideas. org.nvim is there, I can adapt it to do this, you know?

Download the VTT

He hasn't released a clip of this one yet, but this exchange was one of my favourite parts of the main conversation:

[Linkarzu]: I don't know if like that's a particularity of Neovim users, we're all toxic and we just hate each other.

[Sacha]: Yeah, maybe you should just come over to the Emacs community. We have hot chocolate.

[Linkarzu]: If you go to the Emacs subreddit, it's like rainbows and butterflies. There's not a lot of hate. I always wonder why does that happen? It's not moderators, you know, it's just people. Is it just because it's old people? Like the professor, he doesn't want to fight any more. He's old enough. He retired already. He's just ready to pass to the next life. So what, what?

[Sacha]: Hypothesis number two, maybe your editor makes you grumpy.

That's at about 01:30:06 in this unlisted embed of the full conversation:

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Over at the MIT Technology Review there’s a nice article on Emacs turning 50 this year. It gives a short history of Emacs starting from its TECO days. Most of that history is pretty well known to seasoned Emacs users but it’s still interesting.

What the article doesn’t give is the exact day of Emacs’ 50^th birthday. That’s not surprising. The early history of Emacs involved the researchers at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory agreeing on a standard set of TECO macros in order to improve collaboration. That was undoubtedly an ongoing process that didn’t have a well defined beginning or end so it’s easy to understand why the exact birthday of Emacs is a little murky.

Regardless, we can all celebrate Emacs’ 50^th year. It’s remarkable when you think about it. Very few programs last that long. There’s FORTRAN and Lisp, of course, but I can’t think of any other piece of software with that sort of longevity. There is, to be sure, a Ship of Theseus aspect to that longevity but it’s one shared by FORTRAN and Lisp as well.

Who knows what things will look like in another 50 years but if we still have editors, I’m putting my money on Emacs still being around. Wouldn’t that be something?

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

[ The stream will be recorded. You can watch it later. ]

This is a spontaneous live stream that starts in ~10 minutes. I will do some work on my ef-themes package for Emacs. I want to tweak the color values of all themes in order to achieve inter-theme consistency as I noticed some cases that are problematic.

I will keep the chat open, in case there are any questions related to this or anything else—I always answer everything.

Code I wrote to update files

(defun prot/ef-themes-match-p (file)
  (string-match-p "ef-.*-theme\\.el" file))

(defun prot/ef-themes-get-theme-files ()
  (thread-last
    (directory-files "/home/prot/Git/Projects/ef-themes/" :full)
    (seq-filter #'prot/ef-themes-match-p)))

(defun prot/ef-themes-add-bg-diff-fringe (files)
  "Add bg-DIFF-fringe to each theme."
  (dolist (file files)
    (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect file)
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (dolist (scope '("added" "changed" "removed"))
        (when (re-search-forward (format "\\(?:(bg-%s-refine[\s\t]+\\)\"\\(#[A-Fa-f0-9]+\\)\"" scope) nil t)
          (let* ((color (match-string-no-properties 1))
                 (percentage (if (modus-themes-color-dark-p color)
                                 10
                               -10))
                 (fringe-value (modus-themes-adjust-value color percentage)))
            (goto-char (line-end-position))
            (insert (format "\n(bg-%s-fringe %S)" scope fringe-value)))))
      (indent-region (point-min) (point-max))
      (save-buffer))))

(prot/ef-themes-add-bg-diff-fringe (prot/ef-themes-get-theme-files))

(defun prot/ef-themes-get-name-from-file (file)
  (thread-last
    (file-name-nondirectory file)
    (replace-regexp-in-string "-theme\\.el" "")))

(defun prot/ef-themes-add-diff-contrast-tables (files)
  (dolist (file files)
    (let ((theme-name (prot/ef-themes-get-name-from-file file)))
      (with-temp-buffer
        (insert-file-contents file)
        (goto-char (point-min))
        (let ((foreground-colour nil)
              (tables nil))
          (dolist (scope '("added" "changed" "removed"))
            (let ((background-colours nil))
              (dolist (specifier '("" "-faint" "-refine"))
                (when (re-search-forward (format "\\(?:(bg-%s%s[\s\t]+\\)\"\\(#[A-Fa-f0-9]+\\)\"" scope specifier) nil t)
                  (push (match-string-no-properties 1) background-colours)))
              (setq background-colours (nreverse background-colours))
              (when (re-search-forward (format "\\(?:(fg-%s[\s\t]+\\)\"\\(#[A-Fa-f0-9]+\\)\"" scope) nil t)
                (setq foreground-colour (match-string-no-properties 1)))
              (push
               (concat (format "| | %s | %s | %s |"
                               (nth 0 background-colours)
                               (nth 1 background-colours)
                               (nth 2 background-colours))
                       "\n"
                       "|-"
                       "\n"
                       (format "| %s |" foreground-colour)
                       "\n"
                       "#+TBLFM: $2='(Λ $1 @1);%.2f :: $3='(Λ $1 @1);%.2f :: $4='(Λ $1 @1);%.2f"
                       "\n")
               tables)))
          (setq table (nreverse tables))
          (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect "/home/prot/Git/Projects/ef-themes/contrast-ratios.org")
            (goto-char (point-min))
            (when (re-search-forward (format "^\\* %s" theme-name))
              (call-interactively #'org-narrow-to-subtree)
              (goto-char (point-max))
              (insert "** Diff colours")
              (insert "\n\n")
              (dolist (table tables)
                (insert table)
                (insert "\n"))
              (widen))))))))

(prot/ef-themes-add-diff-contrast-tables
 (prot/ef-themes-get-theme-files))

About the ef-themes

The ef-themes are a collection of light and dark themes for GNU Emacs that provide colourful (“pretty”) yet legible options for users who want something with a bit more flair than the modus-themes (also designed by me).

Starting with version 2.0.0, the ef-themes are built on top of the modus-themes. This means that all customisation options of the Modus themes apply to the Ef themes. Same for all Modus commands that load a theme. Enable ef-themes-take-over-modus-themes-mode to set up this arrangement (or enable modus-themes-include-derivatives-mode instead to blend Ef and Modus into one collection).

• Package name (GNU ELPA): ef-themes
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/ef-themes
• Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/ef-themes-changelog
• Sample pictures: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/ef-themes-pictures
• Git repositories:
  • GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/ef-themes
  • GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/ef-themes
• Backronym: Eclectic Fashion in Themes Hides Exaggerated Markings, Embellishments, and Sparkles.

🔷 Consider making a donation.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has an interesting post on Unicode punctuation in Emacs. His post is mainly concerned with the vagaries of dealing with English and Polish punctuation in the same document but a lot of the heavy lifting is accomplished with Electric Quote Mode.

The main problem is handling single and double quotes ‘like this’ and “like this”. Because I do almost all my writing in Org mode, I use the ':t option to turn the ASCII double quote (") into their curved typeset equivalents on export. That’s supposed to do the same with single quotes but I could never get it to work for me and always had to add then manually.

Fortunately, it’s easy to make everything work right in the buffer as you type. You merely turn electric-quote-mode on and it takes care of everything for you. By default it acts the way TeX used to by requiring “ for an opening double quote and ” for the closing double quote and similarly for single quotes. You can make it accept ” and ‘ instead by setting electric-quote-replace-double and electric-quote-context-sensitive to t.

Electric Quote Mode is global so turning it on enables it for all your buffers. You can use electric-quote-local-mode if you want it only in the current buffer. You can toggle either of them on or off by simply calling Meta+x electric-quote....

If you have to deal different quote notation for two or more languages, take a look at mbork’s post for a nifty solution.

I make lots of little EmacsConf schedule updates based on the speakers' feedback. I needed a way to keep track of the schedule that I've just sent the speaker so that I could calculate the differences and notify them again the next time I change the schedule for their talk. I like the way that keeping track of this lets me include a summary of the change in the subject and in the body of the message. For example, one of the emails I sent today had the subject: This blog post is about updating the EMAILED_SCHEDULE entry property in my Org Mode file that keeps track of this year's conference talks so that I can save the schedule that I've emailed. I want to set it only after I've successfully sent the email, because I might change my mind or forget to send the e-mail, and I want to make sure the entry property is based on what I've e-mailed.

EmacsConf 2026: Schedule update as of 2026-10-28: svg: Sun ~2:20 PM EST (40 min earlier)

I send the messages within Emacs, of course. This lets me use emacsconf-mail.el to mail-merge using Emacs Lisp. I can then use message-sent-hook to run buffer-specific code once I've sent the message. This lets me set it up so that each message updates its own talk once I've used C-c C-c to send it.

First, I need a function that adds to a talk's logbook. This is not specifically needed for the message-sent-hook, but it's useful for keeping track of the fact that I've sent this kind of email to that speaker on this date. It's very helpful to be able to see who I've already sent the backstage information to or when was the last time I sent them a schedule update. I can also filter the list of talks by the text in the logs so that if I partially send a mail merge and then cancel the rest because I want to tweak the code, I can send the new mail merge only to the remaining speakers. This is in emacsconf.el.

(defun emacsconf-add-to-talk-logbook (talk note)
  "Add NOTE as a logbook entry for TALK."
  (interactive (list (emacsconf-complete-talk) (read-string "Note: ")))
  (save-window-excursion
    (save-excursion
      (emacsconf-with-talk-heading talk
        (emacsconf-add-to-logbook
         (if (functionp note)
             (funcall note)
           note))
        (bury-buffer (current-buffer))))))

This function is the one that gets added to the message sent hook. It's in emacsconf-mail.el:

(defun emacsconf-mail-add-to-logbook (email note)
  "Add to logbook for all matching talks from this speaker."
  (interactive
   (let* ((email (mail-strip-quoted-names
                  (plist-get (plist-get (notmuch-show-get-message-properties) :headers)
                             :From)))
          (talks (emacsconf-mail-talks email)))
     (list
      email
      (read-string (format "Note for %s: "
                           (mapconcat (lambda (o) (plist-get o :slug))
                                      talks", "))))))
  (condition-case e
      (save-window-excursion
        (mapc
         (lambda (talk)
           (emacsconf-add-to-talk-logbook talk note))
         (emacsconf-mail-talks email)))
    (error (message "Error %s" e))))

And this function actually sets up the message-sent-hook:

(defun emacsconf-mail-log-message-when-sent (o message)
  (add-hook 'message-sent-hook
            `(lambda ()
               (save-window-excursion
                 (emacsconf-add-to-talk-logbook
                  ,(plist-get o :slug)
                  ,message))
               (when (match-buffers "*unsent")
                 (switch-to-buffer (car (match-buffers "*unsent")))))
            nil t))

Which gets called by this part of emacsconf-mail-prepare:

(when (plist-get template :log-note)
  (mapc (lambda (talk)
          (emacsconf-mail-log-message-when-sent talk (plist-get template :log-note)))
        (emacsconf-mail-talks email)))

Then my emacsconf-mail-interim-schedule-update can specify the :log-note like this:

      :log-note
      (lambda ()
        (dolist (talk (cdr group))
          (emacsconf-with-talk-heading talk
            (emacsconf-schedule-save-emailed-time)))
        (concat "emacsconf-mail-interim-schedule-update"
                (if log-note (concat ": " log-note) "") " - " summary))

This lets me run that code only when the mail gets sent.

Next automation idea: Someday I may even figure out how to attach an iCalendar file (including updates to events) so that people can add it to their calendars.

If you find yourself wanting to run code when a message gets sent, then definitely take a look at message-sent-hook. You can add a buffer-local hook with the fourth argument to add-hook (ex: (add-hook 'message-sent-hook (lambda () ...) nil t)) so that you can take actions specific to that message.

Have fun!

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Today I learned a new Emacs trick from Emacs Dwelling. Well, new to me. It turns out it’s been in Emacs since 28.1 so for about four and a half years.

Here’s the problem. When you call isearch it starts searching at the current point location to the bottom of the file. You can cause it to wrap around and continue searching at the top of the file but this isn’t always convenient. As a result, many people always start their search by moving to the top of the buffer first. But this isn’t always convenient either. For example, if you quit the search you go back to the top of the file, not where you started.

Sometimes you want a bit more control: perhaps you want to start at the first match or the last match and if you quit, you’d like to be back where you started. Well this is Emacs so of course you can do that. The nice thing is that it’s already built in. There are no packages to install, you just enable it my setting isearch-allow-motion to t.

You can start the search at any of:

1. The current point position
2. The first match in the file
3. The last match in the file
4. The first match before the window
5. The first match after the window

Take a look at the Emacs Dwelling post to see the details and how to invoke the extra behavior. I don’t know why this hasn’t become the default. If you don’t use the extra capabilities, everything works exactly as before.

Sacha Chua has a nice post that describes something that I really like: taking some data that she’s collected and analysing it to extract useful information. For some reason I really like that sort of thing and am always doing it myself with my own data.

In Chua’s case, she wanted to know how many Emacs News entries she’s written and plot them over time. It’s a little more difficult than you might think. First of all, she didn’t have the complete Emacs News index so she had to recreate the missing parts by converting the HTML entries into Org mode. She did that with a standard Unix pipeline using Pandoc.

Once she had everything in Org mode, she wrote some Elisp to extract the needed information and put it in a table. From there, it was easy to produce a graph showing how may entries she wrote by year. You can even see the years her daughter was a toddler because the number of entries went down for a couple of years. As Chua says, “Babies sleep a lot; toddlers, not so much.”

Take a look at Chua’s post to see all the code and the final graph. The data is mostly useful only for Chua just as mine is useful mostly for me but the way she goes about analyzing the data is useful to anyone that needs to take some data and massage it.

The coolest thing I saw this week is Clerkenwell, a handwritten Clojure notebook (Github).

• Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
  • Emacs Berlin: Emacs-Berlin Hybrid Meetup https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Oct 28 1100 America/Vancouver - 1300 America/Chicago - 1400 America/Toronto - 1800 Etc/UTC - 1900 Europe/Berlin - 2330 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Oct 29 0200 Asia/Singapore
  • EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/316464081/ Thu Nov 5 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto – Fri Nov 6 0000 Etc/UTC - 0100 Europe/Berlin - 0530 Asia/Kolkata - 0800 Asia/Singapore
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Nov 6 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/UTC - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Sat Nov 7 0000 Asia/Singapore
  • Why Sacha Chua Still Lives in Emacs After 20+ Years
• Emacs configuration:
  • welkomscherm v1.2.1: a small, calm, extensible dashboard for Emacs (Reddit)
• Emacs Lisp:
  • Eric MacAdie: I Updated My Emacs Number Package
  • Flymake for Emacs Lisp (@benleis@mathstodon.xyz)
  • Better lisp editing with `tree-guide.el` (and other packages) (28:53)
• Appearance:
  • region-cursors - Cursor overlays at both ends of the region (Reddit)
  • Flick: a quick and simple font picker (Reddit)
  • Protesilaos: Emacs: doric-themes version 1.4.0
• Navigation:
  • Some recent changes I've made to tab-config my tabbing package for emacs built on top of tab-line (@benleis@mathstodon.xyz)
  • Emacs finally folds to my liking - jointhefreeworld
  • Emacs - Ripscope - search C symbol definitions
• Writing:
  • Letters to Auntie: spell-checking in Emacs (@marcin_bielewicz)
  • Emacs for obsessive word lovers (10:40)
  • Dave Pearson: blogmore.el v5.4.0
  • Sacha Chua: Dictating blog posts into Emacs (Irreal)
• Org Mode:
  • modeorg.org: a human guide to Org Mode (@pablo@murad.social)
  • Martin Schell: Using Org-Capture Templates with Elisp Evaluation to Set Values Depending on User Input (Irreal)
  • How to export your org-mode and org-agenda to Apple Reminders · GitHub
  • Building a website with Org mode (Reddit)
  • Denden: Emacs Lisp SSG based on org-publish | Dilip's Log (@swrogers@social.lol)
  • Adding Caching to org-publish-rss.el (@tiang)
  • org-constellation (Reddit)
• Completion:
  • cmd-rewind: resume last completing-read with saved input (Reddit)
• Coding:
  • Using Typescript V7 With Emacs Eglot (@swrogers@social.lol)
  • Auto apply Emacs Eglot safe Code Actions (fixes) on Save
  • Video 3 - Configuring Emacs, Arrays, Slices, Vectors, and the Borrow Checker (15:47)
  • Back to Emacs with the SCSS workflow I always wanted
  • Writing an mTLS server in Go using Emacs (Reddit)
  • Clerkenwell: a handwritten Clojure notebook (Github)
• Shells:
  • Ghostel integration in Emacs (10:27)
• Mail, news, and chat:
  • VM 9.0.0, a mail reader for Emacs (Reddit)
  • Irreal: A Small Improvement - deleting cookies after using elfeed-webkit
• Evil mode:
  • evil-matchit 5.0.0 is published (Reddit) jumping between paired structures
• Multimedia:
  • Sacha Chua: subed.el and quoting snippets of YouTube videos from the auto captions
  • Yay Emacs 44: More conversational voice interfaces (01:11:04)
• LLMs:
  • nmagko/gptel-web: Web search tools for Emacs gptel · GitHub
• Community:
  • Fortnightly Tips, Tricks, and Questions — 2026-10-20 / week 42
  • 40c3 - organizing a Lisp assembly for self-organized workshops (@nmeum@chaos.social)
  • Emacs Historical Archive (@kickingvegas@sfba.social)
  • Eric MacAdie: Emacs Carnival: Are keyboards and M-x here to stay?
  • Can your Vim do that? starts beatboxing (00:53) having fun with multiple cursors.
  • Sacha Chua: Upcoming chat with linkarzu about using Emacs for 25 years
  • Github PR box * tech chats * conference outfits * Emacs Conf prep (05:35:41)
  • Linkarzu clips:
    • Emacs vs Neovim - Why Prot Won't Pick a Side (01:30:34)
    • Emacs vs Neovim - Why He Switched for Good (12:27)
    • vim user admits emacs is better (14:08)
    • Emacs vs Neovim - Why Prot Won't Pick a Side (Reddit)
  • Sacha Chua: Analyzing Emacs News: 564 posts over 11 years, > 34k items, ~60/post
• Other:
  • Raymond Zeitler: A Point-Based Tooltip for Emacs
  • Chai v2.1.0: Read Books in Emacs, Highlight, Search & Ask with Sources (01:36)
  • exc.el — Runs Excel in Emacs (18:48, Github)
  • Comparing file with autosaved file (@lispwizard@techhub.social)
  • anju 1.9: mouse menus for storing frameset, setting macro counter, fill functions (@kickingvegas@sfba.social)
  • buffer-snapshotter: keeps snapshots of changed versions buffers (visiting files or not) written to disk (@morix@loci.onl)
  • Learning an Ancient Language with an Ancient Text Editor - SeaGL 2026 - pretalx
  • Profound anguish and Emacs persistent undos — (^ω^) (@jadedctrl@jam.xwx.moe)
  • returning nonzero exit code from emacsclient (@amy@ice.ch3.st)
  • Emacs and rust on an ASUS Eee PC 1000HA (03:51)
• Emacs development:
  • ekp-fill - line-breaking algorithm; some parts were LLM-generated, so the author is rewriting
• New packages:
  • ctftime: CTFtime dashboard (MELPA)
  • difflayer: Overlay diffs on selected regions (MELPA)
  • elark: Emacs interface to Lark/Feishu via lark-cli (MELPA)
  • fz-index: Sublime-style fuzzy file open with a native index (MELPA)
  • isbn: ISBN library (GNU ELPA)
  • modern-tab: The common part of the two tab modes (MELPA)
  • region-cursors: Display point and active mark using overlays (MELPA)
  • straight-overview: Selective upgrade UI for straight.el packages (MELPA)
  • typst-overlay: Overlay Typst equations (MELPA)
  • xc: Emacs interface for xc (GNU ELPA)

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Bluesky #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, 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!

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

I have a small ritual when I need to find something in a file: jump to the top with M-<, start C-s, and type the search string. It works, but it is a little fiddly. The top of the buffer is not where I am, and most of the time I do not actually need to start there. I just want the first match in the file, or I want to search forward from wherever point happens to be.

The built-in isearch-allow-motion option is kinda useful. It lets the ordinary motion keys M-< and M-> work as match navigation while an isearch is active. Type C-s, type the search string, and then press M-< to jump to the first occurrence in the buffer or M-> to jump to the last. The search stays active, so C-s and C-r keep working from the new position. No trip to the top, no restarting the search.

With isearch-allow-motion set to non-nil, isearch intercepts four motion commands and gives them a search-specific meaning:

The search string is not changed, and you are still in isearch after the jump. That is the whole trick: the motion command has been repurposed from "move the buffer" to "move through the matches", but only while you are searching.

The option has been in Emacs since 28.1, so I would say generally there is probably a high chance you already have it.

Add one line in your init file:

(setq isearch-allow-motion t)

The top-of-buffer ritual was not a huge cost, but it was a repeated one. I do this dozens of times a day, and every time I did it I was leaving the place I wanted to search from, just to make the first match the first match. isearch-allow-motion lets me keep my starting point and still get the first or last match when I need it.

It is a small, built-in option, not a new package or a new search interface. It just teaches a few familiar keys to do the obvious thing while isearch is active. If you are on Emacs 28.1 or later, give it a try!

I'm preparing for a conversation with linkarzu. It would be fun to quote snippets from some of the other videos he has. I like the way he does a lot of reaction videos that build on what people have shared. He tends to listen to things at 1.25 or 1.5x speed. I'm not sure if I have the patience even for that, so it'd be nice to be able to just quickly skim the text. He also clips a lot of his own videos. It might be interesting to play around with my workflows for listening to snippets and clipping them.

I've grabbed YouTube captions and reformatted them before:

• Grabbing the Youtube auto-generated captions is pretty useful when making Emacs News (2021)
• Org Mode: Insert YouTube video with separate captions (2021)

This time around, I want to get the VTT format so that I can possibly use them with subed-record to clip audio or video.

From a YouTube link, I want to run a single command that gets me a VTT file with that as the media source and with the captions. If there are any chapters in the description, it would be lovely to get them too. I can get them from the JSON, yay!

Now I can use M-x sacha-subed-youtube to open the VTT file, which is cached locally, and I can use M-x sacha-subed-youtube-region-as-quote after selecting a section. Well, actually, I have an Embark command s (for "subed") that I can run on a YouTube video link and a selected-mode shortcut for y that I can run when the region is selected. Results:

I Asked Prot If I Should Switch to Emacs

00:09:46: I think the value of Org is that it is in the context of Emacs, which can now do other things. It can be your email client. It can be your agenda. Of course, it can be your programming environment. All these sorts of things, like your RSS feed reader and so on. And in the context of all that, you also have Org. So for me, that's kind of the value. But otherwise, having Org elsewhere, it's great still, because the paradigm of Org, I think, is a portable paradigm.

Org Mode in Neovim Is Finally Here - Full org.nvim Demo

00:00:00: I think that I achieved like 100% of parity with the original Org Mode version on Emacs.

(defvar sacha-subed-youtube-dir "~/proj/youtube-captions"
  "Directory with YouTube captions.")
(defvar sacha-subed-youtube-temp-dir "~/Downloads" "Snap installations need a workaround for permission.")
;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-subed-youtube (url)
  "Download the automatic subtitles or check my cache."
  (interactive "MURL: ")
  (let* ((id (sacha-org-yt-id url))
         (existing (car (directory-files sacha-subed-youtube-dir t
                                         (concat "^" (regexp-quote id) ".*\\.vtt\\'")))))
    (if existing
        (progn
          (find-file existing)
          (subed-mpv-play-from-url url))
      ;; Download
      (let ((directory (make-temp-file (expand-file-name "yt-dlp" sacha-subed-youtube-temp-dir) t))
            filename
            json
            match
            chapters
            subtitles)
        (with-current-buffer (get-buffer-create "*yt-dlp*")
          (let ((default-directory directory))
            (call-process
             "yt-dlp" nil t nil
             "--skip-download"
             "--write-info-json"
             "--sub-format"
             "vtt"
             "--write-subs"
             "--write-auto-subs"
             url)))
        (when (null (directory-files directory t "\\.json$"))
          (error "Could not get data."))
        (setq json (json-read-file (car (directory-files directory t "\\.json$"))))
        (setq chapters (alist-get 'chapters json))
        (setq filename (expand-file-name
                        (concat id " - " (alist-get 'title json) ".vtt")
                        sacha-subed-youtube-dir))
        (setq subtitles (subed-parse-file (car (directory-files
                                                directory t
                                                "\\.vtt$"))))
        (delete-directory directory t)
        ;; add the chapters as comments
        (mapc
         (lambda (sub)
           (when (and chapters
                      (>= (elt sub 1)
                          (* (alist-get 'start_time (car chapters)) 1000)))
             (setf (elt sub 4) (alist-get 'title (pop chapters)))))
         subtitles)
        (subed-create-file
         filename
         subtitles
         t)
        (find-file filename)
        (subed-mpv-play-from-url url)))))

(defun sacha-subed-youtube-id ()
  "Return the YouTube ID."
  (or (save-restriction
        (save-excursion
          (goto-char (point-min))
          (subed-forward-subtitle-text)
          (when (subed-record-get-directive "YOUTUBE_URL")
            (sacha-org-yt-id
             (subed-record-get-directive "YOUTUBE_URL")))))
      (car (split-string (file-name-base (buffer-file-name)) " "))))

;; Now we just need a quick way to copy a YouTube URL.
;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-subed-youtube-url (&optional start-msecs end-msecs)
  "Copy YouTube URL for the current timestamp."
  (interactive)
  (when-let*
      ((id (sacha-subed-youtube-id))
       (s
        (if end-msecs
            (format "https://youtu.be/%s?t=%d&end=%d"
                    id
                    (/ (or start-msecs (subed-subtitle-msecs-start))
                       1000)
                    (1+ (/ end-msecs
                           1000)))
          (format "https://youtu.be/%s?t=%d"
                    id
                    (/ (or start-msecs (subed-subtitle-msecs-start))
                       1000)))))
    (when (called-interactively-p 'any)
      (kill-new s)
      (message "%s" s))
    s))

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-subed-youtube-play ()
  "Play this video from YouTube."
  (interactive)
  (when-let*
      ((id (sacha-subed-youtube-id))
       (s (concat "https://youtu.be/" id)))
    (when (string= subed-mpv-media-file s)
      (subed-mpv-play-from-url s))
    (subed-mpv-jump-to-current-subtitle)
    (subed-mpv-unpause)))

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-subed-youtube-region-as-quote (beg end &optional label)
  "Format this as a quote."
  (interactive (list (region-beginning) (region-end) (when current-prefix-arg (read-string "Label: "))))
  (let* ((id (sacha-subed-youtube-id))
         (url (sacha-subed-youtube-url
               (save-excursion
                 (goto-char beg)
                 (subed-subtitle-msecs-start))
               (save-excursion
                 (goto-char end)
                 (subed-subtitle-msecs-stop))))
         (base (file-name-base (buffer-file-name)))
         (text (subed-subtitle-list-text (subed-subtitle-list beg end)))
         (s (format
             "%s\n#+begin_quote\n%s: %s\n#+end_quote\n"
             (org-link-make-string
              (concat "yt:" url)
              (or label
                  (and (string-match (format "^%s - \\(.+\\)" (regexp-quote id)) base)
                       (match-string 1 base))
                  (sacha-page-title url)))
             (org-link-make-string
              (concat "vtime:"
                      (subed-msecs-to-timestamp
                       (save-excursion
                         (goto-char beg)
                         (subed-subtitle-msecs-start))
                       t)))
             (with-temp-buffer
               (insert text)
               (let ((fill-column most-positive-fixnum))
                 (fill-region (point-min) (point-max))
                 (string-trim (buffer-string)))))))
      (when (called-interactively-p 'any)
        (kill-new s)
        (message "%s" s))
      s))

Some of this code hasn't been committed to subed yet, but I will commit it sometime this week.

My next steps might be to:

• cache the video as a whole to make it easier to check the waveforms
• extract the segment to a standalone video file so that it's easy for me to play back or include in another video
• see if I can use my voice activity detection and semi-streaming speech recognition to get a VTT of my current OBS recording

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Martin Schell has an excellent post on building and using Org capture templates. What’s interesting about his approach is that his template prompts for certain information—customer ID and site location in his example—captures that information in some local variables, and uses those variables to customize the capture for the particular customer.

His two main tools for doing this are:

1. The %^{PROMPT|A|B|...} placeholder to prompt for data.
2. The %(EXP) placeholder to execute the Elisp expression EXP.

He wrote some helper functions to deal with setting and accessing local variables. The first, ms/set-var, prompts the user for the value of a variable, creates the variable, sets its value, and returns the value. This is different from the %^{...} placeholder in that it captures the value of the user’s answer for later use. The other helper functions make use of the captured variables.

Take a look at Schell’s post to see the functions and how the whole thing hangs together. His needs may be more complicated than normal but the ideas he uses to solve them are handy and applicable to many—even simpler—situations.

I’ve used all the placeholders that uses in my own templates but the idea of capturing a variable for later reuse in the template is new to me. It’s a neat idea and definitely worth knowing.

While summarizing my history with Emacs, I was curious about just how many Emacs News posts I've written and how many links I've highlighted. 564 posts, > 34000 items, an average of 60 items per posts.

Analysis: It turned out that my emacs-news/index.org only went back to about 2016, missing a few months of 2015. To fill in the data, I needed to convert the old HTML files into Org format.

find -name \*news\*.html -exec zsh -c 'pandoc -f html -t org {} --wrap=none -o $(basename {} .html).org' \;

Then I inserted the old entries into my file. insert-file-contents doesn't seem to move the point, but if I narrow to my Posts subtree (org-narrow-to-subtree), then I can go to the end of the narrowed part.

(defun sacha-emacs-news-insert-old-ones ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((dir "~/proj/static-blog/blog/2015/"))
    (dolist (f
             (sort
              (directory-files-recursively dir "news.*org$")
              :key #'file-name-base
              :reverse t))
      (insert "** " (substring (file-name-base f) 0 10) " Emacs News\n\n")
      (insert-file-contents f)
      (goto-char (point-max)))))

With all the entries in place, let's look at the list items that start with a link.

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-emacs-news-count-links ()
  "Return the number of main links in this subtree."
  (interactive)
  (let ((count 0))
    (save-excursion
      (org-back-to-heading)
      (while (re-search-forward "^ *- \\[\\[" (save-excursion (org-end-of-subtree)) t)
        (incf count)))
    (when (called-interactively-p 'any)
      (message "%d" count))
    count))

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-emacs-news-analyze ()
  "Count how many entries and items. Make a table of entries."
  (interactive)
  (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect "~/sync/emacs-news/index.org")
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (let (results)
      (org-map-entries
       (lambda ()
         (let ((title (org-entry-get (point) "ITEM")))
           (when (string-match "\\([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]\\) Emacs" title)
             (push (list (match-string 1 title)
                         (sacha-emacs-news-count-links))
                   results)))))
      (seq-uniq (sort results :key 'car :reverse t)))))

(append '(("Date" "Count") hline) (sacha-emacs-news-analyze))

set title "Number of links in Emacs News per week"
set xdata time
set timefmt "%Y-%m-%d"
set format x "%Y"
set xlabel "Year"
set ylabel "Count"
set grid
plot data using 1:2 with lines title "Items"

This probably tracks my availability more than anything else. The dip in 2017 and 2018 corresponds pretty well to the time that the kiddo needed more of my attention. Babies sleep a lot; toddlers, not so much.

I generally feel that there are so many interesting rabbit holes to go down each week, and the Emacs community is active enough that there's always one or two things I want to add to my to-do list to explore further. Putting together Emacs News is one of the highlights of my week. It takes me about 1 - 2 hours, and some of that is just because I get distracted trying out the cool stuff I come across.

Learning from similar newsletters: OCaml Weekly News has a single author as well and does a lot more summarization, but includes fewer links. This Week in Rust is a similar link-dump weekly newsletter. It's written by a larger team and it has more commentary. I think that for the Emacs community, I'm still leaning towards this large list of categorized links for easy skimming. As I get the hang of writing more, I'd like to write more blog posts myself that Emacs News can also link to. If your community doesn't already have a weekly or monthly newsletter, I highly recommend it as a way to bring the community together.

Here's the table, in case you're curious:

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

These are my minimalist themes. They use few colours and will appear mostly monochromatic in many contexts. Styles involve the careful use of typography, such as italics and bold italics.

If you want maximalist themes in terms of colour, check my ef-themes package. For something in-between, which I consider the best “default theme” for a text editor, opt for my modus-themes.

• Package name (GNU ELPA): doric-themes
• Sample pictures: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/doric-themes-pictures
• Git repository: https://github.com/protesilaos/doric-themes
• Backronym: Doric Only Really Intensifies Conservatively … themes.

Below are the release notes.

Update to doric-themes version 1.4.0

The new doric-meadow and doric-mountain themes

doric-meadow is a light theme with yellow and green colours, while doric-mountain has a similar albeit dark palette. They expand the collection of the Doric themes to cover even more styles and preferences.

Diff colours are refined

I improved the inter-theme consistency of all colours that apply to diffs, such as those shown in diff-mode, ediff, and magit buffers.

Before, some themes were needlessly more subtle than others while certain colours could be hard to discern in some situations. For example, if the diff-hl package was in use and the fringe was set to a thin line.

Other packages also benefit from this review, such as my pulsar and lin.

Matching parentheses are distinct from the active region

The highlight of matching parentheses produced by show-paren-mode is now distinct from the active region. The same is true for the current line, per hl-line-mode.

The doric-themes-define-theme should not fail in certain cases

I fixed an issue that was reported to me by Amin Bandali where the doric-themes-define-theme was failing to instantiate a theme in the macroexpanded code.

The bg-accent and fg-accent palette entries are renamed

This is relevant for those who rely on doric-themes-with-colors. The new names are bg-accent-primary and fg-accent-primary. The old ones will not longer work.

🔷 Consider making a donation.

When you hover the mouse pointer over a link in Org, Emacs displays a tooltip that shows the link's URL.⁰ This mimics the behavior of a web browser that displays the URL in the status bar.

Within Emacs, I try to avoid the mouse as much as possible. I already configured Emacs so that pressing ENTER on a link follows the link.¹ But this method doesn't provide a way to preview the link before following it. I wondered, "What if Emacs displayed a tooltip whenever point is on a link?"

The answer came to me immediately; "It would be darn annoying."

So I decided that the user should invoke a function to "display tooltip at point." It didn't take long for me to find a solution on Stack Exchange, "farynaio/org-link-copy."² The function's primary purpose is to add the URL to the kill-ring. But it also shows the URL in a message that indicates the URL was copied. It works perfectly.

However, the tricky part was binding a key to the function. It was suggested that one could bind C-x C-l³ to the function with this statement:

(define-key org-mode-map (kbd "C-x C-l") 'farynaio/org-link-copy)

Unfortunately, when I included it in my init file, it generated the error "Symbol's value as variable is void: org-mode-map" even while it worked after Org was enabled.

Eventually, after trying (unsuccessfully) to add the assignment to org-mode-hook, I found it easy to include this statement above the define-key statement: (require 'org-keys). This provides a definition of org-mode-map, which is provided in org-keys.el.

As Emacs is very keyboard-oriented, this little addition allowed my fingers (and thumbs) to stay on the keys.

Recall that my original objective was to display a tooltip, not a message. However, a tooltip would appear at the location of the mouse pointer, not at point, even if the mouse is hovering over another program's window. Just try it yourself:

(tooltip-show-help "MSG")

But this disadvantageous behavior of tooltip-show-help could be useful if you wanted to locate the mouse pointer or signal the status of some long-running asynchronous Emacs process. Setting the message to "****\n****\n****\n****\n****\n****\n****\n****" might make the mouse obvious enough to notice. Feel free to play with that!

Trying to locate the mouse pointer leads me to another issue: how to locate point. So far, I've been using my overwrite-mode indicator to show me point.⁴ But I hope to devise a more effective solution soon. Perhaps.

⁰ If you don't see this, you might need to enable tooltip-mode.

¹ Setting the variable org-return-follows-link to non-nil achieves this.

² See https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/60555. The function is org-link-copy.

³ I chose to bind the function to "s-SPC".

⁴ See Change Emacs Cursor to Indicate Overwrite Mode

I'm going to be chatting with linkarzu about Emacs and life. He's more of a Vim person than an Emacs person, so I'll try to share things that are generally useful. He's called it: "Why Sacha Chua Still Lives in Emacs After 20+ Years."

I am not sure my eyebrows have ever done that, but linkarzu does like his AI-generated thumbnails, so we'll let that pass. =)

[2026-10-29 Thu 08:00] (America/Toronto, -0400) = Thu Oct 29 0800H EDT / 0700H CDT / 0600H MDT / 0500H PDT / 1200H UTC / 1300H CET / 1400H EET / 1730H IST / 2000H +08 / 2100H JST

His description:

Sacha Chua joins me to talk about Emacs. She has been living in it for decades, and she shares the Emacs world with all of us through Emacs News, Emacs Chat and EmacsConf.

I want to see how she runs her life in Org Mode and how she uses her speech and audio braindump workflows, and to ask her what she thinks of what Prot and I have been doing with Emacs.

We'll also be discussing Neovim and other usual tech related topics

As a backup and so that it shows up on my YouTube feed, it's also going to be streamed at:

(but watch it on his channel instead for the stats boost!)

Note: Both videos will become unlisted afterwards. I think that means you'll still be able to reach it from my blog post or from a direct link, but you won't see it on his channel or mine, at least until he posts the edited video publicly. Also, to encourage people to sign up for his memberships (and to keep things more focused during the conversation), Linkarzu limits chat during the livestream to members of his channel. That's totally fine, he's allowed to experiment with ways to make a living, so please don't give him any grief about it. =) If you have any questions about what we talk about, or would like to continue the conversation, feel free to leave a comment or email me at sacha@sachachua.com and I will check it afterwards.

I like making things available and searchable long-term. I plan to post the transcript of either the full conversation or excerpts of it on my blog, and I'll probably also post screenshots or clips of the video or audio where it makes sense. It might be something like the transcript I posted in Chatted with John Wiegley and Karthik Chikmagalur about personal information management.

I am looking forward to learning more about the NeoVim community. I think the NeoVim community does the YouTube thing really well, and I'm hoping that the new org.nvim stuff might encourage people to do more literate programming and blogging. I put together some notes on my Emacs history, building on from the title that Linkarzu put on his event ("Why Sacha Chua Still Lives in Emacs After 20+ Years"). I'll probably add a little bit more over the next two days. I am more curious about where the conversation can take us rather than switching into presentation mode, since I can write blog posts and make videos whenever I want. =)

I put together some sketches to help me organize my thoughts. His channel uses dark mode, so let's experiment with dark mode in my sketches too. I want to think about things so that the relevant resources are readily available and so that I can express myself more concisely. I can put together a presentation or write a blog post by myself, so I'm more curious about the kinds of things he wants to explore in the conversation.

About me

I'll probably need to do a brief introduction to set the context so that people know where I'm coming from. Let's disclaim my professional irrelevance up front.

Image text and links

About me 2026-10-24-03

• sachachua.com (since 2001 :) )
• Emacs News
• planet.emacslife.com
• EmacsConf
• Where: Manila, Philippines to Toronto, Canada in 2005
• Now:
  • Continuing with hanging out with A+ (kiddo) and W- (husband)
  • Experimenting with retirement
• Previously: web prototypes, data analysis, sketchnoting, computer science
• Currently tinkering with: learning French, hybrid speech interfaces, community sharing

It turns out that I've been using Emacs for at least 25 years, which is pretty cool. I am 43, so that's more than half my life.

Summary of other important things

Let's start with a summary so that we don't worry about running out of time and so that people don't have to listen to two hours before getting to the good stuff. I want people to be able to get something out of this, whether they're a Vim diehard or experimenting with Helix, or even if they're passionate about things other than text editors. Here are some of the things I'm learning about that I think are important.

• Community:
  • It's really hard to learn Emacs all by yourself. It's obscure, arcane, and overwhelming.
    • Steve Rowe's Blog : Code Editor Learning Curves
    • the learning cliff and the View from the Top
  • Fortunately, we have a strong culture of sharing, starting with the GNU General Public License and continuing through things like literate programming. We have mailing lists, blog posts, videos, meetups, and conferences. One of the best ways to learn Emacs is to learn out loud. Another way is to look over someone's shoulder. It doesn't take a lot of time or money to do the kinds of things that I enjoy doing to connect the Emacs community, and I'd love to see other tech communities experiment with things like that too.
    • Working on the plumbing in a small web community
• Adaptability: You can customize Emacs to really fit the way you want to work. The more people do this, the easier it gets to adapt Emacs to even more workflows.
• Incremental improvements: Even small changes add up, and code turns out to be surprisingly reusable. It often pays off beyond the recommendations of xkcd: Is It Worth the Time?.
• Imagination and play: Tweaking Emacs can be lots of fun. Fun is important.

Quick notes on the stuff he mentioned in the description:

• How I run my life in Org Mode
  • Capture into an inbox on my computer or on my phone (Orgzly Revived + Syncthing),
  • Agenda on either Orgzly or my computer.
  • Several large files that I add a lot of ideas to and slowly chip away at when I have time. I'm still the primary parent for our ten-year-old. Although I have a little bit more focus time now that she (usually) attends virtual school, I still find myself capturing ideas and knowing that I will get to them maybe sometime over the next few years.
• It's a lot of fun to be able to make tiny improvements that add up.
• Speech and audio brain dump workflow
  • On my computer
    • I use dictation to quickly grab some snippets.
    • I can put each sentence on its own line and then use Org Mode to move things around.
    • For more complicated things, then I'll use Org Mode outlines or maybe start with some kind of sketch.
    • I also type too. It's nice to have that option, especially when there's code.
    • Finding the shape of my thoughts
    • Dictating blog posts into Emacs
    • Emacs Carnival Oct 2026: Exploring keys and voice input in Emacs
      • Voice commands are great when you've run out of keyboard shortcuts or you can't remember them
  • On my phone
    • Audio braindump workflow tweaks: Adding Org Mode hyperlinks to recordings based on keywords
      • I prefer this kind of thinking out loud at my computer, though, because being able to read and restructure the text right away helps me.
    • My mobile use has shifted to practising French with my tongue twisters and audio recordings.
• What I think of Linkarzu and Prot's conversations
  • It's totally okay if you want to stick with NeoVim. I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with!
  • I think the discussions we can have about workflows can cross editor boundaries. =)

History

Here's a brief overview of my history with Emacs, in case anything sparks curiosity.

The details are a little bit fuzzy, but fortunately I've written about some things in previous blog posts. I'd like to flesh this out with an outline and maybe even some sentences or paragraphs later on. I love the way that different themes recur. I find myself building on things that I started exploring years ago. For example, my current interest in hybrid speech interfaces echoes all the way back to M-x doctor and Emacspeak from the beginning.

• M-x doctor:

  • From "Unix Power Tools":

    If you have time to waste (and I mean really waste), Emacs has things to keep you occupied. … If you think you might be in need of a psychotherapist, save your money and try ESC-x doctor RETURN.

    I was not actually looking for a psychotherapist. I think I was seventeen or eighteen, and I was trying to go through all the interesting computer science books in my university's library in the Philippines. I thought it was funny that someone put in that kind of Easter egg. The more I dug around in the source code, the more I was amazed by the things that people had added to Emacs. Anyway, it's interesting how the fun, inconsequential stuff turned out to be the thing that caught my attention.

• Planner Mode: How I got hooked
  • I loved seeing how people customized Emacs in so many different ways to fit the way that their particular brain worked, and getting it to fit my brain too.
  • One time, when I was the maintainer of Planner Mode, I got an email from someone who said something like: "Thank you for maintaining this. By the way, one of your recent changes lost my data and I didn't have any backups, but that's okay, just please fix it, here are some ideas." That kindness mattered a lot to me.
• Emacspeak:
  • In my third or fourth year of university, my laptop screen started glitching. Sometimes it got really low in brightness and contrast, and you could only read it if you tilted it at an extreme angle and looked very carefully. But the Emacspeak folks had figured out how to make it perfectly usable just with speech synthesis, because they needed that as blind or visually impaired users. This turned out to be pretty handy. I not only used that for a fair chunk of my regular writing and coding, but also for my experiments with wearable computing, and for the occasional alert when I was paying attention to something else. Speech synthesis was a lot more discreet than the head-mounted display that I experimented with in 2003.
• flashcard.el:
  • The fun part about this was rigging up my flashcard.el so that it would show me funny cat pictures from ICanHasCheezburger when I answered enough questions correctly. Fun matters.
  • Japanese flashcards
  • More Emacs evangelization: flashcard
• ledger:
  • Keeping (financial) score with Ledger
  • My financial network map and virtual envelope system
• Org Mode: New note-taking workflow with Emacs Org-mode
  • I started using Org Mode as part of research for a book on Emacs. I didn't finish the book, but I stuck with Org Mode. I like the way it fits the way I think and what I want to do.
• Work: Drupal, Rails, blogging, data analysis, literate programming
• Semi-retirement:
  • What did I learn from this experiment with semi-retirement?
  • Continuing my experiment with (semi-)retirement
  • category - experiment
• EmacsConf
  • I helped organize the first one in 2013 in London. I watched the 2015 one remotely. Amin Bandali reached out to me in 2019 to get EmacsConf going again, and we've been organizing it yearly since.
  • Analyzing my Emacs time over the last 11 years or so
• Emacs Chat
• Emacs News: Great way to see all the cool things that people are working on
  • Analyzing Emacs News: 564 posts over 11 years, > 34k items, ~60/post
• Parenting:
  • Braindump from radiostudent.si interview with Lio Novelli and Jurij Podgorsek: Emacs, focused time - parenting, using fragmented time
  • Orgzly Revived helped me stay sane by capturing ideas and making it easy to postpone them for years.
  • Incremental improvements in fragments of time
• Captions: I can even use them to edit videos and audio files in Emacs
  • Editing subtitles in Emacs with subed, with synchronized video playback through mpv
  • category - subed
• SVGs:
  • EmacsConf backstage: scheduling with SVGs
  • Visualizing the balance of speaking in my French conversations with tutors
  • Using Emacs to visualize speaking and target words/phrases in real-ish time
• Minecraft, cubing
  • The kiddo wanted to play Minecraft, but she wasn't comfortable enough with typing yet, so I made her some command books so that she could just click on things in order to teleport back to us or give herself equipment. Now she can type very quickly, but it was helpful back then.
    • Updating my Minecraft command book using Emacs, TRAMP, and mcf.el
    • Using Org Mode tables and Emacs Lisp to create Minecraft Java JSON command books
  • Rubik's cubes:
    • Using Org Babel to learn Rubik's cube algorithms
• Streaming
• French, LLMs
• Speech: speech recognition, speech synthesis, hybrid speech interfaces
  • M-x doctor demonstration
  • Emacs Carnival Oct 2026: Exploring keys and voice input in Emacs

Large language models and artificial intelligence

linkarzu mentioned wanting to talk about artificial intelligence. I don't know nearly as much as lots of other people do. Maybe I can just share the things that I've been experimenting with, and also what I care about from a community perspective. I would like to help figure out how to deal with this turbulence and come out the other side happier.

Text from sketch

Large language models and other things 2026-10-24-02

• Y'all know much more than I do. You have more at stake.
• Me: tiny steps, using it for tightly scoped tools
  • grammar/fixing literal translations, explanations
  • troubleshooting
  • prototypes (ex: Python servers)
• Next:
  • help people who want to connect and experiment
    • human-focused
    • LLM-assisted (only if you want)
• Keep exploring what I'm curious about: experiments > hype
• Yay:
  • more people learning about and customizing things
  • more capable local models
  • adding up fragments of time
• Boo:
  • flood of slop, "content", spam
  • overwhelmed developers
  • centralization
  • polarization
  • externalized costs
  • non-deterministic

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Earlier this week I had a coaching session with Protesilaos, where we focused on health and wellness. I took some notes during our call, which I expand on here, and share with Prot's permission. I've been paying more serious attention to my health this year, and our discussion was in the context of me striving to live a healthier life. These notes are shared in the hope of being useful and are not professional advice; for medical advice please consult a licensed physician.

Update 24 October 2026: Prot published a note about our discussion on his website: Healthier lifestyle with Amin Bandali

Life in today's fast-paced world can feel busier than ever, where every day is packed with a myriad of activities and tasks that need to be done, or tempting distractions that pop up seemingly randomly, with hardly a moment to spare. Despite that, or perhaps because of that, it's worthwhile to make time for ourselves and the various aspects of our health.

As embodied souls, our bodies condition our minds. We take care of our body so we can take care of our mind. As humans we evolved for an active lifestyle out of survival necessity. In today's society many of us have sedentary office jobs that involve sitting for long periods of time. It's especially important that we try and make time for some regular physical activity like exercising and resistance training, to help build and retain muscle mass and mobility as we age. Fitness does not have to be the end goal that takes over our life, though there is nothing wrong with that if fitness is one's central goal e.g. as a personal trainer. Rather, for someone like me with other primary goals, my reason to exercise is to help live a healthier life, so I could spend quality time with my loved ones and carry out my responsibilities with a healthy body and mind.

Prot mentioned that our health is directly dependent on the following four factors:

• what we eat;
• what we drink;
• what we breathe; and
• what we think.

Thus compromising any of these - for example, eating greasy food or drinking alcohol - would undermine the gains from exercising.

While pursuing fitness, it's important to have sustained effort so that the body remains active and the mind is not distracted, and equally important to have sustainable effort so that we don't suffer injuries and not make the pursuit of fitness burdensome financially.

Calisthenics is a key part of the strength training activities Prot practices, in addition to the physically intensive work he does on his land.

Calisthenics [...] is a form of strength training that utilizes an individual's body weight as resistance to perform multi-joint, compound movements with little or no equipment. Calisthenics are popular for their convenience, as they require little to no equipment and can be performed anywhere.

— Calisthenics, Wikipedia

Calisthenics can be done progressively, starting small and building in intensity and duration over time. It is also economically/financially sustainable. These calisthenic exercises are a good starting point (barring existing injuries in the related areas):

• push-ups - easier version: at an angle or against the wall;
• pull-ups - easier version: at an angle e.g. using door frame;
• squats - easier version: don't squat all the way down; and
• sit-ups.

Aim to perform each exercise in 3 sets of 10 repetitions, but it's perfectly okay to start with fewer and gradually build up. The exercises should be done around the same time everyday, so that there is enough time for the muscles to rest and recover for the next day. Doing them at night then again the next morning, for instance, would be too short of a time period and not enough for the body to recover. It's also vital to get enough sleep each night to make sure the body can properly rest and be energized the next day.

As mentioned earlier, it's crucial to pair exercise with a healthy diet. I found Prot's programming metaphor for food interesting: similar to how it takes more time and effort for us to process and understand complex source code, breaking down and processing complex foods is similarly more difficult for the body. Prot does not eat fried food, and recommends avoiding sauces as much as possible: greasy, salty, and creamy extras make food more irresistible. They tend to make one want to eat more than what the body needs, and are to be avoided in isolation but especially in combination. In keeping ingredients close to their natural states, not overdoing things, and not eating more than the body needs, Prot extends his philosophy of simplicity and moderation to cooking.

In addition to eating healthy meals, we need to apply similar consideration to snacks: avoiding overly salty or sugary snacks, and choosing healthier ones. Nuts can make great snacks in small quantities, especially almonds and walnuts, if one's not allergic.

In addition to the inherent healthiness of the food or snack, Prot also suggests paying attention to methods of preparation. For instance, regarding concentration or distillation: juices, even when freshly squeezed from fruits, might have more of the fruits' sugar than its pulp and other beneficial parts. Additionally, chewing triggers biological responses in our body which for example can reduce stress, and release satiety hormones to help avoid overeating. So, Prot suggests to just eat the fruits themselves.

Regarding weight loss, it will occur naturally as we introduce exercise into our routine, and pay closer attention to what we eat and drink. It's important to lose the weight slowly to condition our body to the new reality as it changes. Shortcuts tend to either not work, or have negative consequences. By going through the process slowly and with regularity, we gradually retrain our muscle memories and adjust our habits so we can maintain the lower weight and the healthier lifestyle. Regularity is key: it's better do a little everyday, than do a lot on only two days. It helps us develop the attitude that the exercise is part of our regular effort that we do consistently all the time.

Working on wellness and living healthier is a matter of moderation, and building capacity over time. I will give it the time and attention it needs, without rushing, and enjoy the journey to becoming a healthier version of myself.

Take care, and so long for now.

This month’s Emacs Asia-Pacific (APAC) virtual meetup is scheduled for Saturday, October 24, 2026 with BigBlueButton and #emacs on Libera Chat IRC. The timing will be 1400 to 1500 IST.

The meetup might get extended by 30 minutes if there is any talk, this page will be updated accordingly.

If you would like to give a demo or talk (maximum 20 minutes) on GNU Emacs or any variant, please contact bhavin192 on Libera Chat with your talk details:

Sacha Chua has a really nice post on dictating into Emacs. She starts by quoting Matt Weber on how he writes better than he speaks. Chua can relate and so can I. We both feel the same way. As I’ve said before, “…my written thoughts are always much better organized than my spoken ones…”.

Being who she is, Chua resolved to fix this by arranging to dictate her posts into Emacs. As you can imagine, she encountered all sorts of problems along the way but was mainly able to find solutions for them. You can check her post—and Weber’s—to see how they’re doing that.

When I read Chua’s post, I thought, “maybe I should do that too” but then I realized that I don’t want to dictate my text. The truth is, I enjoy writing a lot more than I do speaking and I especially enjoy writing with Emacs. Although it’s not always obvious, I do a lot of revising on my posts as I write them and I usually try to make a final editing pass at least one day after I’ve written them. Speaking, on the other hands, feels more like “one and done” to me. I know that I could dictate a post and then edit the result but it’s not the same. And in any event, as I say, I enjoy writing a lot more than I enjoy talking.

I suppose, as Chua says, the day may come when ever encroaching old age, disease, or accident may make typing hard or impossible and I may be forced to consider dictation but until then, I’m happy to continue typing my text.

Matt is experimenting with dictating his blog posts. He says:

I write really well. I have very good grammatical skills, for the most part, when I’m typing. But when I speak, I don’t speak like that. My grammar is not very good. I say words out of order a lot. I have filler words. And I say things that don’t make any sense.

This is totally me too! It's one of the reasons why I want to get used to dictation, because it'll give me a lot more practice in saying things, which can only help when I'm making videos or talking to people.

While I’m talking, the text that’s outputted has no punctuation or paragraphs or anything like that.

Oh yeah, no, that's mostly a matter of picking the right speech recognition engine. For example, I'm using a local instance of Orukeet, and it seems to do a reasonable job of dividing my thoughts into properly-capitalized and punctuated sentences in both English and French. In fact, I have some code in Emacs that wraps it to one sentence per line (as part of sacha-whisper-insert which uses sachac/whisper.el). This allows me to use Org shortcuts to move lines around in order to reorganize them into something that makes more sense.

Some people use large language models to clean up raw transcripts and remove false starts or filler words. I don't quite trust large language models to leave my wording alone. I have some code that uses replace-regexp-in-string to take out some of my filler words and fix commonly misrecognized words that I've saved with substitute.el.

I'm not sure if I was ever any good at multitasking, but nowadays at 43 years old, I find that talking and typing at the same time has gotten a little bit harder for me. I type much more slowly if I want to narrate things at the same time, like when I'm recording a video or live streaming. When I'm just thinking on my own, I type quickly enough that my computer sometimes jumbles the keystrokes up because it doesn't handle keyboard interrupts well when it's busy. It's not just my fingers; it sometimes happens even when I was trying to use wdotool to simulate typing. Speech recognition is surprisingly reliable, even though I have to correct it from time to time. The broad strokes are there, and I save the recordings so that I can fix misrecognized words.

I also love the way that speech recognition opens up so many more possibilities for commands I would never be able to memorize keyboard shortcuts for. "Remind me today to…" is now one of my favourite ways to capture an Org Mode task.

Besides, I think it's a good idea to plan ahead just in case I can't type very well in the future. All sorts of things can happen: accidents, disease, old age. I wrote about that a bit more in Emacs Carnival Oct 2026: Exploring keys and voice input in Emacs.

All that to say: exciting times ahead. I think it would be pretty amazing if this sort of thing allows more people to write and share. Looking forward to reading (and possibly listening to) what people have been learning about!

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

I've just made a very small update to blogmore.el to fix a small bug, and also to update some deprecated code.

The blogmore-new command inserts the result of expanding a template into the buffer when making a new post, and I've not touched that template since I started writing blogmore.el. This includes not updating it when I switched much of the frontmatter-handling code over to proper YAML parsing. The problem here was that the title didn't get quotes around it, which became an issue if there was something like a : in the title; any subsequent attempt to modify frontmatter properties would throw an error.

So this release ensures that the title and the date get quoted right away. I guess, at some point, I should rework this code so that it uses the frontmatter-handling code to set up those properties and, instead, just uses the template for the main body.

I've also changed all uses of things like when-let and if-let to use when-let* and if-let*. It seems that, as of Emacs 31.1, the former are deprecated.

As you all know by now, I really hate being spied on by web sites and other on-line entities. I’m pretty sure this misbehavior won’t be legal much longer but I’m equally sure that the on-line advertising industry won’t go gentle into that good night and will find ways to nibble around the edges of whatever laws get passed.

Happily, there’s Magic Lasso which pretty much solves the problem for Safari users. That would be the end of the story except that I use XWidgets with mu4e to read HTML emails and Elfeed entries through the wonderful elfeed-webkit. They work nicely but now Magic Lasso is no longer filtering their content so cookies and trackers are being accumulated. For the longest time I couldn’t find where they were being stored. I finally stumbled on its location and discovered that it was a simple text file that could simply be deleted.

The problem was that I had to remember to do it and more specifically, where the file was located. I finally stopped being stupid and wrote a simple function to delete the file:

(defun jcs-kill-cookies ()
  "Delete the cookies from Webkit"
  (interactive)
  (delete-file ".emacs.d/url/cookies")
  (message "Cookies deleted."))

It’s almost too simple to bother showing.

While I was at it, I also called jcs-kill-cookies when I quit elfeed so I don’t have to remember to do it manually. All of this is trivial, of course, but it’s another example of sanding down your workflow to make it as simple as possible. Now things pretty much take care of themselves. I suppose I should figure out a way to delete cookies after email too but for now I’m happy that the problem is mostly solved.

At work, I write my documentation with Org Mode and then export it into Confluence using a space-ID and a parent page ID. Both values depend on the customer to whom the documentation refers. Instead of creating every documents from scratch, I was searching for something which supports me by providing a task-specific template. I also needed a solution to automatically set customer-related properties in the template. Once I learned about Org-Capture, I created a template that asks me for a customer and sets any customer-related value in my template automatically. Because Org-Capture templates support the evaluation of Elisp, extending them is only limited by your Elisp skills 😃.

One of the things I especially enjoy about Emacs is that there’s always something new to discover as Capture, a feature for quickly create notes without leaving the current context. Assuming you are taking notes during a project meeting and want to create a new TODO according to a new project tasks - Where to put your new task? Instead of thinking about the target for your TODO, you can call M--x org-capture, fill the template and Capture stores the TODO in a file set in org-capture-templates. The main benefit for me is that I don’t have to worry about where my new note will end up while I’m working on something else, like a meeting.

With Capture Emacs provides a powerful template generator which provides a lot of expansion to set values automatically. One expansion is %^{PROMPT|Default|Some Value} which prompts you to select one of the provided values and replaces the expansion by it. If you leave the input empty, Capture replaces the expansion with the first value (Default). Because the value is not stored, I needed something else to meet my requirements.

During my investigation I discovered a blog post Org Capture Tricks of David Zuber who extended his templates with Elisp functions to store values in variables which can be used within the template. Thanks to this knowledge and the capabilities of Capture, I was able to create a template for all my documentation needs.

In this post I’d like to introduce you to Org Capture and share how I solved my problem.

Testing Environment

This guide was tested with the following software:

• Emacs 30.2
• Org Mode 9.7.11

Setup and Usage

Let’s start by adding the following snippets into your init.el:

As default Capture stores your file in ~/org. To store your notes created by Capture in a dedicated directory replace the default value of org-directory as follows.

(setq org-directory "~/Documents/Workbench/org-files")

The following code adds an entry in the menu after executing M-x org-capture.

(setq org-capture-templates
 '(("t" "Todo" entry (file "todo.org") "* TODO %?\n %i\n %a")))

Alongside file Capture supports many other targets such as file+headline to create your note in a dedicated tree. For further details please refer to Org Manual - Template Elements.

(setq org-capture-templates
 '(("t" "Todo" entry (file+headline "todo.org" "Header1") "* TODO %?\n %i\n %a")))

To apply the change run M-x eval-buffer or M-x restart-emacs.

To create your first note enter M-x org-capture and select the new template. Once you entered C-c C-c to save your task, Capture creates todo.org in ~org-directory_. Instead of saving your new TODO in a file, you can execute org-refile with C-c C-w to move your entry to a dedicated heading. Without any adjustments in your Emacs config, you can only use todo.org as refile targets.

To add new refile targets, you may add them into org-refile-targets as follows. Each entry of org-refile-targets starts with a specification of the files which shall be considered, following how to find refile targets within these files. The next code block adds the current buffer (nil), org-agenda-files and an absolute file path as refile targets. Each :maxlevel . N limits the search scope within the target to headings up to level N.

(setq org-refile-targets
 '((nil :maxlevel . 4) (org-agenda-files :maxlevel . 3) (("~/Dokumente/Emacs-Test/org-files/test.org") :maxlevel . 2)))

If you are curious about Refile, you should check out its documentation (Emacsdocs - Refile and Copy) or one of the various blog posts which are covering many details, such as Organizing Notes With Refile by Arron Bieber.

Once you know how to use Capture, we can go ahead and create our template.

Extending Capture with Elisp

Assuming you want to create a template to document a customer environment. This documentation shall include the database management system and another file loaded by the template.

Firstly add a new entry into org-capture-templates.

• (here) sets the cursor position as target.

(setq org-capture-templates
 '(("t" "Todo" entry (file+headline "todo.org" "Tasks") "* TODO %?\n %i\n %a")
 ("s" "My New Template" entry (here) (file "my_new_template"))))

Then create the template in org-directory.

* Site Documentation %(ms/set-var "Set project" 'project '("PR1" "PR2")) %^G
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOMER: %(ms/get-customer project)
:END:

Site location: %^{Host Location|Cloud|On-Premise|Hybrid}

Database: %(ms/set-var "RDBMS" 'rdbms '("PostgreSQL" "MSSQL" "Oracle"))
Database port: %(ms/get-db-port rdbms)

#+begin_src bash
%[~/Dokumente/Emacs-Test/org-files/script.sh]
#+end_src

%?

• %(EXP) evaluates an Elisp expressions and replace it with the result. We will use it later to call our functions.
• %^G prompt for tags, with completion all tags in all agenda files.
• %^{PROMPT|A|B|C} prompts you to select A, B or C with A as default value.
• %[FILE] loads content from a file. Expansion in the file are resolved after the file has been loaded.
• %? sets the cursor after you have completed the template.

To get a full list of possible % placeholders you should visit orgmode.org -Template Expansion.

To demonstrate the usage of variables in the included files, we create a simple script that is loaded by the template which assigns the selected project to VAR1.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
VAR1=project

Next create an Elip script including the functions called in the template:

• ms/get-customer returns CUST1 or CUST2 depending on project.
• ms/get-db-port returns a port depending on the value of rdbms.
• ms/set-var prompts the user to choose one of the entries in options and assign the selected value to variable. options is a list passed to the function.

;;; org-capture-summary-tools.el --- Collection of functions loaded in config.org
;;; Commentary: Adapted from https://storax.github.io/blog/2016/05/02/org-capture-tricks/
;;; Code:
(defun ms/get-customer (project)
 "Return Customer according to PROJECT."
 (if (equal (downcase project) "PR1")
 (message "CUST1")
 (message "CUST2")))

(defun ms/get-db-port (rdbms)
 "Return Confluence parent page id according to RDBMS."
 (cond
 ((equal (downcase rdbms) "postgresql") (message "5432"))
 ((equal (downcase rdbms) "mssql") (message "1433"))
 ((equal (downcase rdbms) "oracle") (message "1521"))))

(defun ms/set-var (prompt variable options)
 "PROMPT for one of OPTIONS, save it to VARIABLE and insert it."
 (make-local-variable variable)
 ;; COLLECTION (2nd argument): Gets options as a list of strings.
 ;; REQUIRE-MATCH (4th argument): Set to non-nil (t) to force user input.
 ;; DEF (7th argument): Returns first element of list as default.
 (set variable (completing-read (concat prompt ": ") options nil t nil nil (car options))))

Finally load org-capture-summary-tools.el in init.el and run M--x eval-buffer to make its content callable within our template.

(setq capture-tools (concat user-emacs-directory "packages/custom/org-capture-summary-tools.el"))
(load capture-tools)

Now we can test our new template. For this call M--x org-capture, select it with s and enter the values in the user prompts. The next codeblock contains the buffer content after entered PR1 as project, PostgreSQL as database, Cloud as site location and TAG1 as tag.

* Site Documentation PR1  :TAG1:
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOMER: CUST2
:END:

Site location: Cloud

Database: PostgreSQL
Database port: 5432

#+begin_src bash
#!/usr/bin/env bash

VAR1=project

#+end_src

Finally, you can either save your buffer as a new heading at the cursor position or move it elsewhere entering C-c C-w.

Conclusion

After we discovered the basic usage of Capture we created a template including prompts to set multiple values based on a single prompt. With the capabilities of Capture in relation with Elisp you have anything you need to adapt the template to your personal requirements.

Thank you for your attention. I hope if this article helps you and wish you every success with your projects.

Randy Ridenour has an interesting post about debugging your init file. The main problem, he says, is that he sometimes makes a change that results in unbalanced parentheses. Often he doesn’t discover this until the next time he reboots Emacs, something he doesn’t do often.

He says that his usual method for finding the problem was to do what amounts to a binary search on his init file: He comments out half the init file. If the problem occurs, he repeats the process with the commented potion; otherwise he continues with the uncommented half. But then he discovered the built-in function check-parens that checks for unbalanced delimiters in the current buffer. That’s a nifty solution to Ridenour’s problem that I didn’t know about. Another tool in the toolbox.

The other thing about his post is that it reminded me of a package I wrote about in 2015 from Artur Malabarba: elisp-bug-hunter. I haven’t used it in a while but every time I do, it works perfectly and invariably finds the error often without any further action. What it does is automate the binary search that Ridenour used to hunt down his unbalanced parentheses but it works for any problem.

If the problem throws an error, elisp-bug-hunter will find it without any user input but for more complicated situations, you can specify a predicate to indicate whether the current run succeeded or not. I load it early in my init so it will be available if there is a problem.

So the take away from this post is two really useful debugging tools: check-parens for finding unbalanced delimiters and elisp-debug-hunter. Everyone should know these tools.

People say that language is for communication, and every day Hacker News proves these people wrong.

I mean, it’s not just Hacker News, but it’s the place I encounter this phenomenon most often: Somebody will be discussing something, and then somebody else will respond with a short sentence that’s mostly acronyms.

The fascinating thing about these responses is that if you know what the acronyms mean, then what’s being stated is often trivial (i.e., something that everybody who knows what those acronyms mean already knows). And if you don’t know what the acronyms mean, then the sentence is completely opaque.

(Often seen, for instance, when discussing network issues, and somebody responds with an alphabet soup involving acronyms like “BGP”, “AP”, “BMP” and “FRX”.)

So these utterances function two ways: For the people who’re on the “inside”, they’re saying “I know this stuff, like you other smart people…”. For the people who’re on the outside, this expresses “… and you’re a moron”.

I guess that’s a form of communication after all.

But for fun, I just whipped up a new command for Emacs called shr-etla (for obvious reasons) and put it on Microsoft Github. Here we have it in action on a totally random Hacker News comment:

It works by sending the paragraph over to an LLM, and it also tells the LLM what web site it came from. This context is vital, because many abbreviations expand to many, many things, and the LLM needs to know what kind of person it’s trying to decode.

(Googling for abbreviations is usually pretty useless — 74% of the time you get a bunch of other meanings; usually an American company or other that’s been SEO-ing the results. (“SEO” means “Search Engine Optimisation”, which is a form of terrorism.)

Of course, all of this doesn’t help much in many cases:

I guess!?

(caveat accipiens — like all things involving LLMs, this Emacs command is just a toy. The LLM has been instructed to return JSON with the results, and it does so in 99% of the cases, but in some cases it’ll return something else, and then you just have to run the command again. Or it’ll have done something else, like translate things into Kyrgyz; who knows? But that’s just part of the fun.)

I usually write my posts the evening before I publish them but yesterday, as they say, life intervened. I went to a wedding and by the time I got home it was too late and I was too tired to concentrate on writing a post. Therefore, I’m writing this the next morning so things are a bit rushed.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has an interesting problem whose solution is harder than you think it would be. The problem is pretty simple: Every Sunday morning when he writes his weekly review, he needs to update all the clock tables in his journal. That usually takes about a minute and mbork had the idea that he could use an idle timer to run the update. Specifically, he reasoned that if Emacs were idle for a minute it probably meant that he was otherwise engaged and that Emacs would be idle for another minute so why not fire off his update?

Of course, he wanted to do this only once a week on Sundays so it was a bit more complex than just setting the idle timer. He came up with the idea of setting a (normal) timer for 3 AM on Sunday that would set the idle timer. That didn’t quite work because of a technical issue but he got things working with yet another timer.

You should read his post for the details. His solution is interesting and shows that sometimes even simple things can be harder than we imagined.

It’s been a month since I first plugged my Glove80 into Hedwig and started using it, so I thought it was time for a follow-up.

First things first: this keyboard is the most comfortable thing I’ve ever typed on, to the point that I cringe now when I place my fingers on a regular keyboard in the office. If I wasn’t a keyboard snob earlier with my Kinesis, I definitely am now.

It’s not just the ergonomics, which I will get to below. I didn’t realize how important the switches are. I thought I’d miss the clicky sound and feel of my old brown switches, and sometimes I do for a moment, but it’s only for a few seconds. A whole morning of typing in Emacs? Nah. The Cherry Blossom switches that come with this keyboard are a pleasure to work with. They’re not only silent, but also super easy to press. It’s like whispering to my keyboard instead of shouting at it.

The real reason I ended up with the Glove80 was my RSI, and I’m happy to say it’s gone. That’s probably why 90% of people buy a keyboard that looks “crazy” like this one in the first place. Having the two halves separate also makes my shoulders and arms feel better. The keyboard parts are very light, so rotating them a bit into a slight “V” to fit the natural angle of my arms and wrists is automatic as I move around a bit, especially when I stand at my desk. With the Kinesis, which is much heavier and bulkier, this was a whole thing, not to mention the cables that ended up tangling around my coffee cup in the morning. This is much better.

Another important factor is the keywells. My fingers fit into those as soon as I took the keyboard out of the box. I know the keywells aren’t specific to the Glove80, but it was the first time I experienced them, and it makes you wonder why they don’t exist on all keyboards. It also helps you find the right position instantly. The palm rests fit, the slight height differences in the wells tell your pinkies where they should go, the thumbs naturally extend to the thumb row… it all felt right the second I placed my hands on the Glove80, and a month later it’s jarring not to have this when I switch to another keyboard.

This brings me to the key positions and the columnar layout, which was (and still is, to an extent) the hardest part to get used to. For the most part, the regular keys for QWERTY typing work. The issue is more with the function keys in their factory settings and the conflict, in my case, with what Emacs wants me to use. I’m mostly used to the common shortcuts now, but my right hand still does most of the work with the left Ctrl, and I have to consciously force myself to use the right Ctrl key for keys on the left half (like x or s) and vice versa¹.

The main issue I have with the keyboard now is gaming. This keyboard isn’t meant for WASD (see the layout in the picture below), which is hard-coded into any gamer’s DNA. For now, I switch back to the Kinesis when I play any action games. I could probably just create another layer for gaming, shifting the keys to maybe RDFG, but that’s just weird. Besides, games are more in the keyboard shouting category than the whispering one.

Other small annoyances… let’s see.

The legs of this keyboard. They are essentially screws with pads (the “boot” of the leg), and even though I use the nuts and rubber rings that came with the keyboard — which do help — the screws still move a bit from time to time, which results in the keyboard being a bit wobbly. It doesn’t happen often, and it takes a few seconds to fix, but I feel like there needs to be a better solution. I like to use a high tented angle with my Glove80, which means that when I want to use the case to take the keyboard somewhere, I have to unscrew the two long legs — the ones under the thumb rows — so they fit in the case, and then screw them back in and tighten them, which means I’m avoiding taking it with me, which is a shame. Here’s what these look like up close:

Two more nitpicky things: switching back to the Kinesis is actually confusing now, which I didn’t expect. I now type worse on the Kinesis than I used to. Not exactly bad, when you think about it: the whole point was to move away from standard keyboards, but the world still runs on the old standard. I now expect to find common function keys under my thumbs (where they should be!), but they aren’t, and that leads to typos at work because I don’t take the keyboard with me as I mentioned above. I’m fine on my laptop keyboard though; I guess it’s different enough from the Glove80 that my hands register it as a whole different mode and don’t get confused.

The other tiny small thing is not the keyboard’s fault at all: hard drive password at boot on Linux. There’s no Bluetooth at boot (it’s locked behind the encryption if you encrypt your hard drive), so I need to physically plug it in with the USB. This is a tiny little thing, but I find that passwords in general are frozen in my finger memory, and I have to watch myself type them now to get them right. The solution here is probably using new passwords that will work with this keyboard — which in turn means I will have the reverse problem when I can’t use this keyboard.

All in all though, this keyboard is fantastic. A few more months, and I’m sure I’ll incorporate more tricks to help with some of the issues I described above. I’m glad I got it. It didn’t just resolve my RSI issues, but it’s also making me a better typist in general.

I live in Emacs, and usually only restart it when absolutely necessary. When I do restart, I occasionally get the dreaded message that there’s something wrong with my init file. I’m then prompted to start with the --debug-init switch, which I rarely find helpful. It’s been my experience that the error is often from having unbalanced parens somewhere, and I’ve always found them by brute force—commenting out half of the file, restarting, commenting out another half, restarting, etc. This is a tedious job with an init file that is thousands of lines long.

Recently, I stumbled on the check-parens function. Run it from the beginning of the buffer, and it will stop at the outermost open paren that contains the error. I don’t know how many hours this would have saved me in the past, but better late than never.

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKGf3lP6eRQ

[ The stream will be recorded. You can watch it later. ]

Today, Saturday, 17 October 2026, at 14:30 Europe/Athens, I will work on my modus-themes for Emacs.

About a year ago I turned them into a framework that theme developers can rely on. Lots of themes have been built on top of Modus since then.

What I want to do this year is extract the core Modus that other themes need into its own library. This way, we can have a separation of concerns between what is the framework proper and what are modus-themes (modus-operandi, modus-vivendi, etc.).

I expect to work on this for 3 hours or more.

I will have the chat open in case someone has a question about what I am programming or ANYTHING else they might want to ask me.

🔷 Consider making a donation.

Years ago when I first starting using Emacs seriously, one of my go to sites for inspiration and ideas was Dirk-Jan C. Binnema’s EMACS-FU. He always had good ideas, not the least of which is the wonderful email client mu4e that I and many others are still using today. Thirteen years ago, Binnema stopped blogging although his site was still active. Despite the fact that he was not blogging he was working on mu/mu4e and other projects.

Now, after all those years, he’s published another post on EMACS-FU. This times it’s about his just released new version (1.14.4) of mu4e. Most of the post is concerned with the mu4e changes in the latest release. A (very) broad summary of these changes are:

• Some enhancements in support of the Inbox Zero concept
• Support for MIME type icons
• Completion
• Language detection
• Attachment in replies
• Enhanced support for HTML messages
• Enhanced desktop notifications

By far the most exciting news for me is about Binnema’s work on xwidgets. As most of you probably know, Emacs’ support of xwidgets has been broken for a while because of changes to the xwidgets library that removed a feature that Emacs depended on. Binnema has fixed that so now (as of Emacs 31.1) Emacs can support up-to-date xwidgets libraries again. That’s a real boon for me because I use xwidgets for both email in mu4e and for Elfeed.

In any event, I’m thrilled to see Binnema’s return even if it amounts to no more than a visit. I do hope, however, that I won’t have to wait 13 years for his next post.