I like using the orderless completion package for Emacs because it allows me to specify different parts of a completion candidate than any order I want. Because I'm learning French, I want commands like consult-line (which uses minibuffer completion) and completion-at-point (which uses in-buffer completion) to also match candidates where the words might have accented characters. For example, instead of having to type "utilisé" with the accented é, I want to type "utilise" and have it match both "utilise" and "utilisé".

(defvar my-orderless-accent-replacements
  '(("a" . "[aàáâãäå]")
    ("e" . "[eèéêë]")
    ("i" . "[iìíîï]")
    ("o" . "[oòóôõöœ]")
    ("u" . "[uùúûü]")
    ("c" . "[cç]")
    ("n" . "[nñ]"))) ; in case anyone needs ñ for Spanish

(defun my-orderless-accent-dispatch (pattern &rest _)
  (seq-reduce
   (lambda (prev val)
     (replace-regexp-in-string (car val) (cdr val) prev))
   my-orderless-accent-replacements
   pattern))

(use-package orderless
  :custom
  (completion-styles '(orderless basic))
  (completion-category-overrides '((file (styles basic partial-completion))))
  (orderless-style-dispatchers '(my-orderless-accent-dispatch orderless-affix-dispatch)))

This is an entry for Emacs Carnival February 2026: Completion.

You can comment on Mastodon or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

At this week's Emacs Berlin meetup, someone wanted to know how to change the order of completion candidates. Specifically, they wanted to list the top level Org Mode headings before the second level headings and so on. They were using org-ql to navigate Org headings, but since org-ql sorts its candidates by the number of matches according to the code in the org-ql-completing-read function, I wasn't quite sure how to get it to do what they wanted. (And I realized my org-ql setup was broken, so I couldn't fiddle with it live. Edit: Turns out I needed to update the peg package) Instead, I showed folks consult-org-heading which is part of the Consult package, which I like to use to jump around the headings in a single Org file. It's a short function that's easy to use as a starting point for something custom.

Here's some code that allows you to use consult-org-heading to jump to an Org heading in the current file with completions sorted by level.

(with-eval-after-load 'consult-org
  (advice-add
   #'consult-org--headings
   :filter-return
   (lambda (candidates)
     (sort candidates
           :lessp
           (lambda (a b)
             (let ((level-a (car (get-text-property 0 'consult-org--heading a)))
                   (level-b (car (get-text-property 0 'consult-org--heading b))))
               (cond
                ((< level-a level-b) t)
                ((< level-b level-a) nil)
                (t nil))))))))

My previous approach defined a different function based on consult-org-heading, but using the advice feels a little cleaner because it will also make it work for any other function that uses consult-org--headings.

I also wanted to get this to work for C-u org-refile, which uses org-refile-get-location. This is a little trickier because the table of completion candidates is a list of cons cells that don't store the level, and it doesn't pass the metadata to completing-read to tell it not to re-sort the results. We'll just fake it by counting the number of "/", which is the path separator used if org-outline-path-complete-in-steps is set to nil.

(with-eval-after-load 'org
  (advice-add
   'org-refile-get-location
   :around
   (lambda (fn &rest args)
     (let ((completion-extra-properties
            '(:display-sort-function
              (lambda (candidates)
                (sort candidates
                      :key (lambda (s) (length (split-string s "/"))))))))
       (apply fn args)))))

In general, if you would like completion candidates to be in a certain order, you can specify display-sort-function either by calling completing-read with a collection that's a lambda function instead of a table of completion candidates, or by overriding it with completion-category-overrides if there's a category you can use or completion-extra-properties if not.

Here's a short example of passing a lambda to a completion function (thanks to Manuel Uberti):

(defun mu-date-at-point (date)
  "Insert current DATE at point via `completing-read'."
  (interactive
   (let* ((formats '("%Y%m%d" "%F" "%Y%m%d%H%M" "%Y-%m-%dT%T"))
          (vals (mapcar #'format-time-string formats))
          (opts
           (lambda (string pred action)
             (if (eq action 'metadata)
                 '(metadata (display-sort-function . identity))
               (complete-with-action action vals string pred)))))
     (list (completing-read "Insert date: " opts nil t))))
  (insert date))

If you use consult--read from the Consult completion framework, there is a :sort property that you can set to either nil or your own function.

This entry is part of the Emacs Carnival for Feb 2026: Completion.

You can comment on Mastodon or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Although many of us won’t admit it, we all enjoy a bit of nostalgia. Here’s some from 20 to 25 years ago. Kids today, they don’t know how good they have it. There’s a tendency to romance the “powerful” workstations from the turn of the century. I do the same thing with the Lisp Machines but I was there for those turn-of-the-century workstations and I can tell you from first hand experience that someone sitting in front of a run-of-the-mill laptop running Linux, FreeBSD , or even macOS is having a much better Unix/Emacs experience than the folks sitting in front of one of those old workstations had.

Nevertheless, nostalgia is strong and many would like to experience what it was like. Victor Larios is offering a trip on the tech time machine to experience what it was like back then. The “time machine” consists is a browser based recreation of the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) complete with the then popular XEmacs.

XEmacs was popular then mainly because Gnu Emacs was dragging its feet on adapting to the X Window system and it offered a better experience. I was a Vim user in those days so I can’t speak to its relative merits but all my Emacs-using colleagues were running it. GNU Emacs eventually caught up and surpassed the XEmacs implementation so XEmacs has pretty much faded into oblivion but it was state of the art back then.

In any event, if you sometimes have nostalgia pangs about the “old days” and would like to see was it was like, here’s an easy way to scratch the itch.

Good news, everyone – copilot.el 0.4 is out!

But that’s just the start of it. This is the most important release for me since I assumed the project’s leadership and I hope this article will manage to make you agree with my reasoning.

Enough empty words – let me now walk you through the highlights.

A Proper Copilot Client

The single biggest change in this release is the migration from the legacy getCompletions API (reverse-engineered from copilot.vim) to the standard textDocument/inlineCompletion LSP method provided by the official @github/copilot-language-server.

This might sound like a dry and boring internal change, but it’s actually a big deal. copilot.el started its life as a port of copilot.vim – we were essentially reverse-engineering how that plugin talked to the Copilot server and replicating it in Elisp. That worked, but it was fragile and meant we were always playing catch-up with undocumented protocol changes.

Now we speak the official LSP protocol. We send proper textDocument/didOpen, textDocument/didChange, and textDocument/didFocus notifications. We manage workspace folders. We handle server-to-client requests like window/showMessageRequest and window/showDocument. We perform a clean shutdown/exit sequence instead of just killing the process. In short, copilot.el is now a proper Copilot LSP client, not a reverse-engineered hack.

This release, in a way, completes the cycle – from a package born out of reverse engineering copilot.vim to a legitimate Copilot client built on the official API.¹

But wait, there’s (a lot) more!

AI Model Selection

You can now choose which AI model powers your completions via M-x copilot-select-completion-model. The command queries the server for available models on your subscription and lets you pick one interactively. The selection is persisted in copilot-completion-model.

Parentheses Balancer 2.0

The parentheses balancer – the component that post-processes completions in Lisp modes to fix unbalanced delimiters – got a complete rewrite. The old implementation counted parentheses as raw characters, which meant it would “balance” parens inside comments and strings where they shouldn’t be touched. The new implementation uses parse-partial-sexp to understand the actual syntactic structure, so it only fixes genuinely unbalanced delimiters.

Whether the balancer will remain necessary in the long run is an open question – as Copilot’s models get smarter, they produce fewer unbalanced completions. But for now it still catches enough edge cases to earn its keep. You can disable it with (setopt copilot-enable-parentheses-balancer nil) if you want to see how well the raw completions work for you.

Improved Server Communication

Beyond the core API migration, we’ve improved the server communication in several ways:

• Status reporting: didChangeStatus notifications show Copilot’s state (Normal, Warning, Error, Inactive) in the mode-line.
• Progress tracking: $/progress notifications display progress for long-running operations like indexing.
• Request cancellation: stale completion requests are cancelled with $/cancelRequest so the server doesn’t waste cycles on abandoned work.
• User-defined handlers: copilot-on-request and copilot-on-notification let you hook into any server message.
• UTF-16 positions: position offsets now correctly use UTF-16 code units, so emoji and other supplementary-plane characters no longer confuse the server.

Tests and Documentation

This release adds a proper test suite using buttercup. We went from zero tests to over 120, covering everything from URI generation and position calculation to the balancer, overlay management, and server lifecycle. CI now runs across multiple Emacs versions (27.2 through snapshot) and on macOS and Windows in addition to Linux.

The README got a (almost) complete rewrite – it now covers installation for every popular package manager, documents all commands and customization options, includes a protocol coverage table, and has a new FAQ section addressing the most common issues people run into. Plenty of good stuff in it!

This might sound like a lot of effort for not much user-visible payoff, but when I started hacking on the project:

• I really struggled to understand how to make the best use of the package
• The lack of tests made it hard to make significant changes, as every change felt quite risky

Anyways, I hope you’ll enjoy the improved documentation and you’ll have easier time setting up copilot.el.

Bug Fixes

Too many to list individually, but here are some highlights:

• copilot-complete now works without copilot-mode enabled (#450)
• Partial accept-by-word no longer loses trailing text when the server uses a replacement range (#448)
• JSON-RPC requests send an empty object instead of omitting params, fixing authentication on newer server versions (#445)
• The company-mode dependency is gone – no more void-function company--active-p errors (#243)
• The completion overlay plays nice with Emacs 30’s completion-preview-mode (#377)

See the full changelog for the complete list.

What’s Next

There’s still plenty of work ahead. We have three big feature branches in the pipeline, all open as PRs and ready for adventurous testers:

• Next Edit Suggestions (NES) – proactive edit suggestions that appear at your cursor based on your recent editing patterns, similar to the NES feature in VS Code.
• Copilot Chat – interactive chat with Copilot, right inside Emacs.
• Native installation without Node.js – use the pre-built Copilot language server binary instead of requiring a Node.js installation.

If any of these sound interesting to you, please give them a spin and report back. Your feedback is what shapes the next release.

Thanks

A big thanks to Paul Nelson for contributing several partial acceptance commands and the overlay clearing improvements – those are some of the most user-visible quality-of-life changes in this release. Thanks also to everyone who filed detailed bug reports and tested fixes – you know who you are, and this release wouldn’t be the same without you.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

For those of you following along, Emacs has been crashing on my Mac (but not on my Linux desktop) for a while, but it seemed too random to pinpoint. This led me into looking for the Darwin version in the Emacs build in Emacs for Mac OS (which was what I was using on my Mac), which was a couple of versions behind that of macOS itself.

I went ahead and attempted to use Emacs Plus from Homebrew, as most people commented. I haven’t noticed much of a difference, though personally I do prefer to use Emacs from Homebrew as I do with my other packages, so I stuck with it a bit longer.

Yesterday I encountered a stubborn crash in my journelly.org file. Journelly, which is basically a large org-file with pictures displayed in-line under some headers (you can get an idea of what Journelly is and how I use it here).

I took a picture of the snow outside with my iPhone using Journelly, which saved it to journelly.org with the image attached. On the Mac, every time I went to open the header, Emacs crashed, time after time. I just couldn’t edit that image. In a collapsed state for the header, where the image didn’t show, it was fine. On Linux, when I tried - fine. Oh, and before you ask - I tried this with emacs -Q, and yes, it crashed every single time as well.

The JPG image on my iPhone was a 7MB file with dimensions of 4284 x 5712. I knew from past experience that such large images slow down Emacs (on Linux too), so I shrunk it down to a 700kb file with dimensions of 604 x 640, and launched Emacs again. No problem. Everything was stable. I tried to load Emacs a few more times and it worked each time.

This was my hunch from the beginning - that something is up with images at least on the Mac, and this is proof enough for me. I don’t know exactly at what point Emacs crashes: is it a matter of how many images the org file has? How big are they? A combination of both? But I can tell you it seems to be more about the dimensions of the image in pixels than the file size. This is fine for me, for my journal, I don’t need large high-resolution images anyway; those are uploaded and displayed on my blog and elsewhere. It seems that some folks have encountered similar issues as well, from Reddit and elsewhere.

If you have similar issues and you’re fine with scaling down your images, a good solution is dwim-shell-commands-resize-image-in-pixels, part of the excellent dwim-shell-command package, which can quickly shrink down a large number of images from inside Emacs. I’m using it constantly.

I’ve been using Emacs for over 20 years and I still keep discovering (and rediscovering) comment-related commands and variables. You’d think that after two decades I’d have comments figured out, but it turns out there’s a surprising amount of depth hiding behind a few keybindings.

What prompted this article was my recent work on neocaml, a tree-sitter based major mode for OCaml. OCaml uses (* ... *) block comments – no line comments at all – and that unusual syntax forced me to dig deeper into how Emacs handles comments internally. I learned more about comment variables in the past few months than in the previous 20 years combined.

The Swiss Army Knife: M-;

I wrote about comment-dwim back in my Comment Commands Redux article, but I don’t think I did it justice. M-; is genuinely one of the most context-sensitive commands in Emacs. Here’s a breakdown of what it does depending on where you invoke it:

With an active region: It calls comment-region to comment out the selected code. But if the region already consists entirely of comments, it calls uncomment-region instead. So it’s effectively a toggle.¹

On an empty line: It inserts a comment (using comment-start and comment-end) and places point between the delimiters, properly indented.

On a line with code but no comment: It adds an end-of-line comment, indented to comment-column (default 32). This is the classic “inline comment” workflow – write your code, hit M-;, type your annotation.

On a line that already has an end-of-line comment: It jumps to that comment and reindents it. Pressing M-; again just keeps you there.

With a prefix argument (C-u M-;): It kills the first comment on the current line.

That’s five distinct behaviors from a single keybinding. No wonder people find it confusing at first. If you want something simpler, comment-line (C-x C-;, added in Emacs 25.1) just toggles comments on the current line or region – nothing more, nothing less.

Continuing Comments: M-j

I also wrote about M-j years ago in Continue a Comment on the Next Line. The command (comment-indent-new-line²) breaks the current line and continues the comment on the next line with proper indentation.

For languages with line comments (//, #, ;;), this works great out of the box – it just inserts the comment delimiter on the new line. But for languages with block comments like OCaml’s (* ... *), the default behavior is less helpful: it closes the current comment and opens a new one:

(* some text about something. *)
(* |

What you actually want is to continue the same comment:

(* some text about something.
   |

This is controlled by two variables that I suspect most people have never heard of:

• comment-multi-line – when non-nil, tells commands like M-j to continue the current comment rather than closing and reopening it.

• comment-line-break-function – the function that M-j actually calls to do its work. Major modes can set this to customize the line-breaking behavior inside comments.

In neocaml, I set comment-multi-line to t and provide a custom comment-line-break-function that uses tree-sitter to find the column where the comment body text starts, then indents the new line to match:

(setq-local comment-multi-line t)
(setq-local comment-line-break-function #'neocaml--comment-indent-new-line)

The implementation is straightforward – walk up the tree-sitter AST to find the enclosing comment node, compute the body column from the opening delimiter, and indent accordingly. Now M-j inside (** documentation *) produces a new line indented to align with the text after (**.

Filling Comments: M-q

While I was at it I also had to teach M-q (fill-paragraph) about OCaml comments. By default, fill-paragraph doesn’t know where a (* ... *) comment starts and ends, so it either does nothing useful or mangles things.

The fix was setting fill-paragraph-function to a custom function that uses tree-sitter to find the comment boundaries, narrows to the body text (excluding the (* and *) delimiters), and fills within that region. The fill prefix is computed from the body start column so continuation lines align properly:

(* This is a long comment that gets
   wrapped at the fill column, with
   continuation lines properly
   indented *)

The Comment Variable Zoo

Working on all of this made me realize just how many comment-related variables Emacs exposes for major modes to configure. Here are the ones I ended up caring about:

Most of these have sensible defaults for line-comment languages, which is why you can go 20 years without thinking about them. But the moment you deal with block comments, especially unusual ones like OCaml’s nested (* ... *), you discover the full machinery.

Closing Thoughts

I find it remarkable that after all these years Emacs can still surprise me. A handful of comment commands – M-;, M-j, M-q – and a set of buffer-local variables give you a comment editing experience that’s both powerful and deeply customizable. Most users never need to think about the underlying variables, but they’re there when you need them, and they compose nicely.

If you’re a major mode author, pay attention to these variables. Getting comments right is one of those things that users notice immediately when it breaks and never think about when it works.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

Time for a new Bending Emacs episode. This one is a follow-up to Episode 10, where we introduced agent-shell.

Bending Emacs Episode 12: agent-shell + Claude Skills

This time around, we explore Claude Skills and how to use them to teach agents Emacs tricks. I built a handful of skills packaged as a Claude Code plugin at github.com/xenodium/emacs-skills.

The skills use emacsclient --eval under the hood to bridge agent work to your running Emacs session:

• /dired - Open files from the latest interaction in a dired buffer with marks.
• /open - Open files in Emacs, jumping to a specific line when relevant.
• /select - Open a file and select the relevant region.
• /highlight - Highlight relevant regions across files with a temporary read-only minor mode.
• /describe - Look up Emacs documentation and summarize findings.
• emacsclient (auto) - Teaches the agent to always prefer emacsclient over emacs.

Hope you enjoyed the video!

Want more videos?

Liked the video? Please let me know. Got feedback? Leave me some comments.

Please go like my video, share with others, and subscribe to my channel.

As an indie dev, I now have a lot more flexibility to build Emacs tools and share knowledge, but it comes at the cost of not focusing on other activities that help pay the bills. If you benefit or enjoy my work please consider sponsoring the work.

Another short post today but one that some of you may find useful. Over at the Emacs subreddit, James Cherti offers a set of commit hooks for Elisp programmers. There are hooks that check for parenthesis consistency, byte compile to check for compile errors, native compile to check for errors, and even a hook to check for conformance to Elisp indentation conventions.

The project repository is here. It has a little more information on installing and using the hooks but essentially everything you need to know is in the reddit announcement.

If you’re an Elisp programmer and like to run some rudimentary checks before committing your work, you may find Cherti’s project useful. If, like me, you hate being constrained by arbitrary coding format conventions, you can choose to ignore the indentation checks. In any event, if you’re an Elisp programmer, you should take a look at Cherti’s post.

One of the things that has always slightly bothered me about chatting with a local LLM is that it only knows what it was trained on (although I suppose most LLMs are like that) . Ask it about your own codebase, your org notes, your project docs - and it’s just guessing. Well, not anymore! Ollama Buddy now ships with proper Retrieval Augmented Generation support built-in

What even is RAG?

If you haven’t come across the term before, the basic idea is simple. Instead of asking the LLM a question cold, you first go off and find the most relevant bits of text from your own documents, then you hand those bits to the LLM along with your question. The LLM now has actual context to work with rather than just vibes. The “retrieval” part is done using vector embeddings - each chunk of your documents gets turned into a mathematical representation, and at query time your question gets the same treatment. Chunks that are mathematically “close” to your question are the ones that get retrieved.

In this case, I have worked to keep the whole pipeline inside Emacs; it talks to Ollama directly to contact an embedding model, which then returns the required information. I have tried to make this as Emacs Org-friendly as possible by storing the embedding information in Org files.

Getting started

You’ll need an embedding model pulled alongside your chat model. The default is nomic-embed-text which is a solid general-purpose choice:

ollama pull nomic-embed-text

or just do it within ollama-buddy from the Model Management page.

Indexing your documents

The main entry point is M-x ollama-buddy-rag-index-directory. Point it at a directory and it will crawl through, chunk everything up, generate embeddings for each chunk, and save an index file. The first time you run this it can take a while depending on how much content you have and how fast your machine is - subsequent updates are much quicker as it only processes changed files.

Supported file types (and I even managed to get pdf text extraction working!):

• Emacs Lisp (.el)
• Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, Rust, C/C++, Java, Ruby - basically most languages
• Org-mode and Markdown
• Plain text
• PDF files (if you have pdftotext from poppler-utils installed)
• YAML, TOML, JSON, HTML, CSS

Files over 1MB are skipped (configurable), and the usual suspects like .git, node_modules, __pycache__ are excluded automatically.

The index gets saved into ~/.emacs.d/ollama-buddy/rag-indexes/ as a .rag file named after the directory. You can see what you’ve got with M-x ollama-buddy-rag-list-indexes.

The chunking strategy

One thing I’m quite happy with here is the chunking. Rather than just splitting on a fixed character count, documents are split into overlapping word-based chunks. The defaults are:

(setq ollama-buddy-rag-chunk-size 400) ; ~500 tokens per chunk
(setq ollama-buddy-rag-chunk-overlap 50) ; 50-word overlap between chunks

The overlap is important - it means a piece of information that sits right at a chunk boundary doesn’t get lost. Each chunk also tracks its source file and line numbers, so you can see exactly where a result came from.

Searching and attaching context

Once you have an index, there are two main ways to use it:

• M-x ollama-buddy-rag-search - searches and displays the results in a dedicated buffer so you can read through them

• M-x ollama-buddy-rag-attach - searches and attaches the results directly to your chat context

The second one is the useful one for day-to-day work. After running it, your next chat message will automatically include the retrieved document chunks as context. The status line shows ♁N (where N is the number of attached searches) so you always know what context is in play. Clear everything with M-x ollama-buddy-clear-attachments or C-c 0.

You can also trigger searches inline using the @rag() syntax directly in your prompt and is something fun I have been working on to include an inline command language of sorts, but more about that in a future post.

The similarity search uses cosine similarity with sensible defaults (hopefully!)

(setq ollama-buddy-rag-top-k 5) ; return top 5 matching chunks
(setq ollama-buddy-rag-similarity-threshold 0.3) ; filter out low-relevance results

Bump top-k if you want more context, lower the threshold if you’re not getting enough results.

A practical example

Say you’ve been working on a large Emacs package and you want the LLM to help you understand something specific. You’d do:

1. M-x ollama-buddy-rag-index-directory → point at your project directory
2. Wait for indexing to complete (the chat header-line shows progress)
3. M-x ollama-buddy-rag-attach → type your search query, e.g. “streaming filter process”
4. Ask your question in the chat buffer as normal

The LLM now has the relevant source chunks as context and can give you a much more grounded answer than it would cold.

And the important aspect, especially regarding local models which don’t often have the huge context sizes often found in online LLMs is that it allows for very efficient context retrieval.

That’s pretty much it!

The whole thing is self-contained inside Emacs, no external packages or vector databases, you index once, search as needed, and the LLM gets actual information rather than hallucinating answers about your codebase or anything else that you would want to ingest and it will hopefully make working with local LLMs through ollama noticeably more useful and accurate.

A few years ago I wrote about setting up Emacs for OCaml development. Back then the recommended stack was tuareg-mode + merlin-mode, with Merlin providing the bulk of the IDE experience. A lot has changed since then – the OCaml tooling has evolved considerably, and I’ve been working on some new tools myself. Time for an update.

The New Stack

Here’s what I recommend today:

• neocaml instead of tuareg-mode
• ocaml-eglot instead of merlin-mode
• Eglot (built into Emacs 29+) as the LSP client

The key shift is from Merlin’s custom protocol to LSP. ocaml-lsp-server has matured significantly since my original article – it’s no longer a thin wrapper around Merlin. It now offers project-wide renaming, semantic highlighting, Dune RPC integration, and OCaml-specific extensions like pattern match generation and typed holes. ocaml-eglot is a lightweight Emacs package by Tarides that bridges Eglot with these OCaml-specific LSP extensions, giving you the full Merlin feature set through a standardized protocol.

And neocaml is my own TreeSitter-powered OCaml major mode – modern, lean, and built for the LSP era. You can read more about it in the 0.1 release announcement.

The Essentials

First, install the server-side tools:

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$ opam install ocaml-lsp-server

You no longer need to install merlin separately – ocaml-lsp-server vendors it internally.

Then set up Emacs:

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;; Modern TreeSitter-powered OCaml major mode
(use-package neocaml
  :ensure t)

;; Major mode for editing Dune project files
(use-package dune
  :ensure t)

;; OCaml-specific LSP extensions via Eglot
(use-package ocaml-eglot
  :ensure t
  :hook (neocaml-mode . ocaml-eglot-setup))

That’s it. Eglot ships with Emacs 29+, so there’s nothing extra to install for the LSP client itself. When you open an OCaml file, Eglot will automatically start ocaml-lsp-server and you’ll have completion, type information, code navigation, diagnostics, and all the other goodies you’d expect.

Compare this to the old setup – no more merlin-mode, merlin-eldoc, flycheck-ocaml, or manual Company configuration. LSP handles all of it through a single, uniform interface.

The Toplevel

neocaml includes built-in REPL integration via neocaml-repl-minor-mode. The basics work well:

• C-c C-z – start or switch to the OCaml toplevel
• C-c C-c – send the current definition
• C-c C-r – send the selected region
• C-c C-b – send the entire buffer

If you want utop specifically, you’re still better off using utop.el alongside neocaml. Its main advantage is that you get code completion inside the utop REPL within Emacs – something neocaml’s built-in REPL integration doesn’t provide:

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(use-package utop
  :ensure t
  :hook (neocaml-mode . utop-minor-mode))

This will shadow neocaml’s REPL keybindings with utop’s, which is the intended behavior.

That said, as I’ve grown more comfortable with OCaml I find myself using the toplevel less and less. These days I rely more on a test-driven workflow – write a test, run it, iterate. In particular I’m partial to the workflow described in this OCaml Discuss thread – running dune runtest continuously and writing expect tests for quick feedback. It’s a more structured approach that scales better than REPL-driven development, especially as your projects grow.

Give neocaml a Try

If you’re an OCaml programmer using Emacs, I’d love for you to take neocaml for a spin. It’s available on MELPA, so getting started is just an M-x package-install away. The project is still young and I’m actively working on it – your feedback, bug reports, and pull requests are invaluable. Let me know what works, what doesn’t, and what you’d like to see next.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

Every now and then someone asks me how to learn Vim.¹ My answer is always the same: it’s simpler than you think, but it takes longer than you’d like. Here’s my bulletproof 3-step plan.

Step 1: Learn the Basics

Start with vimtutor – it ships with Vim and takes about 30 minutes. It’ll teach you enough to survive: moving around, editing text, saving, quitting. The essentials.

Once you’re past that, I strongly recommend Practical Vim by Drew Neil. This book changed the way I think about Vim. I had known the basics of Vim for over 20 years, but the Vim editing model never really clicked for me until I read it. The key insight is that Vim has a grammar – operators (verbs) combine with motions (nouns) to form commands. d (delete) + w (word) = dw. c (change) + i" (inside quotes) = ci". Once you internalize this composable language, you stop memorizing individual commands and start thinking in Vim. The book is structured as 121 self-contained tips rather than a linear tutorial, which makes it great for dipping in and out.

You could also just read :help cover to cover – Vim’s built-in documentation is excellent. But let’s be honest, few people have that kind of patience.

Other resources worth checking out:

• Advent of Vim – a playlist of short video tutorials covering basic Vim topics. Great for visual learners who prefer bite-sized lessons.
• ThePrimeagen’s Vim Fundamentals – if you prefer video content and a more energetic teaching style.
• vim-be-good – a Neovim plugin that gamifies Vim practice. Good for building muscle memory.

Step 2: Start Small

Resist the temptation to grab a massive Neovim distribution like LazyVim on day one. You’ll find it overwhelming if you don’t understand the basics and don’t know how the Vim/Neovim plugin ecosystem works. It’s like trying to drive a race car before you’ve learned how a clutch works.

Instead, start with a minimal configuration and grow it gradually. I wrote about this in detail in Build your .vimrc from Scratch – the short version is that modern Vim and Neovim ship with excellent defaults and you can get surprisingly far with a handful of settings.

I’m a tinkerer by nature. I like to understand how my tools operate at their fundamental level, and I always take that approach when learning something new. Building your config piece by piece means you understand every line in it, and when something breaks you know exactly where to look.

Step 3: Practice for 10 Years

I’m only half joking. Peter Norvig’s famous essay Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years makes the case that mastering any complex skill requires sustained, deliberate practice over a long period – not a weekend crash course. The same applies to Vim.

Grow your configuration one setting at a time. Learn Vimscript (or Lua if you’re on Neovim). Read other people’s configs. Maybe write a small plugin. Every month you’ll discover some built-in feature or clever trick that makes you wonder how you ever lived without it.

One of the reasons I chose Emacs over Vim back in the day was that I really hated Vimscript – it was a terrible language to write anything in. These days the situation is much better: Vim9 Script is a significant improvement, and Neovim’s switch to Lua makes building configs and plugins genuinely enjoyable.

Mastering an editor like Vim is a lifelong journey. Then again, the way things are going with LLM-assisted coding, maybe you should think long and hard about whether you want to commit your life to learning an editor when half the industry is “programming” without one. But that’s a rant for another day.

Plan B

If this bulletproof plan doesn’t work out for you, there’s always Emacs. Over 20 years in and I’m still learning new things – these days mostly how to make the best of evil-mode so I can have the best of both worlds. As I like to say:

The road to Emacs mastery is paved with a lifetime of M-x invocations.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

I’ve developed a new random software testing technique that I believe will become a staple of my software testing going forward. It is both helpful for agentic AI (LLM) software development, where robust software verification is more important than ever, and implemented with the help of LLMs.

I’m training to ride RAGBRAI LIII in Iowa in July 2026. RAGBRAI provides a training plan which, if followed, helps riders get ready for the ride.

Being an Emacs Org geek, I grabbed the provided Excel spreadsheet, exported it as a CSV (comma separated values) file, then converted that to an Org table.

The spreadsheet shows two lines per week, one with the planned mileages, and another to record the actual miles ridden. There’s a total mileage in column 6, which is filled in for the planned rides, and you fill in yourself for the actuals.

The first few lines of the spreadsheet look like

|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|
|                      | 2026 RAGBRAI® Training Plan |                   |                  |                  |            |
|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|
| Week of:             | Weekday 1                   | Weekday 2         | Saturday         | Sunday           | Week Total |
|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|
| February 9           | 5 miles                     | 5 miles           | 10 miles         | -                | 20 miles   |
|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|
| Actual Ridden        |                             |                   |                  |                  |            |
|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|
| February 16          | 10 miles                    | 10 miles          | 10 miles         | -                | 30 miles   |
|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|
| Actual Ridden        |                             |                   |                  |                  |            |
|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|

I wanted to do two things:

• make column 6 the sum of columns 2 through 5, which include two weekday and two weekend rides
• create a column 7 that’s a percentage of the actual vs. planned mileage

Org tables let you specify formulas for cells, columns, and rows. Getting the sum of columns 2 through 5 for column 6 can be done a couple of ways:

• $6=$2+$3+$4+$5
• $6=vsum($2..$5)

I used the former for quite a while, until I realized I could use the latter. Either way, it works.

I had difficulty getting the formula for column 7 working how I wanted it. Org tables can do formulas using Calc syntax, which is what I used for column 6, or using Emacs Lisp forms as formulas. I used Calc syntax to get this working. I wanted to calculate $7 as 100 times the value of @0$6, the current row’s sum of miles ridden, divided by the value of the previous row’s sum of planned miles. It’s easy enough to just do something like $7=100*@0$6/@-1$6, but the values on the planned rides rows were 100 times the planned miles for that week divided by the actual miles for the previous week, which is usually some number over 100. And not that interesting to me.

I also got rid of all instances of “miles” in the table. I ended up with weird things like 70.3 miles / miles, and couldn’t figure out how to get Org to simplify this. Getting rid of “miles” in the spreadsheet made things look much better.

I wanted to key on the “Actual Ridden” string in $1. If $1 is “Actual Ridden”, then use the calculation we’ve been discussing. Otherwise, use 100 or show nothing. I had great difficulty making this work with Calc syntax.

So, I tried Emacs Lisp forms as formulas. I ended up with

$7='(if (string-equal $1 "Actual Ridden") (format "%.2f" (* 100 (/ (string-to-number @0$6) (string-to-number @-1$6)))) "")

This is a pretty straightforward translation of the percentage formula, along with using format to only show a couple of decimal places. In the case of other lines, just return an empty string. The final formula works great.

I started out on a journey to try to get sway to create a new workspace for me, with a “probably” unique name. How could I do that?

sway, like it’s ancestor i3, has an IPC mechanism that allows you to query and control sway from other programs. You can play with this with swaymsg. swaymsg "workspace foo" will switch your current display to show workspace “foo”, creating “foo” if it doesn’t exist. So one interesting way to achieve my goal is

swaymsg "workspace $(xkcdpass -n 1)"

xkcdpass -n 1 prints a single random word from xkcdpass’ word file.

One problem with random words is that we don’t typically have nice key bindings in sway to switch to these. You can use the mouse and click on the workspace name on your bar, but if you’d prefer to only use your keyboard, too bad.

So I thought to use rofi to show a list of workspaces and let you select one. rofi has no builtin mode for this, but it does have a way to add modes using scripts. Such a script has two modes itself:

• with no arguments, list the items in question. In this case, list the workspaces
• with one argument, do something with that item. In our case, switch to that workspace

rofi allows you to type a new item, so in our case that would be another way to switch to a new workspace.

So, how do you get the list of workspaces? Again, the sway IPC mechanism. You can run swaymsg -t get_workspaces to get the list of workspaces. By default this will pretty print the list of workspaces. But if you specify -r or --raw or pipe swaymsg to another program, it outputs JSON. Here’s an example:

[
  {
    "id": 6,
    "type": "workspace",
    "orientation": "horizontal",
    "percent": null,
    "urgent": false,
    "marks": [],
    "layout": "splith",
    "border": "none",
    "current_border_width": 0,
    "rect": {
      "x": 0,
      "y": 30,
      "width": 2560,
      "height": 1410
    },
    "deco_rect": {
      "x": 0,
      "y": 0,
      "width": 0,
      "height": 0
    },
    "window_rect": {
      "x": 0,
      "y": 0,
      "width": 0,
      "height": 0
    },
    "geometry": {
      "x": 0,
      "y": 0,
      "width": 0,
      "height": 0
    },
    "name": "1",
    "window": null,
    "nodes": [],
    "floating_nodes": [],
    "focus": [
      17
    ],
    "fullscreen_mode": 1,
    "sticky": false,
    "floating": null,
    "scratchpad_state": null,
    "num": 1,
    "output": "DP-9",
    "representation": "H[H[emacs]]",
    "focused": true,
    "visible": true
  },
  {
    "id": 18,
    "type": "workspace",
    "orientation": "horizontal",
    "percent": null,
    "urgent": false,
    "marks": [],
    "layout": "splith",
    "border": "none",
    "current_border_width": 0,
    "rect": {
      "x": 2560,
      "y": 30,
      "width": 1920,
      "height": 1170
    },
    "deco_rect": {
      "x": 0,
      "y": 0,
      "width": 0,
      "height": 0
    },
    "window_rect": {
      "x": 0,
      "y": 0,
      "width": 0,
      "height": 0
    },
    "geometry": {
      "x": 0,
      "y": 0,
      "width": 0,
      "height": 0
    },
    "name": "2",
    "window": null,
    "nodes": [],
    "floating_nodes": [
      {
        "id": 9,
        "type": "floating_con",
        "orientation": "none",
        "percent": 0.61330662393162383,
        "urgent": false,
        "marks": [],
        "focused": false,
        "layout": "none",
        "border": "normal",
        "current_border_width": 2,
        "rect": {
          "x": 2878,
          "y": 97,
          "width": 1284,
          "height": 1046
        },
        "deco_rect": {
          "x": 318,
          "y": 40,
          "width": 1284,
          "height": 27
        },
        "window_rect": {
          "x": 2,
          "y": 0,
          "width": 1280,
          "height": 1044
        },
        "geometry": {
          "x": 0,
          "y": 0,
          "width": 696,
          "height": 486
        },
        "name": "foot",
        "window": null,
        "nodes": [],
        "floating_nodes": [],
        "focus": [],
        "fullscreen_mode": 0,
        "sticky": false,
        "floating": "user_on",
        "scratchpad_state": "fresh",
        "pid": 5998,
        "app_id": "foot",
        "foreign_toplevel_identifier": "0483dba85d6ad4c7b88b28653765ab03",
        "visible": true,
        "max_render_time": 0,
        "allow_tearing": false,
        "shell": "xdg_shell",
        "inhibit_idle": false,
        "sandbox_engine": null,
        "sandbox_app_id": null,
        "sandbox_instance_id": null,
        "idle_inhibitors": {
          "user": "none",
          "application": "none"
        }
      }
    ],
    "focus": [
      12,
      9
    ],
    "fullscreen_mode": 1,
    "sticky": false,
    "floating": null,
    "scratchpad_state": null,
    "num": 2,
    "output": "DP-8",
    "representation": "H[google-chrome]",
    "focused": false,
    "visible": true
  },
  {
    "id": 21,
    "type": "workspace",
    "orientation": "horizontal",
    "percent": null,
    "urgent": false,
    "marks": [],
    "layout": "splith",
    "border": "none",
    "current_border_width": 0,
    "rect": {
      "x": 2560,
      "y": 30,
      "width": 1920,
      "height": 1170
    },
    "deco_rect": {
      "x": 0,
      "y": 0,
      "width": 0,
      "height": 0
    },
    "window_rect": {
      "x": 0,
      "y": 0,
      "width": 0,
      "height": 0
    },
    "geometry": {
      "x": 0,
      "y": 0,
      "width": 0,
      "height": 0
    },
    "name": "4",
    "window": null,
    "nodes": [],
    "floating_nodes": [],
    "focus": [
      24,
      25
    ],
    "fullscreen_mode": 1,
    "sticky": false,
    "floating": null,
    "scratchpad_state": null,
    "num": 4,
    "output": "DP-8",
    "representation": "H[V[foot] V[foot]]",
    "focused": false,
    "visible": false
  }
]

Phew, that’s a lot for 3 workspaces! The only part I care about in this case is the “name” for each. We could do some weird stuff with grep and sed to get the names, or use jq to extract what we want.

swaymsg -t get_workspaces | jq '.[] | .name'

generates

"1"
"2"
"4"

Perfect!

Putting this all together, here’s a shell script sway_list_workspaces that we can use with rofi to switch workspaces without using the mouse.

#!/bin/sh

if [ x"$1" = x ]
then
    swaymsg -t get_workspaces | jq '.[] | .name'
else
    swaymsg "workspace $1" >/dev/null
fi

Here’s the rofi command line to use:

rofi -modes 'Workspaces:/home/davemarq/bin/sway_list_workspaces' -show Workspaces

I bind it to “$mod+Shift+w” in my sway config file:

bindsym $mod+Shift+w exec "rofi -modes 'Workspaces:/home/davemarq/bin/sway_list_workspaces' -show Workspaces"

Org Mode is a big part of why I enjoy Emacs, so I'm delighted that there's a new release out (Org 9.8). Thanks to all who contributed! If you would like to help out, Ihor is looking for several volunteers who can try to reproduce bugs and do initial feedback on the new patches.

• Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
  • London Emacs (in person): Emacs London meetup https://www.meetup.com/london-emacs-hacking/events/313006896/ Tue Feb 24 1800 Europe/London
  • Emacs Berlin (hybrid, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Feb 25 0930 America/Vancouver - 1130 America/Chicago - 1230 America/Toronto - 1730 Etc/GMT - 1830 Europe/Berlin - 2300 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Feb 26 0130 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat Feb 28 0030 America/Vancouver - 0230 America/Chicago - 0330 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/GMT - 0930 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #3 2026 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/3147760f-1a8b-4996-9b3c-2773d7d360ca Mon Mar 2 1900 CET
  • EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/313161406/ Thu Mar 5 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto – Fri Mar 6 0000 Etc/GMT - 0100 Europe/Berlin - 0530 Asia/Kolkata - 0800 Asia/Singapore
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Mar 6 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Sat Mar 7 0000 Asia/Singapore
• Beginner:
  • A noob friendly start (Reddit)
• Emacs configuration:
  • Irreal: Let’s Play How Big Is Your Emacs Config?
  • sstraust/shannonmax: maximize your keybinding efficiency in emacs! (HN)
• Emacs Lisp:
  • A tiny library: once.el, giving you "once-hook" instead of "add-hook" (Reddit)
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: confirm package bugs with –init-directory (Irreal, Irreal)
  • pre-commit-elisp - Emacs Lisp (Elisp) Git pre-commit hooks [Release 1.0.7]​
  • Xah Ep762. emacs lisp coding, command to fix youtube description, crimes of recursive acronym (02:09:50)
  • Xah Talk Show Ep765. emacs lisp coding. command to delete emacs backup. (01:17:31)
• Appearance:
  • Alvaro Ramirez: Bending Emacs - Episode 11: winpulse (YouTube 08:46, Irreal)
• Navigation:
  • Magnus: Switching to project.el
• Dired:
  • emacs-dired filepicker for qutebrowser
• Writing:
  • Chai (拆) — an Emacs package for destructive reading
  • How I Use Emacs to Take Notes (11:22)
  • adoc-mode 0.8 is out with many new features - AsciiDoc
  • bbatsov/asciidoc-mode: A modern Emacs major mode for editing AsciiDoc files, powered by TreeSitter (@bbatsov@hachyderm.io) - leaner alternative
• Org Mode:
  • Org mode 9.8 is out (r/emacs, r/orgmode, Irreal) also help wanted:
  • Announcing Casual Org (Reddit)
  • Marcin Borkowski: Org links’ targets
  • Hugo, org-mode y Codeberg | Texaco blog (@texaco@defcon.social)
  • Thanos Apollo: Org Gnosis 0.2.0 Release Notes
  • TAONAW - Emacs and Org Mode: Emacs for macOS and Darwin versions
  • Org development:
    • Ensure a non-zero percent cookie when anything is complete
    • Bump minimal Emacs version
• Coding:
  • Forgejo, AGit, and Pull Request Templates (@lobsters@mastodon.social)
  • andros/conflict-buttons.el - conflict-buttons.el - Andros's repositories (@andros@activity.andros.dev)
  • eglot-multi-preset: Per-project language server presets for Eglot
  • Meta Redux: Flycheck 36 (Reddit, Irreal) - also includes org-lint; security update for CVE in emacs-lisp checker
  • Magnus: Using advice to limit lsp-ui-doc nuisance
  • ablatedsprocket/emacs-dotnet - transient menu around the dotnet CLI (@ablatedsprocket@hachyderm.io)
  • Clojure - State of Clojure 2025 Results (@bbatsov@hachyderm.io) - Emacs still dev tool of choice despite strong competition
  • Release v5.21.0 · clojure-emacs/clojure-mode · GitHub (@bbatsov@hachyderm.io)
  • Building RDE against latest Guix on CI (01:34:22)
  • Maryanne Wachter: Six Months of C
• Mail, news, and chat:
  • Tip to help remember to wide reply on mailing lists in Gnus
• Evil mode:
  • D.V.F.P.: Vim… beyond Vim - mentions Evil Mode
• Multimedia:
  • Alvaro Ramirez: Ready Player cover download improvements (Reddit)
  • Lars Ingebrigtsen: A little collection of SVG tricks for Emacs
  • tusharhero: PALE, Canvas, and Stuff demos
  • [18] Emacs Reader, PALE: Improvements to Canvas API, Shaders & Graphics APIs - Dyne.org TV
• Fun:
  • MonadicSheep/stk-code: Fork of STK (SuperTuxKart) with Emacs port (powered by Pale). Requires Canvas API (Reddit)
• AI:
  • LLMs and agents in Emacs: share your workflows
  • Evolving a Modular dev Experience in Emacs (Reddit, HN)
  • Run LLM Scripts in Emacs (No Packages) #llm #ai #claudecode (04:22)
  • CLAUDE.md instructions to automatically update TODOs and track execution time (clocking) in org-mode · GitHub (@typester@pdx.social)
  • 035 Ollama Buddy - Advanced Tool Calling with Multiple Tools #emacs #ollama (02:52, Reddit, also Reddit)
  • emacs-gravity: An idiomatic Emacs UI for Claude Code — structured, navigatable, fully native.
  • Fritz Grabo: Introducing elfeed-summarize
  • devinprater/emacspeak-goodies - speech-enable gptel-agent, tweak elfeed (@pixelate@tweesecake.social)
  • org-mode, agents, and ekg
  • emacs-os/el-init: A statically compiled Emacs init (PID 1) patchset, Emacs Lisp-based service supervisor and core component of Emacs-OS. (retrospective, Reddit)
  • Robot - Emacs integration (X, Github)
• Community:
  • How peeking at screens shaped my Emacs - typester.dev (@typester@pdx.social)
  • Prot Asks: Ro about programmatic thinking, political discourse, and art as self-discovery (02:53:42)
• Other:
  • Jeremias-A-Queiroz/eConky: A side-buffer dashboard for Emacs inspired by Conky. (Reddit)
  • kristjoc/bible-gateway: A Simple BibleGateway Client for Emacs (Reddit)
  • Using app-emacs/portage::akater | Using Gentoo package manager from GNU Emacs (01:12)
  • ezemtsov/ewm: EWM - Emacs Wayland Manager - Codeberg.org (Reddit)
  • jiewawa/gnome-window-calls.el - Codeberg.org (@jiewawa@masto.ai)
  • Thaodan/i3-emacs at i3_integration_mode_handle_display_buffer (@thaodan@mastodon.social)
  • Christian Tietze: Introducing quake-frame.el: My Take on a Terminal Visor, But Running Emacs
  • M-x.app – a macOS menubar app that turns Emacs into a system-wide automation backend via callback URLs (Reddit) Example uses:
    • Replacing Raycast With Emacs, Ep 1 - App Launcher
    • Replacing Raycast With Emacs, Ep 2 - Bang Commands
  • NEO Emacs: GPU-powered Emacs written in Rust. Aim for multi-threads, 10x perf & 100% compatibility. (02:06, HN, also previous discussion on Reddit)
• Emacs development:
  • emacs-devel: Figuring out what to do about very long VCS command lines - maybe a defcustom?
  • New prefix argument for pp-eval-expression
  • Add SHA-3 support to secure-hash
  • Fix broken `FOO-mode-indent-offset` convention
  • Support displaying more months in the calendar
  • New user option 'after-delete-frame-select-mru-frame' (bug#80397)
  • Sort Eshell aliases when adding new ones
  • Make Rmail summary address display customizable
  • New command vc-dir-root-next-action
  • Use a custom Pdb class in the Python shell
  • browse-url-firefox-program: Add support for more Firefox variants.
  • Add new command 'copy-theme-options'
  • Add a theme and minor mode for new users
  • Add frame-use-time, get-mru-frame, use mru frame in delete-frame (bug#80397)
  • vc-git-pull, vc-git-incoming-revision: Use push remotes
  • Use -outstanding not -outgoing-base in VC command names
  • Change the default value of 'split-width-threshold' from 160 to 150
  • Add repeat-map for smerge-mode commands
• New packages:
  • asciidoc-mode: Major mode for AsciiDoc markup (MELPA)
  • consult-gumshoe: Consult integration for gumshoe (MELPA)
  • edit-metadata: Edit embedded metadata (MELPA)
  • elfeed-summarize: Add LLM-powered inline summaries to elfeed (MELPA)
  • eselect-news: Read Gentoo eselect news (MELPA)
  • evil-emacs-cursor-model-mode: Emacs' cursor model in evil-mode (NonGNU ELPA)
  • kawacode: Kawa Code collaboration package (MELPA)
  • lisp-semantic-hl: Semantic Syntax Highlighting for Lisp Languages (MELPA)
  • magnus: Manage multiple Claude Code instances (MELPA)
  • mark-graf: Modern WYSIWYG-style markdown editing (MELPA)
  • ob-gleam: Org Babel functions for Gleam (MELPA)
  • org-tempus: Enhance Org time tracking (MELPA)
  • persp-gumshoe: Perspective support for gumshoe (MELPA)
  • truename-cache: Efficiently de-dup file-names (MELPA)
  • winpulse: Momentary window background flash animation (MELPA)

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 comment on Mastodon or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Ihor Radchenko writes to tell us about the release of Org Mode 9.8. It’s a pretty big release as you can see from the Changes file. It’s much too long to list the changes here and, of course, not everyone will be interested in all the changes so be sure to take a look to see what’s of interest to you.

As always, we should pause and give thanks to Ihor, Bastien, and the others—see the announcement for a list of those contributing to this release—who work so hard on our behalf without any recompense but that thanks. These guys are heroes and, as I always say, we owe them a beer whenever he find ourselves in the same bar as any of them.

The announcement has a short list of significant updates so if you don’t want to read the whole changes file, that’s a good place to start.

Note: As I was preparing tomorrow’s post, I noticed that I forgot to publish today’s. Sorry. Here it is, better late than never.

Over at Meta Redux, Bozhidar Batsov has announced the release of Flycheck 36. It has, he says, been a long time coming but he’s really happy with it.

He’s added a couple of new language checkers—javascript-oxlint and org-lint—fixed a security issue, and added some features to ShellCheck. There are also quality of life improvements and bug fixes. Additionally, he’s updated the app’s Web site.

Take a look at Batsov’s post for all the details. Batsov notes that many people have assumed that Flycheck is essentially dead because of the builtin Flymake’s integration with Eglot but he says that Flycheck is alive and well and continuing to evolve.

If you’re a Flycheck user or interested in it, all this is good news. Batsov has put a lot of work into improving it and has plans for more. He explicitly asks those who want additional features to let him know or better yet to submit a PR. In any event, you should take a look at Batsov’s post to see all the new features and improvements.

Six Months of C

The past year has brought a lot of changes, not the least of which is that I'm now working primarily in C after a few years of web development in NodeJS/React/general JavaScript land. There's some irony to this given that in my first PyCon talk back in 2022, I proudly declared that I wanted to write as little C/C++ as possible when reimplementing a constraint library in Python using Cython.

However, I've never been particularly happy with high levels of abstraction and black-box implementations going back to my days of frustration with structural engineering software, so maybe it's fitting now that I'm working at a lower level and pursuing performant programming in C. Of course, the switch has meant working with a completely different toolset than I've used in the past, and learning a lot about Emacs along the way.

Base Emacs Configuration

I use Emacs 30.2 installed via the Emacs Plus Homebrew tap with native compilation, along with Doom Emacs to configure most of the features that I want to use.

Some of the packages not included in Doom Emacs that I find particularly useful for general development are:

• git-link - allows you to copy a direct link to Github at the current line (useful for quickly pinpointing code for discussion)
• rainbow-delimiters - highlights parentheses, brackets, braces in different colors (useful for nested input files)
• wgrep - makes a grep buffer editable and allows you to write changes to all files modified in that buffer

Tree-sitter

My main mode when working in C is c-ts-mode, which is the C editing mode powered by tree-sitter

I believe installing tree-sitter per language now is much easier than it used to be, as I only needed to install the C grammar as outlined in this Mastering Emacs article per the "Compiling and Installing with the builtin method in Emacs" section. While the notes say that it doesn't work well unless you're using GCC and running Linux, I didn't have any problems with Clang and MacOS.

I still don't think I'm using Tree-sitter to its full capabilities in Emacs, but it has been fun to explore the code base using treesit-explore-mode and treesit-inspect-mode. I'd like to do more with its code navigation and highlighting, as I'm still relying primarily on projectile for code navigation. While researching some of the links for this blog post, I discovered the Combobulate package (disclaimer, from the same author as Mastering Emacs), which looks like it could be helpful.

Custom formatting rules

Unfortunately, I can't use .clang-format, as there is an unorthodox set of formatting requirements that don't fit into any of the common C standards. As a result, I needed to add the following .clang-format to my base directory to avoid significant frustration.

DisableFormat: true

Org Mode Improvements

One of the biggest boons for navigating a large, unfamiliar codebase (in a new language!) has been utilizing org mode to its fullest. It's how I write out work plans, write code snippets for investigation or debugging, and add in-line images to track current application state.

Early on, I added a function to copy an org mode link to the current file and line number (appropriately named copy-org-link-to-line). This has made it easy to navigate to functions I need to modify in my work plan and include additional context as my understanding of the codebase improves.

(defun copy-org-link-to-line ()
  "Copy an Org mode link to the current file and line number.
  Format: [[file+emacs:/absolute/path/to/file.txt::$line_number][file.txt:$line_number]]"
  (interactive)
  (if-let ((file (buffer-file-name))
           (line (line-number-at-pos)))
        (let ((org-link (format "[[file+emacs:%s::%d][%s:%d]]" file line (file-name-nondirectory file) line)))
            (kill-new org-link)
            (message "Copied %s" org-link))
    (message "Buffer is not visiting a file")))

I've also struggled with tab/space presentation conflicting across different minor modes (probably an artifact from Doom, which has electric-indent-local-mode and ws-butler-mode), so I have a custom display setting for tabs in c-ts-mode:

(standard-display-ascii ?\t "••••")

Debugging with dape

I initially loaded and unloaded debugging files drafted in org-mode and loaded just into the command line lldb. This was largely because I couldn't get debugging with dap-mode to work at all with C. Surprise! This was because I use eglot instead of lsp-mode, as eglot seems to have won out for using language servers within Emacs, and dap-mode seems to be tied to lsp-mode.

In the interest of KISS, I opted to just use dape since it uses eglot out of the box.

I have two 'dape-configs set up in my config.el. One for launching/debugging the GUI, and another for launching/debugging a single test suite, which look something like this:

(after! dap-mode
    (after! dape
        :ensure t 
        :config 
        (add-to-list 'dape-configs
            `(debug-gui
              modes (c-ts-mode c-mode)
              ensure dape-ensure-command 
              command "lldb-dap"
              command-cwd "/Users/mclare/workspaces/prog/bin"
              :type "lldb-dap"
              :request "launch"
              :program "prog_dev"
              :initCommands ["command source -s 0 .lldbinit"]
              :args ["absolute/path/to/test/file"]
            )
        )
        (add-to-list 'dape-configs
            `(debug-test
              modes (c-ts-mode c-mode)
              ensure dape-ensure-command 
              command "lldb-dap"
              command-cwd "/Users/mclare/workspaces/prog/bin"
              :type "lldb-dap"
              :request "launch"
              :program "prog_test"
              :initCommands ["command source -s 0 .lldbinit"]
              :args ["--test_suite" "$test_suite_name"]
            )
        )
    )
)

The Good

• After my frustration trying to configure dap-mode, dape just worked! By default, the run adapter fields are easy to figure out before transferring that information to a dape-config as I did.

• The dape-many-windows buffer layout is intuitive and easy to work with, providing immediate insight with 3 smaller buffers for Local/Global/Registers/Watch variables, the Stack/Modules/Sources, and Breakpoints/Threads, as well as positioning the dape-repl in a buffer at the bottom of the screen.

Dape Many Windows (from readme)

The Bad

• lldb shortcuts do not work in the provided dape-repl. This can get annoying with having to write out breakpoint --file file.c --line $line_number --condition "i == 200" over and over, rather than the shorthand br l c.

• Watch variables or conditional statements set in the repl do not appear in the Breakpoints/Threads window, where you can easily delete them, which can be confusing while debugging.

• It also seems to be impossible to "reset" breakpoint counts set using the dape command M-x M-a b (These are the ones that populate in the Breakpoint/Threads buffer) wwithout manually visiting the file. I've had to navigate to the breakpoint location and then toggle on/off to achieve this.

The ??

• Editing watch variables via dape-info-watch-edit-node is really weird. I can't figure out how to get it to commit my changes despite the hints indicating it should just be C-c C-c.

• Eglot as a process disconnects a lot. I don't know if this is due to dape or just in general while working in my project. I'd say 80% of the time I reach for xref-find-definition, I get a warning that eglot is not connected, which is very frustrating. (I don't get an error upon firing eglot-reconnect though!).

Other Resources

Especially in the age of LLMs, I'm becoming more and more leery of trusting online tutorials or resources. Since I'm working in C99, it seemed like a good investment to get some C standard texts, since the language is small enough to fit into pretty slim volumes.

Before starting my new job I read:

• Effective C - though this was a bit of a challenge because it includes updates to cover all the way to C23!

• The C Programming Language (also known as K&R) - skimmed this one mostly since I've heard the style is outdated

Since starting, I've also acquired:

• C: A Reference Manual - Super useful for the standard library reference

and just for fun (related but not specifically C)...

• The Linux Programming Interface - for really digging into system programming

I’ve finally published Gnosis version 0.7.0 that brings some much needed changes and integration with org-gnosis. You can get the latest version of gnosis via GNU ELPA or directly from upstream.

New features

• Review topic from dashboard nodes view (r), with configurable forward-link and backlink depth (R or C-u r).
• gnosis-review-topic accepts separate forward/backlink depth to include themata from related nodes.
• gnosis-save-hook runs after saving a thema, called with the thema ID.
• Link integrity detection and repair commands (gnosis-links-check, gnosis-links-sync).
• Dashboard maintenance menu for syncing/rebuilding nodes and link health checks.
• Dashboard shows themata with orphaned links.
• View due org-gnosis nodes linked to themata from dashboard.
• Bulk replace string in keimenon with org-gnosis node link.
• Custom gnosis-center-content-during-review option.
• Delete action available during review.
• Format org-gnosis links in keimenon during review output.
• Export deck option to include or exclude suspended themata.
• Exported decks include a #+THEMATA: header with thema count.
• Importing into an existing deck prompts for confirmation.
• Failed thema imports report the source file line number.

Dashboard

• Added nodes dashboard, view org-gnosis nodes information including backlinks and linked themata as well as start a review session.
• Suspend column displays Yes No instead of 1 0.
• Flatten Actions submenu into the home menu.
• Separate Import/Export into its own menu column.
• Four-column layout: Navigate, Actions, Import/Export, Maintenance.

Algorithm

• Cap gnosis-synolon at gnosis-algorithm-synolon-max (default 3.0), floor at 1.3.
• Add interval fuzz to prevent review clustering.
• Fix lethe event: properly reduce gnosis-plus on consecutive failures.

Performance

• Dashboard suspend, delete, and edit update only the affected entry instead of refreshing the entire buffer.
• Dashboard nodes view uses bulk queries for link counts (2 queries instead of 2N).
• Deck export uses 2 bulk queries instead of 2 per thema (N+1 eliminated).
• Deck export uses plain text insertion instead of per-thema buffer scans (O(n^2) eliminated).
• Deck import wraps all operations in a single transaction with pre-cached IDs (10K fsyncs reduced to 1).
• Review updates use a single DB query.
• Tag output uses a single DB call.
• Average daily reviews computed with a single DB call.

Bug fixes

• Fix gnosis-monkeytype hook leak (now buffer-local).
• Fix vc-pull to reopen database properly after successful pull.
• Pre-load emacsql-sqlite-builtin to fix cl-generic dispatch crash on Emacs 29+.

Documentation

• Update Introduction to describe the intended workflow with org-gnosis (write notes, create themata, link, review).
• Document the two separate databases (gnosis and org-gnosis).
• Update dashboard section for new menu layout.
• Add Import & Export section with export options and import behavior.

I just pushed a new version for org-gnosis, the note taking module of gnosis, which you can find here. The update should be available to all users via GNU ELPA.

Important Changes

Database Changes

• Database version bumped to 3, tracking mtime and hash for both nodes and journal files.
• Automatic database migration prompts when schema is outdated.
• Lazy database initialization - database connections are created only when needed, improving startup time.
• Added org-gnosis-database-file custom variable to specify custom database file location.

Performance Improvements

• Major performance improvements for org-gnosis-db-sync with GC optimization during sync.
• Two-tier incremental sync: fast mtime check, then accurate hash comparison.
  • Only processes files where both modification time and content have changed.
  • Dramatically improves performance for .gpg encrypted files and large repositories.
• Both node files and journal files now use incremental sync with progress reporting showing changed/total file counts.
• To force full resync, call org-gnosis-db-sync with prefix arg C-u. e.g C-u M-x org-gnosis-db-sync RET.

Journaling

• By default, today’s journal entries are created in org-gnosis-journal-file as level 1 headings.
  • When set to nil, creates separate files for each date entry.
  • Creating new entries (e.g., via org-gnosis-journal-find for an event, non-date) creates separate files in org-gnosis-journal-dir regardless of this setting.
  • Single journal file is only used for today’s date entries.
• Added org-gnosis-journal-as-gpg that when non-nil journal files will be created as gpg encrypted files.
• Journal todos now only retrieve checkboxes from today’s heading when using a single journal file, improving performance.

Tag Management

• Automatic cleanup of orphaned tags (tags with no associated nodes) when updating files.
• Improved tag-based node selection with dedicated functions.

Improvements

• Simplified parsing algorithm for better performance and maintainability.
• Better handling of topic titles - only includes parent headings when they have IDs.
• Added org-gnosis-get-nodes-data for retrieving node information with backlink counts.
• Improved test coverage for parsing, title processing, and journal todos.

The fates are still punishing me for leaving home for travel. Today I had two errands to run:

1. Renew a driver license
2. Return an unused TV set top box to my provider

The DMV is, of course, a red flag but it turned out taking 3 hours. Three hours at the DMV is no one’s idea of a good time. After I staggered out of the DMV I went to my provider to drop off the TV set top box. That should take about 5 minutes, right? Silly you and me. That took an hour and a half.

In any event, I’m exhausted and ready for bed so today’s post is going to be ultrashort. The other day I wrote about Prot’s post on using --init-directory as an aid in debugging. Serendipitously, I ran across this post about ready-player freezing. The developer, Álvaro Ramírez, asks the user to provide information on his configuration and Emacs version.

This is a perfect example of where Prot’s advice would be useful. The user could easily build and install a temporary init.el to eliminate everything but what’s needed to produce the problem. Doing so might even allow the user to discover the problem on their own.

It’s been a while since Flycheck 35, but Flycheck 36 is finally here! This is a pretty big release with a lot of new features, bug fixes, and some much-needed cleanup of legacy checkers.

In fact, I’d say it’s the biggest and most important Flycheck release since I became the project’s primary maintainer a couple of years ago. For a while I had mostly gone with the flow (adding/improving linters and fixing bugs), but by now I feel more confident to make bigger and bolder changes.

Anyways, you’re probably interested to learn more about Flycheck 36, so let me walk you through the highlights.

New Checkers

We’ve added a couple of new checkers:

• javascript-oxlint – a checker using oxlint, the blazing-fast JavaScript/TypeScript linter written in Rust. If you haven’t tried oxlint yet, you really should – it’s impressively fast.
• org-lint – an Org mode checker using Emacs’ built-in org-lint. It detects issues like invalid links, dead links, and duplicate IDs. This one went through a rewrite mid-cycle to run in the current Emacs process instead of a --batch subprocess, which eliminates false warnings for source block languages provided by external packages.

Security

We’ve mitigated CVE-2024-53920 in the emacs-lisp checker by disabling local eval directives and restricting local variables to safe values during byte-compilation. This was an important fix – byte-compilation involves macro expansion, which means untrusted Elisp files could potentially execute arbitrary code during syntax checking. A follow-up fix for Emacs 30+ using trusted-content is in the works.¹

ShellCheck Improvements

The sh-shellcheck checker got some love in this release:

• New flycheck-shellcheck-infer-shell option to let ShellCheck auto-detect the shell dialect
• flycheck-shellcheck-args for passing extra command-line arguments
• flycheck-shellcheck-enabled-checks to enable optional checks via --enable

Quality-of-Life Improvements

A bunch of small but welcome improvements:

• flycheck-command-map now works as a prefix command with keymap-set and friends – no more need for the define-key workaround
• Buffers are automatically re-checked after revert-buffer, so global-auto-revert-mode users get up-to-date diagnostics without manual intervention
• The mode-line indicator now includes info-level errors (format: errors|warnings|infos)
• The python-ruff checker got an error explainer, so you can quickly look up what a rule means
• Pyright rule names (like reportGeneralTypeIssues) now show up as error IDs

Bug Fixes

This release includes a massive number of bug fixes – over 25 of them. Some highlights:

• Fixed error pattern matching in non-English locales by forcing LC_ALL=C for checker processes
• Fixed the rust checker on Windows (no more /dev/null errors)
• Fixed flycheck-navigation-minimum-level being ignored in some cases
• Fixed compilation warnings on Emacs 30
• Fixed several issues with the python-ruff, tex-chktex, emacs-lisp, and awk-gawk checkers

Check the release notes for the full list.

Spring Cleaning

We’ve removed a number of checkers for tools that have been dead or deprecated for years:

• typescript-tslint (deprecated since 2019, use ESLint with typescript-eslint)
• sass, scss, sass/scss-sass-lint, scss-lint (Ruby Sass is dead, use Stylelint)
• eruby-erubis, eruby-ruumba (Erubis abandoned since 2011)
• css-csslint (abandoned since ~2017, use Stylelint)
• coffee-coffeelint, protobuf-prototool, nix-linter

If you’re still using any of these tools… well, it’s probably time to upgrade!

Documentation Site

flycheck.org got a visual refresh – we’ve switched from the old Alabaster Sphinx theme to Furo, which gives the site a clean, modern look with proper dark mode support and better mobile responsiveness. We’ve also added prominent GitHub links at the top of every page, making it easier to jump to the source or file issues.

I hate the old theme, so this one is a major win in my book! I’ve also took some effort to make sure the documentation accurately reflects the current state of project, as here and there things were out-of-sync.

Flycheck is Alive and Well

I know that many people wrote Flycheck off when Flymake got tight integration with Eglot (they share a maintainer, after all), and I understand why – it’s hard to compete with something that’s built into Emacs and “just works” out of the box. But Flycheck continues to advance and evolve. We have excellent Eglot support via flycheck-eglot, a massive library of built-in checkers,² and a feature set that Flymake still can’t match in many areas.

More importantly, Flycheck’s biggest strength has always been that it’s community-driven and easy to contribute to. Adding a new checker is straightforward, PRs get reviewed quickly, and you don’t have to go through the FSF copyright assignment process. That matters, and it’s why the project keeps growing.

Epilogue

I’m pretty happy with this release. The combination of new features, security hardening, and cleanup of dead checkers puts Flycheck in a much healthier state. Looking ahead to Flycheck 37, I’m thinking about tree-sitter integration, more new checkers (OCaml and Swift are already in the pipeline), and potentially dropping support for Emacs 27 so we can take advantage of newer APIs. The plan is still hazy, but it’s starting to take some shape…

As always, contributions are very welcome! If there’s a lint tool you use that Flycheck doesn’t support yet, PRs are the fastest way to make it happen. As mentioned above, Flycheck’s biggest strength remains its community, and are the community.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

Almost 3 years after the rebirth of adoc-mode I’m happy to announce that adoc-mode 0.8 is finally out! This is a massive release that has been cooking for way too long, but I think it was worth the wait.

Let me walk you through the highlights.

Native Code Block Highlighting

This was the flagship feature I teased at the end of my 0.7 announcement, and it’s easily the most impactful change in this release. Source code blocks now get fontified using the appropriate language major mode – Ruby code looks like it does in ruby-mode, Python code looks like python-mode, and so on.

The feature is enabled out-of-the-box with a sensible default – only code blocks of 5000 characters or fewer are fontified natively, to avoid performance issues with very large blocks. You can set adoc-fontify-code-blocks-natively to t if you want unlimited fontification, or to nil to disable it entirely.

Inline Image Preview

You can now see images directly in your buffer instead of just staring at image::path/to/screenshot.png[]. Image previews are displayed automatically when you open a file (controlled by adoc-display-images), and you can toggle them on and off with adoc-toggle-images.

Right-clicking on an image link gives you a context menu to generate or remove the preview for that specific image. Remote images are supported too – set adoc-display-remote-images to t if you want to fetch and display images from URLs.

Navigation

A couple of welcome additions here:

• adoc-follow-thing-at-point (bound to C-c C-o and M-.) lets you follow URLs (opens in browser), include:: macros (opens the referenced file), and cross-references (jumps to the anchor). It’s one of those features that once you have it, you can’t imagine living without.
• adoc-goto-ref-label (C-c C-a) jumps to an anchor by ID, with a smart default pulled from the xref at point.
• The imenu index is now hierarchical – headings are nested under their parent sections, which makes navigating large documents much more pleasant.

Asciidoctor Inline Macros

adoc-mode now highlights Asciidoctor-specific inline macros like kbd:[], btn:[], menu:[], pass:[], stem:[], latexmath:[], and asciimath:[]. These were previously ignored by font-lock and would just blend in with regular text.

I’m a heavy user of Antora, and I really appreciate this one.

Bug Fixes Galore

This release squashes a lot of long-standing bugs:

• Fixed a noticeable lag when typing in code blocks (this one was particularly annoying).
• Fixed an Emacs hang caused by escaped curly braces in attribute references.
• Fixed multiline font-lock for inline formatting (bold, italic, etc. spanning multiple lines).
• Prevented auto-fill-mode from breaking section title lines.
• Prevented Flyspell from generating overlays for links and other non-prose regions.
• Fixed table delimiter highlighting (was limited to 4 columns).
• Fixed unconstrained monospace delimiters.
• And quite a few more – check the release notes for the full list.

Internal Improvements

I’ve also spent some time cleaning up the internals:

• The minimum Emacs version is now 28.1 (up from 26).
• Deprecated AsciiDoc backtick-apostrophe quote styles (not supported by Asciidoctor) have been removed.
• Two-line (Setext) titles are now disabled by default, since Asciidoctor has deprecated them.
• Image display and tempo templates have been extracted into separate files (adoc-mode-image.el and adoc-mode-tempo.el), making the main file more manageable.

The codebase is in much better shape than it was 3 years ago, but there’s still some room for improvement.

One More Thing: asciidoc-mode

I did eventually act on that idea I mentioned in my 0.7 post – I created asciidoc-mode, a tree-sitter-based AsciiDoc major mode for Emacs 30.1+. It’s a very different beast from adoc-mode – focused on the essentials (highlighting, navigation, folding) and leveraging tree-sitter for accurate and performant parsing.

If you’re on Emacs 30+ and prefer a lighter-weight editing experience, asciidoc-mode might be a good fit. If you want the full kitchen sink – image previews, tempo templates, native code block highlighting – adoc-mode is still the way to go. Both packages are maintained by me and they complement each other nicely.

Epilogue

adoc-mode 0.8 is available on NonGNU ELPA, MELPA Stable, and MELPA. Upgrading is just a M-x package-install away.

I’d like to thank everyone who contributed bug reports, pull requests, and feedback over the past 3 years. Open-source is a team sport and this release wouldn’t have happened without you. You rock!

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking! And keep writing… in AsciiDoc, of course!

Most Emacs Org users would concur that Org mode is a magnificent tool for capturing and communicating thought. That said, Org mode’s vast set of features can be daunting to master. A common guidance for new users is to take it slow: incrementally learn a subset of Org’s features as you need them.

A big reason for Org mode’s steep learning curve is that it adopts Emacs’ unfortunate culture of compelling users to memorize keybindings. Learning a distinct keybinding for each Org command (remember I said vast feature set?) is onerous, so a different tack is made: reuse the same keybinding but have it possess different behavior based on context. This context is usually tied to the type of structure the point (aka cursor) is in. For example, if the point is in a source block, the binding C-c C-c would execute it, but if the point is on a checkbox item, then C-c C-c would toggle its checked state. Taking this approach lowers the effort to recall a keybinding at the cost of recalling what its contextual behavior would be. In practice, using such overloaded keybindings is…okay. But I’d argue that we could have a more usable interface, leading to the point of this post:

Announcing support for Org mode in the v2.14.0 update for Casual, now available on MELPA.

Readers of this blog will know that Casual is my project to re-imagine the primary user interface for Emacs using keyboard-driven menus. If this is new to you, I highly recommend reading this introduction to it.

Primary to the design of the Casual Org menus is to be context-sensitive, only showing a subset of Org mode commands that are relevant. This set of context-sensitive commands is opinionated, but seeks to provide utility to users both new and experienced with Org.

Shown below is a demo of Casual Org at work:

While the design of this UI has been months in the making, there is nothing like real-world use and feedback. Constructive input is appreciated, especially if you are relatively new to using Org.

A great deal of thanks goes out to the maintainers of and contributors to Org mode and to the community that uses it. If you are able, please support it. Also, if you find Casual useful, I’d appreciate a coffee as well.

—

Video music: Burna Boy - Last Last (JON REYES FINDAWAY BLEND) | Jon Reyes

The standard advice people get when they complain about some bug or difficulty with Emacs is to restart it with -q or -Q to see if the problem persists. The problem with that advice is that the difficulty may be with a package. In that case you want to load at least the offending package and its configuration. That used to involve moving or renaming your init.el so that you could install the minimal init.el that produced the problem. As of Emacs 29 that got easier with the introduction of the --init-directory parameter that tells Emacs to load it’s configuration from a different directory.

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has a nice post that explains how to use this feature when you experience a problem and want to file a bug report. The main problem, of course, is what to put in your new init.el. Prot recommends using use-package with :ensure t (and whatever configuration you’re using) to load the package.

Sometimes you might have to build the package from source rather than simply loading it from one of the ELPA repositories. Prot discusses how to do this using package-vc-install to grab the source directly from its git repository. He has some sample code showing how to do this.

Finally, he has some general recommendations that you can use to make the developer’s life a bit easier. On the other hand, if you are the package developer, the --init-directory trick can save a lot of time in locating bugs. In either case, take a look at Prot’s post. There’s a lot of good information in it.

Switched to emacs-plus to try it again for a few days. Darwin version is now up to date. Let’s see what the differences are, if there are indeed any - and of course, if things keep crashing.

Last week I wrote about Álvaro Ramírez’s new Winpulse package. The purpose of the package is to flash the window receiving focus when you use the other-window command. I wrote that I chose a different solution—changing the color of the mode line—that I felt was better because it provided a lasting indication of the active window.

In his latest Bending Emacs video, Ramírez expounds a bit more on why he chose the solution he did. The main reason appears to be that he sometimes turns off the mode line in some of his windows so my solution obviously wouldn’t work in that situation. Take a look at his video to see his complete argument.

In my previous post on Winpulse, I noted that you could, of course, use both his and my solution. I don’t think that would be worthwhile for me but in his video, Ramírez mentions Pulsar, a package similar to Winpulse that flashes the current line of the buffer getting focus instead of the entire window.

That seems to me a be something I might want to do since it helps locate the point in the new window. As always, Emacs lets you have things exactly the way you want them.

Ramírez and I tend to like the same sorts of things so our disagreement on this issue initially puzzled me. The answer, I think, is that when he switches windows, he just cycles through all the windows in the frame. I, on the other hand, use ace-window that lets me choose the window I want to change to directly. Again, this is a matter of choice but it helps explain why he and I chose different solutions.

The Bending Emacs 11 video is 8 minutes and 45 seconds so it such be easy to find time for it. If you’d like an enhanced way of seeing what window you’re switching to, take a look

Speaking of things that don’t matter at all , over at the Emacs reddit, reddit_enjoyer_47 wants to know how big our init.el files are. Despite my dismissal of the question as of no importance, it turns out that the answers are interesting. The answers range from about 20 lines to about 7,000 lines. For the record, mine is 2527,

Most of the folks with large init files say they have been using Emacs for a long time. That make sense because the files just naturally accrete by adding small pieces that may outlive their usefulness. More importantly, though, long term users tend to adapt Emacs to their individual needs and the usual way of doing that is by adding packages and changing default options.

More interesting to me are users with tiny configurations. It’s hard for me to fathom how you can make good use of Emacs with a configuration that small. A couple of the responders with small inits either listed them or provided a link to it. They appear to be using Emacs as a single purpose editor, usually for coding in a specific language.

Others take pride in having a small config or perhaps consider it some sort of moral necessity. One even set himself a (small) limit an requires himself to refactor his config if it exceeds that limit. That’s fine, I suppose, but it seems to me that it merely serves to limit the usefulness of Emacs.

Much of the maintenance work I do for my packages involves correspondence with users about potential bugs. Sometimes, a user will encounter a problem that I cannot reproduce on my end. I thus try to recreate the bug in a pristine environment and ask my correspondent to do the same.

This has become easier since Emacs 29, which introduced a command-line flag called --init-directory. It is responsible for loading the init.el that is present in the given directory. For example:

# From a terminal or shell, run something like this:
emacs --init-directory=/tmp/test-emacs/

In other words, you can keep your regular configuration intact while launching Emacs with another set of options.

Create the test init.el file

Have a directory that is unrelated to your regular Emacs configuration. Then write the init.el inside of it.

Because I do this frequently, I prefer to use the standard Linux path /tmp/. Its files get deleted as soon as I switch off the computer, which is exactly what I want in this case.

As such, if there is a bug with, say, the modus-themes, I will work with this file path /tmp/modus-themes/init.el.

But the exact location of the directory does not matter, so choose what makes sense to you.

Write the minimum necessary code

In that init file, include only the code that is needed to reproduce the bug.

Since you want to have the package installed, it makes sense to write a use-package declaration for it. Include the :ensure t directive as it instructs the built-in package manager to install the package if it is not already available.

;; Contents of the init.el...
(use-package modus-themes
  :ensure t
  :config
  (setq modus-themes-common-palette-overrides
        '((fringe unspecified)
          (border-mode-line-active unspecified)
          (border-mode-line-inactive unspecified)))
  (setq modus-vivendi-palette-overrides
        '((bg-main "#1e1f22")
          (fg-main "#bcbec4")))
  (load-theme 'modus-vivendi t))

Install from source, if necessary

If you are using an alternative to package.el like straight or elpaca, then the aforementioned :ensure t will likely not suffice: you need to build the package from source. To this end, Emacs has the function package-vc-install. Some of my recent packages have sample code that relies on this approach. For instance:

(use-package gnome-accent-theme-switcher
  :demand t
  :init
  ;; Then upgrade it with the command `package-vc-upgrade' or `package-vc-upgrade-all'.
  (unless (package-installed-p 'gnome-accent-theme-switcher)
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/protesilaos/gnome-accent-theme-switcher.git"))
  :bind
  (("<f5>" . gnome-accent-theme-switcher-toggle-mode)
   ("C-<f5>" . gnome-accent-theme-switcher-change-accent))
  :config
  (gnome-accent-theme-switcher-mode 1))

In the above snippet package-vc-install will pull the latest commit from the main branch, though it can even get a specific commit. Read its documentation with M-x describe-function.

What matters is that you fetch the version which you are running in your personaly configuration.

Launch Emacs with this configuration

From the command-line, run something like the following:

emacs --init-directory=/tmp/test-emacs/

This will launch a new instance of Emacs. The use-package you placed there will do the work to install the package. After that you are ready to reproduce the bug in this clean setup.

Write down all the steps

To help the maintainer identify the source of the trouble, keep a record of all the steps you followed. Some bugs show up when the package is loaded, but others are triggered only after a specific action is performed.

Normally, Emacs will pop up a *Backtrace* buffer when it encounters an error. Copy its contents and send them to the maintainer, together with the init.el you used, and the list of the steps you followed.

Sometimes you just need to re-install the package

It sometimes happens that you install a package and it is completely broken. Although this looks bad, it may not even be a bug, but an issue with the old bytecode you had on your system from the previous version of the package.

Do M-x package-delete, select the package, restart Emacs, and then M-x package-install to install the package anew. If everything works, then the problem is gone and you do not need to tell the maintainer about it.

Make it easier for maintainers to help you

With this knowledge, you can provide high quality bug reports for the packages you rely on. Good luck!

At times, even purchased music excludes album covers in track metadata. For those instances, ready-player-mode offers M-x ready-player-download-album-artwork, which does as it says on the tin. The interactive command offers a couple of fetching providers (iTunes vs Internet Archive / MusicBrainz) to grab the album cover. The thing is, I often found myself trying one or the other provider, sometimes without luck. Today, I finally decided to add a third provider (Deezer) to the list. Even then, what's the point of manually trying each provider out when I can automatically try them all and return the result from the first successful one? And so that's what I did.

In addition to offering all providers, M-x ready-player-download-album-artwork now offers "Any", to download from the first successful provider. Now, why keep the option to request from a specific provider? Well, sometimes one provider has better artwork than another. If I don't like what "Any" returns, I can always request from a specific provider.

While on the subject, I also tidied the preview experience up and now display the thumbnail in the minibuffer. In any case, best to show rather than tell.

Enjoying your unrestricted music via Emacs and ready player mode? ✨sponsor✨ the project.

I've used projectile ever since I created my own Emacs config. I have a vague memory choosing it because some other package only supported it. (It might have been lsp-mode, but I'm not sure.) Anyway, now that I'm trying out eglot, again, I thought I might as well see if I can switch to project.el, which is included in Emacs nowadays.

(setopt project-vc-extra-root-markers '(".projectile" ".git"))

(use-package xref-project-history
  :ensure (:type git
           :repo "https://codeberg.org/imarko/xref-project-history.git"
           :branch "master")
  :custom
  (xref-history-storage #'xref-project-history))

src
└── Sider
    └── Data
        ├── Command.hs
        ├── Pipeline.hs
        └── Resp.hs
test
└── Sider
    └── Data
        ├── CommandSpec.hs
        ├── PipelineSpec.hs
        └── RespSpec.hs

(defun mes/setup-hs-ff ()
  (when-let* ((proj-root (project-root (project-current)))
              (rel-proj-root (-some--> (buffer-file-name)
                               (file-name-directory it)
                               (f-relative proj-root it)))
              (sub-tree (car (f-split (f-relative (buffer-file-name) proj-root))))
              (search-dirs (--> '("src" "test")
                                (remove sub-tree it)
                                (-map (lambda (p) (f-join proj-root p)) it)
                                (-select #'f-directory? it)
                                (-mapcat (lambda (p) (f-directories p nil t)) it)
                                (-map (lambda (p) (f-relative p proj-root)) it)
                                (-map (lambda (p) (f-join rel-proj-root p)) it))))
    (setq-local ff-search-directories search-dirs
                ff-other-file-alist '(("Spec\\.hs$" (".hs"))
                                      ("\\.hs$" ("Spec.hs"))))))

Over the last year or so I’ve ended up with various SVG functions that I think may be of some general utility, so I’ve separated them out into its own file and put it on Microsoft Github.

• svg-opacity-gradient
• svg-outline
• svg-multi-line-text
• svg-smooth-line

Some are pretty involved, but most are pretty straightforward. Of course, one can add an infinite number of these, and the more flexible the functions are, the more you can just end up “open-coding” them for your specific project, but I think these have some utility, so there you go.

I am happy to announce that my command line program for binding plain text writing files is live on my GitHub, with full documentation here, and I could not be happier with how it turned out.

But, you may ask, what is it, and why does it exist?

Quoting from the docs:

Binder applies source/build separation to writing—you author in plain text files and compile to a formatted manuscript.

This upends the word processing (or “WYSIWYG” editor) model that requires the writer to edit a build file (delivery format) as a source file. So you can write with the precision of a software engineer rather than the brute force labor of a printer’s devil.

There’s nothing wrong with using word processors like Microsoft Word, but these tools were designed for print formatting first and foremost. That’s why you have so many options for font sizes, page styles, and flow parameters, but very few text navigation or file organization features. Using such antiquated tools for writing today is like composing a novel by hand-setting movable type on a letterpress printer.

Composing in plain text frees you from those constraints and opens you up to the wide world of text editors with advanced text manipulation features, file and chapter organization, portability, and version control.

For my readers already familiar with Emacs and Org Mode, separating source files from build files is quite common. We can do that by exporting Org Mode documents to whatever format we’d like.

However, I wanted a tool that was text editor agnostic and focused more specifically on fiction writing and manuscript generation. So now, it doesn’t matter if you like Emacs, Vim, VS Code, Sublime, Gedit, or whatever, you can make good use of this program.

I particular like the --stats feature that outputs not only the total word count of all files, but also paragraph, sentence count, and a Flesch reading ease score.

Example output:

binder --stats

Manuscript Statistics
──────────────────────────────
  Words:                 45,678
  Paragraphs:            1,234
  Sentences:             2,345
  Words/Paragraph:       37.0
  Sentences/Paragraph:   1.9
  Flesch Reading Ease:   65.2 (Standard)

Nice.

As always, thanks for reading. And be sure to check out my eBooks.

If you have any comments or questions feel free to drop them below.

The post Writing a novel in plain text has never been easier appeared first on Chris Maiorana.

I recently built a little package to flash Emacs windows as you switch through them, so I might as well showcase it in a new Bending Emacs episode, so here it goes:

Bending Emacs Episode 11: winpulse

In addition to showcasing winpulse, we showed some of the built-in window-managing commands like:

• C-x 3 split-window-right
• C-x 2 split-window-below
• C-x 0 delete-window
• C-x ^ enlarge-window
• C-x } enlarge-window-horizontally
• C-x { shrink-window-horizontally
• C-x o other-window

It's worth noting the last four commands are can be optimized by repeat-mode. Check out Karthink's It Bears Repeating: Emacs 28 & Repeat Mode post.

Hope you enjoyed the video!

Want more videos?

Liked the video? Please let me know. Got feedback? Leave me some comments.

Please go like my video, share with others, and subscribe to my channel.

If there's enough interest, I'll continue making more videos!

Make it all sustainable

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Last week, I wrote about Theena Kumaragurunathan’s post on writing Science Fiction with Emacs and how Emacs was the inspiration for the brain computer interface in his latest SF novel. In a followup post, Kumaragurunathan discusses the philosophical and design choices that make Emacs such a great tool for writers like him. He says,

Good UX comes from good design. The former is the harvest that comes
about from sowing in the latter.

He describes the manifestation of that principal in Emacs as,

Emacs feels timeless to me because it made a simple, stubborn choice
early on: let the user shape the tool.

He goes on to describe this as “giving the user agency” and explains how he’s exploited that agency to integrate Emacs with other tools, such as Org-roam and Hyperbole, to build himself a writing environment tailored specifically for him.

As well as being a novelist, Kumaragurunathan is also a screenwriter so he relies on two distinct Emacs modes for his writing:

1. LaTeX for his manuscripts
2. Fountain for his screenplays

There is, he says, no other writing environment that can support both long-form writing and screenwriting.

It’s a nice article and well worth spending a few minutes on. His discussion of how Emacs meets his writing needs and the writing environment he’s evolved from it is instructive and entertaining.

I noticed that in all terminal emulators I tried (iTerm, Ghostty, kitty), I rely on a system-global shortcut to show me a session that I use whenever I need to terminalize something right now, right there, like ffmpeg something or bulk delete with a pattern or convert magick an image. I had this for ages, and I miss it when it’s not there.

I’ve had iTerm show this in the style of a classic Quake Console – yes, from the game; a console that slides in from the top of the screen, and which in games I mostly used for cheat codes. I used this a lot in Unreal to make the intro cinematic interactive and play in that cool castle. (Ghostty has settings that made the sizing a bit trickier but workable. But eventually Kitty’s settings convinced me to try a centered window instead of one sticking to the top. Kitty also convinced me of making the console not hide automatically when it loses focus, which makes pasting into it much nicer.)

A couple of week after trying terminal emulators, I inevitably wonder why I’m spawning a window that only shows zsh when so many file operations and image manipulation and … well, basically everything is nicer in Emacs.

Wouldn’t it be possible to dedicate a GUI window just to this purpose?

So here we are. It’s possible, and now it’s a package.

It took me a few hours to over-engineer a spec-driven approach to make this possible with the help of LLM’s, Claude Code in particular. I archived the whole history of the thought-process of planning and then let Claude Code orchestrate an implementation with subagents in ~50min while I went groceries shopping with my daughter. The whole process taught me how to make named Emacs daemon (aka server) sessions and use them in end-to-end testing without interfering with my own setup. I learned a bit about how Emacs frames can be configured. And it renewed my love for Emacs and its malleability – there were so many cool alternatives to implement the same feature along the way that it sometimes was genuinely hard to pick a path!

Having a stochastic apparatus come up with fringe ideas to use and configure the package made me curious to try a couple of these myself, too. So all in all, the Claude Code driven experience was a success for me.

I even like the tagline that was generated:

Press a key. Get Emacs. Press again. It’s gone.

That’s it.

Get the quake-frame.el package from Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/ctietze/quake-frame.el

Note: I only tested this on macOS because I don’t have a Linux with any GUI ready at the moment.

Extensive documentation in the readme will tell you how to configure things, and it comes with recipes to get you started quickly.

Unlike other visor-style packages that existed already, this one is not animating anything. You could get transparency if you want with a simple tweak.

I still stick to the center location with a slight offset. I believe there’s value in caring for small UI details like this, to nudge the window a couple of percentage points off center. The window sizing should just work and make sense and do the right thing.

The customize group is self-documenting and covers all the settings.

You can reset the frame when you dismiss it, or restore whatever was inside. You could force it to always show your favorite eshell session.

In the end, it’s just managing a GUI window for you so that you can bind a system-global hotkey to it. (I use Keyboard Maestro on Mac.)

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I've switched back to lsp-mode temporarily until I've had time to fix a few things with my eglot setup. Returning prompted me to finally address an irritating behaviour with lsp-ui-doc.

No matter what I set lsp-ui-doc-position to it ends up covering information that I want to see. While waiting for a fix I decided to work around it. It seems to me that this is exactly what advice is for.

I came up with the following to make sure the frame appears on the half of the buffer where point isn't.

(defun my-lsp-ui-doc-wrapper (&rest _)
  (let* ((pos-line (- (line-number-at-pos (point))
                      (line-number-at-pos (window-start))))
         (pos (if (<= pos-line (/ (window-body-height) 2))
                  'bottom
                'top)))
    (setopt lsp-ui-doc-position pos)))

(advice-add 'lsp-ui-doc--move-frame :before #'my-lsp-ui-doc-wrapper)

Lots of cool stuff this week! I'm looking forward to checking out the new futur library for async programming, and the developments around embedding graphics in a canvas in Emacs look interesting too (see the Multimedia section). Also, the discussion about making beginner configuration easier could be neat once the wrinkles are ironed out. Enjoy!

• Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed Feb 18 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Feb 19 0000 Asia/Singapore
  • London Emacs (in person): Emacs London meetup https://www.meetup.com/london-emacs-hacking/events/313006896/ Tue Feb 24 1800 Europe/London
  • Emacs Berlin (hybrid, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Feb 25 0930 America/Vancouver - 1130 America/Chicago - 1230 America/Toronto - 1730 Etc/GMT - 1830 Europe/Berlin - 2300 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Feb 26 0130 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat Feb 28 0030 America/Vancouver - 0230 America/Chicago - 0330 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/GMT - 0930 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #3 2026 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/3147760f-1a8b-4996-9b3c-2773d7d360ca Mon Mar 2 1900 CET
• Upcoming events:
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: I will talk about Emacs and free software (FLOSS @ Oxford)
• Emacs configuration:
  • A proposal for a "beginners" (user-option) theme (@pkal@social.sdfeu.org)
  • package-autosuggest in master (@pkal@social.sdfeu.org)
  • Charles Choi: Deburring Emacs Imenu GUI Configuration
  • Borderliner/Chadmacs: Chadmacs Emacs config (Reddit)
• Emacs Lisp:
  • GNU ELPA - futur: Make async programming a bit easier (Reddit, emacs-devel)
• Appearance:
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: Lin version 2.0.0 - enhancement for hl-line-mode
  • Alvaro Ramirez: Introducing winpulse (Irreal, Reddit)
  • James Dyer: Automatically Syncing Emacs Tab Bar Styling With Your Theme
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: my GNOME accent color theme switcher package (YouTube 02:55)
  • fake-frog/min-oblong-theme: Minimal Emacs Theme (Reddit)
  • veschin/nibelung-theme: Nibelung Theme — Minimalist Gray & Blue Emacs Color Scheme (Reddit)
  • Thankful Eyes Theme | Emacs Themes (@andros@activity.andros.dev)
• Navigation:
  • scrollpanel: Modern Minimap-like Scrolling Panel for Emacs
  • Prgebish/flash: Flash-style navigation for Emacs — jump to any location with search labels (Reddit)
  • UPDATED: Auto-Adjust Frame Width when Split-Window-Right & Revert on Delete-Window or Delete-Other-Window
  • easysession.el: Easily persist and restore file buffers, Magit buffers, scratch, Dired, narrowing, indirect buffers (clones), windows, and tab-bar configurations [Release 1.2.0]​ (Reddit)
  • kirigami.el (Release 1.0.4): text Folding across a diverse set of Emacs modes (Reddit)
• Writing:
  • Why and How I am Using Emacs for Writing My Next Novel (Reddit, programming.dev, lemmy.ml, Irreal)
  • bibtex-generate-autokey with manual confirmation using advice-add :filter-return
  • Fancy Fill Paragraph now on MELPA (Reddit)
  • ashton314/citar-typst: Typst support for the Citar package in Emacs - Codeberg.org (Reddit)
• Org Mode:
  • Mapping org-agenda-open-link: reducing the key strokes needed to open links (@curtismchale@mastodon.social)
  • publicvoit/orgheadingnetwork: visualize headings and their implicit (hierarchy) and explicit (links) interconnections - Codeberg.org (@publicvoit@graz.social)
  • Updated org-protocol bookmarklet for storing the current page
  • A reproducible Org-Mode CV template (Reddit)
  • org-babel support for Goal, BQN, and growler/k
  • Behebung von org-babel Shell-Bindungsproblemen in Emacs: Eine Anleitung zur Festlegung Ihrer bevorz (01:50)
  • Org development:
    • etc/ORG-NEWS (Version 9.8 (not released yet)): Update preparing for the release
    • Obsolete 'org-show-empty-lines-in-parent'
    • Remove obsolete 'org-let' and 'org-let2'
• Completion: this month's Emacs Carnival topic
  • An Alternate Completing Read
• Coding:
  • npm-run: Run npm scripts in your project
  • Bozhidar Batsov: Neocaml 0.1: Ready for Action (Irreal)
  • Small patch to build emacs 30.X from source with the 0.26.X version of tree-sitter · GitHub (Reddit)
  • function-artisans/magit-standup: Collect recent git commits for standup notes (Reddit)
  • magit magic - share your latest glorious find in Magit
  • Hacking on Emacs #6: Link the current Magit commit using git-link pt 2 (28:49)
  • magit-gh.el - a lightweight Magit extension for GitHub CLI pull requests (Reddit)
  • 0WD0/majutsu: Majutsu! Magit for jujutsu (lobste.rs)
• Web:
  • benthamite/chrome-to-eww: Chrome extension to open the current page in eww, Emacs’s built-in browser (Reddit)
• Mail, news, and chat:
  • 2026年，一个普通Emacs用户如何把Gnus跑起来
• Evil mode:
  • Prgebish/evil-tex-ts: Tree-sitter based LaTeX text objects for Evil mode (Reddit)
• Doom Emacs:
  • pimacs/lang-protobuf at master · pivaldi/pimacs · GitHub protobuf-ts-mode for editing Protocol Buffers files with full Buf toolchain integration.
• Multimedia:
  • divyaranjan/divya-lambda: Guix channel for emacs-canvas (@divyaranjan@mathstodon.xyz)
  • Discussion on the composability of graphical applications inside Emacs - MonadicSheep/pale - Codeberg.org (@divyaranjan@mathstodon.xyz)
  • minad/emacs-shader-demo: Emacs Shader Demo (Reddit)
  • Demo of killing and yanking a canvas while it's displaying something (ex: a video)
• Fun:
  • Marcin Borkowski: Toy train timetable improvements – buttons
• AI:
  • FrauH0lle/mevedel overlay-based workflow for interacting with LLMs (Reddit)
  • ECA - Subagents are here!
  • James Dyer: Ollama Buddy v2.0 - LLMs can now call Emacs functions! (YouTube 00:41, Reddit)
  • garyo/gco-llm-pkm: A LLM-based front end to my evolving Personal Knowledge Management system(s) (Reddit)
• Community:
  • Fortnightly Tips, Tricks, and Questions — 2026-02-10 / week 06
  • Andros Fenollosa: Emacs is a Fantasy Workstation
    • Emacs es una estación de trabajo de fantasía | Andros Fenollosa (@andros@activity.andros.dev)
• Other:
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: institution-calendar package (University of Oxford/Cambridge, etc.)
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: add custom entity (Austrian school) to my ‘institution-calendar’
  • chamlis/auth-source-pa: A terrible backend for auth-source to use the pa password manager. - Codeberg.org (@chamlis@social.treehouse.systems)
  • Translate popup by agzam · Pull Request #161 · atykhonov/google-translate · GitHub (Reddit)
  • A Note on File History in Emacs | Brain Baking
  • ctietze/quake-frame.el - Codeberg.org - terminal visor-like package that can be toggled with Emacsclient (@ctietze@mastodon.social)
  • Initial gathering towards a "Collaborative Editing Protocol" - Feb 26 19:00 UTC, cross-editor (@teamtype@fosstodon.org)
• Emacs development:
  • Change the default value of 'split-width-threshold' from 160 to 150
  • Add repeat-map for smerge-mode commands
  • delsel.el: Improve the overlay for text replacement
  • etc/NEWS: Improve text for threads' "buffer disposition"
  • New option 'completion-preview-inhibit-functions' (bug#80370)
  • Original behavior of 'overlays-in' and 'overlays-at' has been restored
  • Rewrite flex completion with Gotoh algorithm
  • Tramp signals 'remote-file-error' consequently
  • Allow disabling battery-update-timer
  • icomplete-ret: Ignore icomplete-show-matches-on-no-input
  • system-sleep sleep blocker and sleep/wake event package (bug#80348)
  • Don't remap RET to 'icomplete-ret' in 'icomplete-mode' (bug#62108)
  • Revert "New key 'M-j' for 'icomplete-mode' (bug#62108)"
  • Do cache and timed invalidation in "VC-aware" project backend
• New packages:
  • fancy-fill-paragraph: Fancy paragraph fill (MELPA)
  • flash: Flash-style navigation (MELPA)
  • futur: Future/promise-based async library (GNU ELPA)
  • helm-emoji: Select emojis with Helm (MELPA)
  • lonelog: Solo RPG notation support (MELPA)
  • neocaml: Major mode for OCaml code (MELPA)
  • oboe: A simple temporary buffer management framework (MELPA)
  • pathaction: Execute the pathaction.yaml rules from your editor (MELPA)
  • sail: NOAA tide and wind reports for sailors (MELPA)
  • spatial-window: Jump to windows using keyboard spatial mapping (MELPA)
  • template-literals-ts-mode: Tree-sitter support for HTML/CSS in JS/TS template literals (MELPA)
  • vtab: Vertical tab bar (MELPA)

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 comment on Mastodon or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Tool calling has landed in ollama-buddy!, it’s originally not something I really thought I would end up doing, but as ollama has provided tool enabled models and an API for this feature then I felt obliged to add it. So now LLMs through ollama can now actually do things inside Emacs rather than just talk about them, my original “do things only in the chat buffer and copy and paste” might have gone right out the window in an effort to fully support the ollama API!

What is Tool Calling?

The basic idea is simple: instead of the model only generating text, it can request to invoke functions. You ask “what files are in my project?”, and instead of guessing, the model calls list_directory, gets the real answer, and responds with actual information.

This creates a conversational loop:

1. You send a prompt
2. The model decides it needs to call a tool
3. ollama-buddy executes the tool and feeds the result back
4. The model generates a response using the real data
5. Steps 2-4 repeat if more tools are needed

All of this is transparent - you just see the final response in the chat buffer.

The new ollama-buddy-tools.el module ships with 8 built-in tools:

Safe tools (read-only, enabled by default):

• read_file - read file contents
• list_directory - list directory contents
• get_buffer_content - read an Emacs buffer
• list_buffers - list open buffers with optional regex filtering
• search_buffer - regex search within a buffer
• calculate - evaluate math expressions via calc-eval

Unsafe tools (require safe mode off):

• write_file - write content to files
• execute_shell - run shell commands

Safe mode is on by default, so the model can only read - it can’t modify anything unless you explicitly allow it, I think this is quite a nice simple implementation, at the moment I generally have safe mode off but always allowing confirmation for each tool action, but of course you can configure as necessary.

Example Session

With a tool-capable model like qwen3:8b and tools enabled (C-c W):

>> PROMPT: What defuns are defined in ollama-buddy-tools.el?

The model calls search_buffer with a regex pattern, gets the list of function definitions, and gives you a nicely formatted summary. No copy-pasting needed.

Custom Tools

You can register your own tools with ollama-buddy-tools-register:

 (ollama-buddy-tools-register
'my-tool
"Description of what the tool does"
'((type . "object")
(required . ["param1"])
(properties . ((param1 . ((type . "string")
(description . "Parameter description"))))))
(lambda (args)
(let ((param1 (alist-get 'param1 args)))
(format "Result: %s" param1)))
t) ; t = safe tool

The registration API takes a name, description, JSON schema for parameters, an implementation function, and a safety flag. The model sees the schema and decides when to call your tool based on the conversation.

A ⚒ symbol now appears next to tool-capable models everywhere - header line, model selector (C-c m), and model management buffer (C-c M). This follows the same pattern as the existing ⊙ vision indicator, so you can see at a glance which models support tools.

That’s it. Pull a tool-capable model (qwen3, llama3.1, mistral, etc.) or use an online tool enabled model from ollama and start chatting. Next up is probably some web searching!, as again the ollama API supports this, so you will be able to pull in the latest from the interwebs to augment your prompt definition!

• 1. Vim in five minutes
• 2. Not a tutorial about Vim
• 3. Vim in Emacs: Evil Mode, the emulator par excellence
• 4. Vim in Sublime Text
• 5. Vim in Visual Studio Code
• 6. Vim in Zed: the youngest

1. Vim in five minutes

Vim is not just a text editor, it is an editing language that allows you to interact with text through logical key combinations.

The basis of Vim’s “language” is the “modal” system.

People from the University of Oxford are organising events related to free software: FLOSS @ Oxford.

On Thursday, the 12th of March 2026, at 6 PM United Kingdom time (GMT) I will give a talk titled Computing in freedom with GNU Emacs. My intention is to introduce Emacs to a wide audience. Participation is open to everyone.

I will post a reminder as we get closer to the date of the event. Looking forward to it!

I've been using Emacs for a while now, and if it has taught me anything, it's not to settle.

Every time I open my configuration, I discover something I can do better, a shortcut I didn't know about, a package that changes the way I work. It has taught me to develop patience, not to take the easy path, because nothing works on the first try: I read, I test, I break, I fix. And in that process, without realizing it, I'm building something that is uniquely mine. I will die without having the perfect configuration, and that's a good thing.

This has changed my perception of software itself. For me, Emacs stopped being just an editor (or an Elisp interpreter, no need to get technical) a long time ago. I experience it as a protocol between my tools and myself. A virtual machine that adds a layer of isolation that allows me to work the way I want, regardless of the operating system. I create utilities in Elisp, not in the language compatible with my platform. I'm in a development environment that is also my working environment. It's strange and wonderful at the same time.

Then there's the community. I've met more people thanks to Emacs, or Org Mode, than any other platform or programming language. It's full of talent and people in love with the editor. I recommend exploring the mailing lists, IRC channels, or Org Social itself.

I don't want to leave you with any deep reflection, just to encourage you. It's not easy or fast, but it is rewarding.

Regarding to Emacs crashing: AI found that my Drawin version of Emacs might be the cause. I’ve been using Emacs for Mac OS which ran darwin21.6.0 - old… (current version on macOS is 25.3.0)

The question is, is this really the problem, or more like the AI making stuff up? It makes sense to me that an Emacs build is based on a slightly older Darwin version, though I’m not an expert. Another reason for this suspicion is that the AI assistant recommended emacs-plus without considering emacs for macOS. I know both are solid based on my own research, and I used Emacs-plus (available with Homebrew) for a while. I’ve been using Emacs for macOS for about a year, and it’s been fine until I believe I updated to the latest macOS, which everyone seems to hate, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it has to do with macOS 26 more than anything else.

For now, I installed the latest version of Emacs for macOS, which was built on darwin23.2 - still behind, but not as bad. If this is what’s running Emacs 30.2 for so many Mac users, it further confirms my suspicion that the Darwin version is not really the issue. But maybe I’m wrong.

I posted my question on Reddit to get some feedback, and out of curiosity, see what the Darwin version is for Emacs-plus (don’t want to install it right now). Guess we’ll see.

Bozhidar Batsov has announced the release of the first version of Neocaml, an Emacs major mode for OCaml. Batsov is a big fan of OCaml but wasn’t happy with the existing Emacs major modes for it. So, of course, he started working on his own version. He’s now reached the point where he feels it’s ready to be shared so he’s released Version 0.1. It’s already on MELPA so it’s easy to install if you want to try it out.

Batsov’s post lays out what he feels was wrong with the existing implementations. You can read the details in his post but the TL;DR is that they’re either old and not well maintained or they use the old style font-locking and indentation mechanisms that have been replaced by TreeSitter.

Batsov says that tuareg still has more features than Neocaml but that Neocaml has all the features you’re apt to need. Batsov is, of course, still working on adding additional features including support for more file types and improvements to structured navigation using TreeSitter. He is, of course, very interested in bug reports and pull requests.

neocaml 0.1 is finally out! Almost a year after I announced the project, I’m happy to report that it has matured to the point where I feel comfortable calling it ready for action. Even better - neocaml recently landed in MELPA, which means installing it is now as easy as:

1
M-x package-install <RET> neocaml <RET>

That’s quite the journey from “a fun experimental project” to a proper Emacs package!

Why neocaml?

You might be wondering what’s wrong with the existing options. The short answer - nothing is wrong per se, but neocaml offers a different set of trade-offs:

• caml-mode is ancient and barely maintained. It lacks many features that modern Emacs users expect and it probably should have been deprecated a long time ago.
• tuareg-mode is very powerful, but also very complex. It carries a lot of legacy code and its regex-based font-locking and custom indentation engine show their age. It’s a beast - in both the good and the bad sense of the word.
• neocaml aims to be a modern, lean alternative that fully embraces TreeSitter. The codebase is small, well-documented, and easy to hack on. If you’re running Emacs 29+ (and especially Emacs 30), TreeSitter is the future and neocaml is built entirely around it.

Of course, neocaml is the youngest of the bunch and it doesn’t yet match Tuareg’s feature completeness. But for many OCaml workflows it’s already more than sufficient, especially when combined with LSP support.

I’ve started the project mostly because I thought that the existing Emacs tooling for OCaml was somewhat behind the times - e.g. both caml-mode and tuareg-mode have features that are no longer needed in the era of ocamllsp.

Let me now walk you through the highlights of version 0.1.

Features

The current feature-set is relatively modest, but all the essential functionality one would expect from an Emacs major mode is there.

TreeSitter-powered Syntax Highlighting

neocaml leverages TreeSitter for syntax highlighting, which is both more accurate and more performant than the traditional regex-based approaches used by caml-mode and tuareg-mode. The font-locking supports 4 customizable intensity levels (controlled via treesit-font-lock-level, default 3), so you can pick the amount of color that suits your taste.

Both .ml (source) and .mli (interface) files get their own major modes with dedicated highlighting rules.

TreeSitter-powered Indentation

Indentation has always been tricky for OCaml modes, and I won’t pretend it’s perfect yet, but neocaml’s TreeSitter-based indentation engine is already quite usable. It also supports cycle-indent functionality, so hitting TAB repeatedly will cycle through plausible indentation levels - a nice quality-of-life feature when the indentation rules can’t fully determine the “right” indent.

If you prefer, you can still delegate indentation to external tools like ocp-indent or even Tuareg’s indentation functions. Still, I think most people will be quite satisfied with the built-in indentation logic.

Code Navigation and Imenu

neocaml provides proper structural navigation commands (beginning-of-defun, end-of-defun, forward-sexp) powered by TreeSitter, plus imenu integration definitions in a buffer has never been easier.

The older modes provide very similar functionality as well, of course, but the use of TreeSitter in neocaml makes such commands more reliable and robust.

REPL Integration

No OCaml mode would be complete without REPL (toplevel) integration. neocaml-repl-minor-mode provides all the essentials:

• C-c C-z - Start or switch to the OCaml REPL
• C-c C-c - Send the current definition
• C-c C-r - Send the selected region
• C-c C-b - Send the entire buffer
• C-c C-p - Send a phrase (code until ;;)

The default REPL is ocaml, but you can easily switch to utop via neocaml-repl-program-name.

I’m still on the fence on whether I want to invest time into making the REPL-integration more powerful or keep it as simple as possible. Right now it’s definitely not a big priority for me, but I want to match what the other older OCaml modes offered in that regard.

LSP Support

neocaml works great with Eglot and ocamllsp, automatically setting the appropriate language IDs for both .ml and .mli files. Pair neocaml with ocaml-eglot and you get a pretty solid OCaml development experience.

The creation of LSP really simplified the lives of a major mode authors like me, as now many of the features that were historically major mode specific are provided by LSP clients out-of-the-box.

That’s also another reason why you probably want to leaner major mode like neocaml-mode.

Other Goodies

But, wait, there’s more!

• C-c C-a to quickly switch between .ml and .mli files
• Prettify-symbols support for common OCaml operators
• Automatic installation of the required TreeSitter grammars via M-x neocaml-install-grammars
• Compatibility with Merlin for those who prefer it over LSP

The Road Ahead

There’s still plenty of work to do:

• Support for additional OCaml file types (e.g. .mld)
• Improvements to structured navigation using newer Emacs TreeSitter APIs
• Improvements to the test suite
• Addressing feedback from real-world OCaml users
• Actually writing some fun OCaml code with neocaml

If you’re following me, you probably know that I’m passionate about both Emacs and OCaml. I hope that neocaml will be my way to contribute to the awesome OCaml community.

I’m not sure how quickly things will move, but I’m committed to making neocaml the best OCaml editing experience on Emacs. Time will tell how far I’ll get!

Give it a Try

If you’re an OCaml programmer using Emacs, I’d love for you to take neocaml for a spin. Install it from MELPA, kick the tires, and let me know what you think. Bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests are all most welcome on GitHub!

That’s all from me, folks! Keep hacking!

With my boring productivity system storing any read later links I wanted a faster way to open the link on the current line. Pressing M x brought up search and then I could trigger org-agenda-open-link which would open the link in my default browser.

Too many keystrokes, so I mapped the same command to SPC l g which roughly translates in my head as link go.

Add this to config.el if you want a similar setup.

(map! :leader
      :desc "Org open link at point"
      "l g" #'org-agenda-open-link)

Lately, Emacs on my Mac has been crashing more frequently. I don’t know for sure what it is, and I can’t get much from the logs, but it seems to be somewhat related to images. Perhaps some memory issue.

My research has led me to suspect that perhaps emacs-plus from Homebrew would be better (I’ve been using Emacs for macOS), but I’m not quite sure yet.

Right now I’m too tired to tackle it, so I’m going to crawl to bed. I’ve been too tired and too busy in the evenings to do much of my personal projects, which sucks. Hope to get some stuff done this weekend, but it’s going to be a busy one.

My institution-calendar package for Emacs displays term+week indicators in the *Calendar* buffer (which, by default, is produced by the calendar command). This is useful, for example, for schools who organise their work by terms, such as winter, spring, and summer, with each having a set number of weeks. This is how the University of Oxford will look like:

The package supports the universities of Oxford and Cambridge out-of-the-box, though users can define their own institutions. I have two institutions there to provide concrete examples. I am happy to add more, but the idea is for users to maintain their own data.

Below I show a complete example using data for a school in Austria.

Write the calendar data

To make this work, you first need to specify the data. This has the same structure as institution-calendar-oxford-university-dates and thus passes the test of institution-calendar-valid-data-p. Look at the code for Oxford to get an idea. Here is a sample:

(defvar my-austrian-school-dates
  '((2025 (wintersemester ( 9  8 2025) ( 2  6 2026))
          (sommersemester ( 2 16 2026) ( 7 10 2026)))))

This is an Austrian school that has two terms for the academic year starting in 2025: wintersemester and sommersemester. The symbols for those terms can be anything. Internally, the package uses the first letter to form the week indicator, followed by the number of the week within the given term.

Each term defines a start date and an end date as a list of integers of the form (MONTH DAY YEAR). I picked a form that is consistent with the way calendar.el represents the date, otherwise I would have used a different standard.

Register your institution

The variable institution-calendar-user-entities contains all user-defined institutions and their corresponding calendar data. Each entry is a cons cell of the form (ENTITY . CALENDAR-DATA), where ENTITY is an arbitrary symbol and CALENDAR-DATA is the symbol of a variable that holds the data, as shown in the previous section.

Here is how we can add to this list:

(add-to-list 'institution-calendar-user-entities (cons 'austrian-school 'my-austrian-school-dates))

In this example, I am calling the newly registered institution austrian-school, which is how I can refer to it elsewhere. I am associating this austrian-school with the calendar data of the variable my-austrian-school-dates.

Make the institution-calendar-mode work for your institution

With the aforementioned in place, the user option institution-calendar-entity can be set to the value of austrian-school:

(setopt institution-calendar-entity 'austrian-school)

If the institution-calendar-mode is enabled, then the regular calendar command will display week indicators for this school. This is good if you only need one calendar. But if you work with many institutions and thus need to switch between their calendars, then ignore this step and move to the next one. Or ignore it anyway if you prefer to keep the M-x calendar intact.

Define a custom command for your institution

The macro institution-calendar-define-convenience-command makes it trivial to define a command that produces a calendar buffer for the given institution. This is like M-x calendar with the minor mode institution-calendar-mode enabled, except it does not alter the output of the calendar—so you can use them both (or, anyhow, use as many as the institutions you care about).

;; This defines the command `institution-calendar-austrian-school'.
;; Call `institution-calendar-austrian-school' with M-x or bind it to a key.
(institution-calendar-define-convenience-command austrian-school)

Once you evaluate this macro call, you will get the command institution-calendar-austrian-school. Use that to produce a calendar that works with the austrian-school in particular. If you are curious, M-x institution-calendar-oxford-university will still do the right thing for the University of Oxford. Same for the command institution-calendar-cambridge-university.

Use an intermonth header

The user option institution-calendar-include-intermonth-header adds a header above the week numbers. By default, this only works with the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Though you can extend the package to support your institution by adding to the value of the variable institution-calendar-intermonth-headers. Thus:

(add-to-list 'institution-calendar-intermonth-headers (cons 'austrian-school "AU"))

You can skip this step if you do not plan to display the intermonth header. Those are not shown by default.

Putting it all together

This is how your configuration of the institution-calendar may look like:

(use-package institution-calendar
  :ensure nil ; not in a package archive
  :init
  ;; Install it from source.
  ;; Then upgrade it with the command `package-vc-upgrade' or `package-vc-upgrade-all'.
  (unless (package-installed-p 'institution-calendar)
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/protesilaos/institution-calendar.git"))
  :config
  (defvar my-austrian-school-dates
    '((2025 (wintersemester ( 9  8 2025) ( 2  6 2026))
            (sommersemester ( 2 16 2026) ( 7 10 2026)))))

  (add-to-list 'institution-calendar-user-entities (cons 'austrian-school 'my-austrian-school-dates))

  ;; This defines the command `institution-calendar-austrian-school'.
  ;; Call `institution-calendar-austrian-school' with M-x or bind it to a key.
  (institution-calendar-define-convenience-command austrian-school)

  (setopt institution-calendar-include-extra-week-numbers t)
  (setopt institution-calendar-include-intermonth-header nil)

  ;; These are optional, if you want `M-x calendar' to work for your institution.
  (setopt institution-calendar-entity 'austrian-school)

  (institution-calendar-mode 1))

Sources

• Git repository: https://github.com/protesilaos/institution-calendar
• Screenshot: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-02-11-emacs-institution-calendar/
• Backronyms: Interestingly Nothing Serving Teachers Implement Term Utilities Took Inspiration from Oxford Novices… calendar; Institution … Cambridge Added Lent Entry Notwithstanding Dates Already Recorded.

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atKuEh3_ArA

In this short video I demonstate a new package for GNU Emacs that synchronises the Emacs theme with the GNOME settings for accent color and light/dark mode. Git repository here: https://github.com/protesilaos/gnome-accent-theme-switcher.