Coffee time. I woke up wondering about .org-id-locations. You know, that Emacs file that keeps track of all of your org-mode IDs. How does it know where are the headers in the files it refers to? Is there a size limit? Can I use a different file (or files) if I want to for the hell of it?

What?? Don’t look at me like that. I often think about Emacs just before I fall asleep and when I wake up. Don’t you?

When the Eagles disbanded after a particularly contentious Long Beach concert where Glenn Frey and Don Felder almost came to blows, Don Henley quipped that the band would get back together when Hell freezes over. Fourteen years later the band did reunite and released their new album, Hell Freezes Over.

I was reminded of that when I read Bozhidar Batsov’s latest post on Rediscovering Vim. Most people don’t know that, like me, Batsov used Vim early in his career. He apparently didn’t stay with Vim too long because of its really hideous extension language. I was less interested in customizing my editor back then and stayed with Vim for many years.

Batsov isn’t, of course, abandoning Emacs. He just wants to “rediscover” Vim and see what he can learn from it. He started out with Neovim, which, apparently, most developers in the Vi camp are using now. But he dropped back to Vim so that he could develop his own configuration just as he had with Emacs.

Batsov likes the way Vim has the notion of “text object” and a uniform way of dealing with those objects. As I’ve said before, that’s what makes it so easy to learn and use the Vim key sequences. I don’t really miss Vim but if I did, it would be that aspect that I’d miss the most.

As I’ve also said before, I have significant muscle memory problems trying to use more than a single editor so we here at the Irreal bunker won’t be recreating Batsov’s experiment. And, really, muscle memory notwithstanding, I have no desire to. I’m perfectly happy with Emacs and indulge what little desire I have to tinker with editors to playing with my Emacs configuration.

In my Emacs email setup (notmuch.el using message-mode), I had this for the longest time:

(setq message-default-mail-headers "Cc: \nBcc: \n")

It would insert Cc and Bcc headers into email composition buffers so that I could quickly edit these fields.

However, the message-default-mail-headers insertion is done unconditionally, so when replying to mail with people receiving a carbon copy, I would end up with two such header lines:

To: ada@example.com
Cc: bob@example.com
Cc:
Bcc:

The empty Cc/Bcc lines usually don’t cause trouble, unless there’s already a Cc/Bcc line – then some mail servers reject the email. Spam protection or something. It was not supposed to be this way, and multiple Cc header lines were permitted:

This specification permits multiple occurrences of most fields. —RFC 822, Section 4.1, 1982

See?

But here we are, post-2001, when RFC 2822 deviates with min/max occurrences. I didn’t know! So how do we get there?

Looking at the variable’s origin in code, it says this variable is intended to ease migration from mail-mode. That alerted me to look just above that declaration and find message-default-headers, which accepts a function.

The message-mode manual on “Message Headers” doesn’t offer any more detail on that, but my experiments show that when message-default-headers is called, the mail composition buffer only contains From, To, Subject, and that’s it. No -- to separate header from content, no signature, yet. So I can check whether Cc/Bcc header lines exist:

(defun ct/message-insert-headers () 
  "Inserts CC/BCC headers, but only if they aren't already present."
  (let* ((headers (buffer-substring-no-properties (point-min) (point-max)))
         (additions (list
                     (unless (string-match "^Cc:" headers) "Cc: \n")
                     (unless (string-match "^Bcc:" headers) "Bcc: \n"))))
    (string-join additions)))
    
(setopt message-default-headers #'ct/message-insert-headers)

Well, “insert” is a lie, the function returns the headers, but for the intended use it’s fine with me.

I can perceive a brief flash of changes when composing emails: the buffer appears, then something happens and is inserted immediately. That didn’t happen before – but the call site looks like it would run this (new to me) function before inserting the (previously used) string message-default-mail-headers. So that’s a mystery I can live with.

During all of this, I noticed that message.el is nested in the gnus/ directory. I didn’t realize that this originated in the Gnus newsreader project.

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There’s been a spate of posts lately about navigating among windows in Emacs and The Emacs Cat decided to jump in with a description of their own procedures. I like those procedures because they are essentially the same as mine.

Like The Emacs Cat, I use abo-abo’s ace-window to switch between windows and I don’t understand why anyone would use anything else. The idea is that when it’s invoked, ace-window will label each window with a number and you can then switch to any of the windows by typing requisite number. It’s easy and fast and after several years I haven’t found anything better.

Unlike The Cat, I just bind ace-window to Ctrl+x o. Most of the time it acts exactly like other-window because I typically have two windows open and in that case, ace-winodw simply gives focus to the other window. On those occasions when I have more than two windows open, moving to the correct window is only one additional keystroke. At one time, I also bound F8 to ace-window so I could switch windows even faster but I found I never used it.

I also use

:config (custom-set-faces
     '(aw-leading-char-face
       ((t (:inherit ace-jump-face-foreground :height 3.0)))))

in my use-package definition for ace-window so that the numbers on the windows are bigger.

Take it from The Emacs Cat and me. You really should be using ace-window to handle window navigation. It’s the best there is.

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCgI54VxuK0

At 11:00 AM Europe/Athens, I will start streaming my work on some of the Emacs packages I have authored and maintain. I will engage with the chat, if there are any comments, but my focus will be on the code.

The packages I plan to cover are denote, denote-org, denote-sequence, doric-themes. Depending on how it goes, I will work on more of my packages.

The video will be recorded and can be watched later.

All my Emacs-related work: https://protesilaos.com/emacs.

Last month I watched the book talk Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture by Jennifer Jenkins with James Boyle facilitating the discussion, co-hosted by the Internet Archive and the Authors Alliance:

Looking to get a copy of the book, I found the book’s page on the publisher’s website, Oxford University Press. Seeing it available as an e-book, I opted to go with that as a more eco-friendly option and to save some physical space. I worked my way through the checkout and payment steps, under the impression that I would be purchasing a copy of the book that I could download and do with as I wished. The use of the words “buy” and “purchase” throughout the book page on the publisher’s website certainly did not suggest otherwise.

In hindsight, there were red flags I failed to notice at the time, such as confusing and seemingly redundant, if not contradictory, information on the book page:

“Downloaded copy on your device does not expire.”

Um, okay? I’d sure hope and expect as much about any file I download.

“Includes 4 years of Bookshelf Online.”

Whatever — as long as I could download, store, and use the book offline I’d be happy.

It’s only upon hovering the small and generic, if not misleading, “E-book purchasing help” link that one would be presented with this vaguely informative eyebrow-raising sentence:

E-book purchase

E-books are granted under the terms of a single-user, non-transferable license, and may be accessed online from any location.

“E-books are granted” (??) is news to me. I thought I would have rightful access to something I bought and paid for, rather than being “granted” (read “allowed”) access to it by and through some overlord. Oh but of course, we live in a time where vendors get to redefine well-established words like “purchase” and “buy” on page N of their terms and conditions.

I obviously did not see that “E-book purchasing help” before giving Oxford University Press my money: being a tech-savvy person, I didn’t think I needed any help “purchasing” an e-book.

Everything became clear shortly after I completed the “purchase” and was redirected to VitalSource to access the book: the VitalSource “Bookshelf” user interface offered no way to download a copy of the book I thought I bought and paid for. It is instead a glorified pile of proprietary JavaScript DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) that wraps around the underlying representation of the book in VitalSource’s possession. The only other option for accessing the book would be through VitalSource’s proprietary application available only for certain versions of certain proprietary operating systems.

At this point, the only method I could think of to try and obtain a copy of the book that I could read without subjecting myself to the shackles of DRM or proprietary software was trying to print the book to PDF. Given that VitalSource’s DRM interface is a proprietary wrapper around VitalSource’s likely ePub-based underlying representation (guessing from the presence of epubcfi in the URL of their book renderer page), the book pages are not exposed all at once, practically forcing one to use the interface’s Print function to get all the pages in one go. After waiting what felt like an eternity for the website to prepare a printable version of the book, I was presented with this abomination (click image for sample in original PDF form):

That is a sample of the output generated by the interface’s Print function: an utterly useless, inferior copy of the book that has giant watermarks on every single page, with the only selectable text in the whole book being the repugnant threat at the top of each page — the actual body text of the book is converted to low-resolution, blurry images, and is therefore neither selectable nor searchable.

Going forward, I will NEVER “purchase” anything from Oxford University Press (and most definitely not from VitalSource), so long as they have no problem “selling” [access to] DRM-infested copies of books with no way to download a usable copy of what I paid for.

The key takeaway for me from this whole experience is that due to the sad and sorry status quo of our current times, this kind of insulting (mal)treatment of users is all but common, and really can happen to any one of us. Therefore it is all the more important for us to band together in protest of this, rather than dividing and isolating ourselves through misguided better-than-thou sentiments toward each other.

For Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture, I ordered and a few days later received a paper copy from the local bookstore. It’s a copy I truly own, and can read whenever, wherever, and however I please.

Take care, and so long for now.

References and related links:

• Terms and Conditions - Oxford University Press (saved PDF copy as of 2025-08-18)
• How do I download or print a PDF copy of my book? - VitalSource (spoiler: you can’t)
• VitalSource “Lifetime” false advertising - Consumer Rights Wiki
• The decline of ownership - Louis Rossmann
• Does California enforce its laws? HELP ME FIND OUT! - Louis Rossmann

Most people who know me and follow my open-source work are likely going to be surprised that I’m writing an article about Vim. After all, I’ve been a devout member of the Church of Emacs for 20 years now, and I’ve spent a lot of time preaching the gospel of Emacs and building extensions for Emacs.

I think a lot fewer people know that early on in my career I was using Vim briefly, before switching to Emacs in 2005. In the beginning of this year I felt it was a good time to revisit Vim and (neovim) and see how they’ve evolved compared to my beloved Emacs. It’s never a bad idea to keep an eye on the competition - they are always a great source of “inspiration”.

The main reason why I abandoned Vim back in the day is quite simple - I really dislike Vim script. It was a horrible language back then and I think it’s still a horrible language today.¹ I’ll admit that the rise of neovim (and it’s switch to Lua) was probably the main reason why the thought of revisiting Vim after so many years even crossed my mind. There’s also the fact that it remains the only other editor (besides Emacs), that’s essentially building material for those of us crazy enough to want to build their own editor. Most people don’t care about that, but for me that’s very precious.

Starting with Vim is always intimidating, even if you kind of know the basics. The configuration options are countless and the Vim plugin ecosystem is huge. :help is your friend!

Initially, I focused on neovim for a couple of reasons:

• Lua for the configuration and the plugins
• Built-in support for things like LSP and Tree-sitter
• Many distros and a ton of “modern” plugins

I spent a lot of time with LazyVim (and a bit with Kickstart.nvim) and while I was mostly OK with them, I didn’t like the process of starting with a huge configuration and working from there to make it my own. So, after a bit of soul-searching I’ve decided to start at the very beginning with Vim 9 and a blank .vimrc and work my way up from there, same as I did with Emacs 20 years ago.

For a while I didn’t use any plugins at all, apart from a handful of plugins bundled with Vim. Eventually I had to install a few plugins as Vim is so spartan out-of-the-box, compared to most other editors. I was reminded that you need plugins for basic things like:

• VCS
• commenting out stuff
• surrounding stuff in paired delimiters
• working with paired delimiters in general (e.g. auto-insert/skip closing quotation marks or brackets)

Frankly, I’m a bit shocked how those things never made their way to Vim proper, but I guess there’s some reason for this. Emacs is often considered to be a super-conservative and slow-moving editor, but it almost feels progressive compared to Vim.²

I was also a bit confused by the native Vim 8 package system³, as it’s little more then some predefined locations and structure for the Vim packages. I had expected something closer to Emacs’s package.el. Anyways vim-plug is pretty good and there are a ton of other package managers out there.

Some other pet peeves I have with Vim are:

• seems there’s no way to configure which types of split commands like :help will use (on widescreen displays I always prefer vertical splits)
• lots of commands that shell out essentially take you out of the editor and you have to press some key (e.g. Enter) to proceed back
• configuration options with weird names like “wildmenu” - good luck figuring out what this is without consulting the help!

So, what am I doing with Vim these days? I’m working my way through the classic book “Practical Vim” and gradually building up my modest .vimrc. I’m trying to use Vim for as many tasks as I can (e.g. writing this blog article), but admittedly every time I need to do something more complex I switch back to Emacs. Knowing myself and my habit of always diving deeper than it usually makes sense I’ll likely play a bit with the dreaded Vim script and Vim9 script before revisiting neovim eventually.

The “real” Vim seems to be in a pretty weird place right now:

• Vim9 is here, but few people are interested in using it, as Vim9 won’t be supported on neovim for obvious reasons
• As neovim has much better LSP support, and Tree-sitter support the majority of the developers using Vim have switched to neovim already
• Vim’s future seems quite uncertain after the passing of its author and primary maintainer

Still, for me it’s always fun to learn something new and to challenge myself to work in a different manner. I’ve never really bought the claims that Vim’s modal editing model is better than the competition, but I can’t deny it has a certain charm to it and it often forces you to think about achieving the desired end result with as little keystrokes as possible. I also like the concept of TextObjects (e.g. something between parentheses or a tag) and having an uniform language for interacting with them. neovim really takes this to the next level by adding Tree-sitter objects to the mix. (e.g. blocks, functions, classes, etc)

I’m already at the point where I feel pretty comfortable with the basics and I probably know about Vim than I ever did. Still, I definitely not as productive as I want to be and I often have to pause and think how to adjust my work habits to match the Vim way. One of the areas that I struggle the most with is that it’s very hard to work on multiple projects with the same Vim instance. I know that’s not how most people use Vim, but it’s something I’m quite used to and it’s taking some time to adjust. I’m also struggling with the weird (and very central) file plugin and figuring out how to tweak various settings for different file types. I know that’s subjective, but right now Emacs’s notion of major and minor modes seems pretty fantastic to me in comparison. Oh, well… perhaps I’ll see the light one day!

What’s the endgame with Vim for me? I don’t see myself switching to Vim (or neovim) as my primary editor, but I can imagine adopting evil-mode in Emacs if I start seeing some tangible benefits from Vim’s way. Even before I began my experiments with Vim, I’d occasionally use evil-mode in Emacs when I primarily had to read something as opposed to write it - pressing fewer modifier keys is always nice. The other potential benefit from my foray in the Vim that I envision is that editors like VS Code and Zed typically have a lot better Vim emulation than Emacs, as there are so much more Vim users out there. Recently my F# exploits forced me to spend a bit of time in VS Code and dealing with its native keybindings was a lot of pain for me.

Down the road I plan to write a couple of follow-up articles on things like:

• my Vim configuration
• comparisons between Vim and Emacs today
• some tips and tricks

Perhaps I’ll even write a guide to Vim for Emacs users, as I really needed one when I was starting out.

If you have any tips for aspiring Vim users - please share those in the comments. I’m also happy to get some advice from seasoned experts and to peruse their .vimrc or init.lua.

That’s all I have for you today. Now I have to figure out how to commit this article with Fugitive and exit Vim. Wish me luck!

After the official release of Journelly 1.0, Álvaro Ramírez has not been sitting on his laurels. He has a long list of feature requests from his beta testers and new users and has already released Journelly 1.1 that implements many of them. You can check his announcement for the full list but they’re mostly quality of life enhancements. For example, there’s now a hashtag picker that comes up when you push the # button. He’s also added support for 10 additional languages. There’s more—take a look at his post for the details.

One interesting aspect of his announcement is that he writes about a post from Ellane telling of her experience with Journelly. She makes two very interesting points. The first is that if you sync your Journelly files to the iCloud, you can control click on the directory to keep it always downloaded. That means you always have access to it even if you are offline.

Her second point is more important. I, and many others commenting on Journelly, have stressed that one of its strengths is its integration with Org mode. Ellane says that even if you don’t know what Org is, Journelly is an extraordinarily useful app and well worth having. I made the same point while commenting on someone else’s post but haven’t stressed it enough. My use of Journelly as a memo book would work just as well even if I weren’t an Org/Emacs user. Of course, the fact that I am an Org user makes it even better.

Let me say again that I really like this app. I’ve been using it all day, every day and its ease of use and flexibility have improved my note taking. The other day I was on a web page that I wanted to save to Journelly. I was about to capture the URL and paste it into Journelly when I noticed that Journelly was in the share menu. I just clicked on it and the entry was automatically stored into Journelly for me. What could be easier? And did I mention that I can read and edit the file in Emacs?

Update [2025-05-20 Tue 19:35]: Ramírez reminds me that when you use the share button to add a web page to Journelly, you can highlight text on the web page and that will be added to the Journelly entry along with the page’s URL.

• Emacs 30:
  • Emacs 30.1.90 released: this is Emacs 30.2 pretest #1 (Irreal)
• Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed May 21 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat May 24 0130 America/Vancouver - 0330 America/Chicago - 0430 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/GMT - 1030 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs Berlin (hybrid, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed May 28 0930 America/Vancouver - 1130 America/Chicago - 1230 America/Toronto - 1630 Etc/GMT - 1830 Europe/Berlin - 2200 Asia/Kolkata – Thu May 29 0030 Asia/Singapore
• Emacs configuration:
  • Marie K. Ekeberg: Emacs Quick Tip: Disable key bindings with global-unset-key (Irreal)
  • ELPAs list: Cross archive package listing for looking up packages that may or may not be on MELPA (Reddit)
  • Emacs Repeat Commands (09:45)
  • Solving Emacs Garbage Collection Stutters (Reddit, Irreal)
  • Emacs' Transient.el — a bunch of practical examples. - YouTube (57:14, HN)
  • kickingvegas/casual 2.4.3: supports latest Transient breaking change (transient-define-group), update both; occur in re-builder, electric quotes (@kickingvegas@sfba.social)
  • achyudh/evil-keypad: Modal command dispatch that speaks native Emacs keybindings (Reddit)
  • Rapport Emacs - literate config
  • Supreme Sexp System - SSS 2.3.23 (@sss_project@mastodon.social)
• Emacs Lisp:
  • Speed up Emacs with features, requires, and autoloads (15:45)
  • Marcin Borkowski: Customization variables which require some computation after being set
  • Corwin Brust: Fork of restclient guarding uses of eval
  • Emacs Package Development: The Emacs Reader (III: Multi-Threading) - 5/18/2025, 5:32:23 PM - Dyne.org TV
  • Ep657 emacs lisp generic map functions (hashtable, asso list, property list), google https censor (01:28:16)
• Appearance:
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: my new Doric themes (Reddit)
• Navigation:
  • The Emacs Cat: Windows Navigation in Emacs
  • TIL subword-mode
  • Gestión de proyectos en Spacemacs | Picando Código
• Dired:
  • James Dyer: The Smallest of Productivity Gains by Instantly Opening Dired Files when isearching (Reddit)
• Writing:
  • Groff + Emacs = ☀️ (@bgtdsword@toot.io)
  • gn0/sigh-mode: Emacs minor mode to navigate the buffer sentence-by-sentence and highlight the current sentence
  • mattgemmell/pandoc-novel: Novel export configuration for pandoc (Markdown to ePub and PDF) (@mattgemmell@mastodon.scot)
• Org Mode:
  • Building an Org-mode Workflow: Basic TODOs - Jeff Bradberry (2022)
  • Anyone else use emacs + org-roam for maths notes? (Reddit)
  • Adding Canadian provincial holidays to Org Mode agenda: diary + org-agenda-include-diary
  • A richer Journelly org capture template (r/orgmode, r/emacs, Irreal) - capture location and weather
  • Org Mode requests: [RFC] Should we allow search options for all links types? (was: [PATCH] lisp/ox.el: Fix export of id links with search string)
  • Formatting Academic Papers in Emacs Orgmode (@kf@sonomu.club)
  • Changing the org babel execute function (ex: elixir-ts instead of elixir)
  • A little trick in my literary programming - export with a custom comment linking back to the file
  • @hajovonta@mastodon.online: cfw got org-table import/export functionality
  • Org-roam is not for me (Reddit)
• Denote:
  • Blogging with Sphinx and denote.el — Alex Carney (@alcarney@mastodon.social)
• Completion:
  • TAONAW - Emacs and Org Mode: - consult-recent-file, consult-org-agenda.
• Coding:
  • TIL which-function-mode shows the current function in modeline
  • Copy and paste tracebacks into emacs with clickable links
  • Ruby: sane sorbet-ls setup in Emacs → Gosha Tcherednitchenko
  • How to insert pairs without fancy packages in Emacs (04:14)
  • Emacs Electric-Pair-Mode (04:59)
  • REPL Driven Development in Python with emacs
  • Starting uv.el – an Emacs frontend package for the uv Python package and project manager
  • (within parens…): Getting into a rabbit's hole and - maybe - getting out: Emacs Make Compile (EMC) (@marcoxa@mastodon.social, Github, Reddit)
  • fj.el fixes: item view, notifications, PR item view
  • New Package: Eljira - An Emacs Interface for Jira (programming.dev)
• Math:
  • applied-science/emacs-vega-view: A mode to facilitate interactive data visualization using Vega from within emacs
• Web:
  • Joar von Arndt: Web browsing in Emacs
• Mail, news, and chat:
  • TIL message-dont-reply-to-names
• Doom Emacs:
  • My Literate Doom Emacs Configuration ·
• Fun:
  • Packages related to Magic the Gathering
  • Emacs transpose buffer (Reddit)
• AI:
  • Make Your First Request to OpenAI/ChatGPT From Emacs Lisp | lesson 06 - YouTube (also, course, Reddit discussion)
  • Alvaro Ramirez: LLM text chat is everywhere. Who’s optimizing UX? (Reddit, lobste.rs)
  • Letting LLMs search my bbdb, and compose emails - Lemmy
  • Using gptel tools to let gpt control a turtle for drawing (Reddit)
• Community:
  • emacs.si srečanje maj 2025 (@len@toot.si)
• Other:
  • divyaranjan/emacs-reader 0.2.0 LispIndus - Codeberg.org - beginnings of a fast and smooth document reader (@divyaranjan@mathstodon.xyz)
  • Emacs weather for wttr.in in modeline.
  • weather-metno, a weather forecast package gets a major overhaul
  • Best keyboard for Emacs? (Irreal)
    • My Emacs Keyboard – Paul Jorgensen - Karbiner Elements on MacOS (Irreal)
  • An FAQ for the Emacs Widget Manifesto · Aleksandr Petrosyan
• Emacs development:
  • emacs-devel: Has anyone worked on porting Emacs to run under Plan 9?
  • Prettify and improve hideshow (bug#78234)
  • New pulse functions for pulse faces and new file for ring bell fns
  • New top-level buffer-local value functions
  • Scroll with mouse wheel in calendar (bug#78298)
• New packages:
  • aidev-mode: Minor mode for AI-assisted development (MELPA)
  • cppinsights: Integration with cppinsights tool (MELPA)
  • epx: Manage and run project-specific shell commands (MELPA)
  • org-mem: Fast info from a large number of Org file contents (MELPA)
  • overleaf: Sync and track changes live with overleaf (MELPA)
  • pdd: HTTP library & Async Toolkit (MELPA)
  • sol-mode: Major mode for editing Solidity code (MELPA)
  • too-wide-minibuffer-mode: Shrink minibuffer if the frame is too wide (MELPA)

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, r/planetemacs, 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 and thanks to tusharhero for some links as well. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

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

Another IRC user, technomancy, created a fork of restclient today after noticing some evals.

Here's the new repository: https://git.sr.ht/~technomancy/restclient.el

The delta is small, simply guarding these behind options (which can be setup per "trusted" file/buffer). I'm sure he'd be interested in your further thoughts if you happen to be an IRC user; I'm not sure how much work he plans to put into this other than immediately offering "a simple fix" believing the package might be somewhat undermaintained currently.

In response to my post on the best emacs keyboards, Paul Jorgensen has a very interesting post of how he leverages software to turn the standard Apple keyboards into Emacs specific keyboards and make them better suited to his needs outside of Emacs as well.

Oddly, he doesn’t have RSI problems so his changes are simply for keyboard efficiency. His post is interesting because it shows how far you can get with a standard, builtin keyboard through software.

Jorgensen uses a combination of Emacs configuration and Karabiner-Elements to customize his keyboard layout. It’s nowhere near what I’d want but that’s not the point. You can use his strategy to configure your keyboard to your requirements.

The lesson from all this is that you don’t (necessarily) need a special keyboard to make it amenable to Emacs or whatever else you’re using. Happily, I don’t require much more than mapping caps lock to Ctrl, choosing a key for Hyper, and choosing a key for Super. All that’s easily done from within Emacs and standard macOS.

All of this is significant because although there are now plenty of excellent third party keyboards available, many—or most—of us are using laptops as our main computers and often don’t have the option of using third party keyboards. Being able to use software to reconfigure our standard keyboards to our liking is a huge win.

If this sort of thing interests you, take a look at Jorgensen’s post. As I said, you don’t have to make the same choices that he did. His process will allow you to make just about any configuration possible.

Eli Zaretskii has announced that the first pretest for Emacs 30.2 is now available for testing. That’s great news. It’s nice to see that development is proceeding apace with the planned bug releases between the—more or less—yearly major releases.

As I always say, if you don’t mind living on the edge a tiny bit, download and test this new release. And as I also always say, thanks to Eli and all the other developers who give so much to our community. They’re real heroes and deserve the gratitude of us all.

One of the killer features of Journelly for many of us is that Journelly’s data is stored as Org Mode markup and that this data is easily synced to the iCloud so that it can be shared among all your devices, including a Mac. That means that you can display and edit the Journelly data just like any other Org file.

It also means that you can make an Org Mode template to add entries to the file right from your Mac. When you do, the entries will show up in the Journelly app just as you’d expect. That’s significant because it means you can take Journelly notes from any of your devices.

Early on, while the app was still in beta, Jack Baty wrote about a template he was using for just this purpose. Ramírez, of course, had his own version. A limitation of both versions was that they didn’t capture the location and weather information. Baty remarked that it shouldn’t be too hard to add that and I remember thinking it was something I should do as soon as I got a chance.

It turns out that it’s a bit harder than I thought. Ramírez has a new post that shows how to do it. Part of the problem is that access to the weather APIs on the Mac require an API key and there’s apparently no easily accessible API for location so Ramírez had to use third party apps for both of these. Even so, it didn’t take much code and now he has a template that captures data and displays it in Journelly just as if it had been entered there in the first place.

If you’d like to try this out, the code is available on GitHub here.

Last week there were some quite interesting posts about windows management in Emacs — Emacs’ windows navigations and some Emacs zen (a review by Irreal), Emacs window management tweaking, for instance.

In this regard, I’ve decided to share my configuration for the issue.

For switching between windows in Emacs I use the ace-window package by Oleh Krehel aka abo-abo, a renowned author of such gems as Hydra, avy, Swiper, and others. Most of these packages have found their place in my .emacs.

My configuration is quite simple.

(use-package avy :ensure t)
(use-package ace-window :ensure t
  :after avy
)

(global-set-key [(f2)]  #'ace-window)

The main function, ace-window is meant to replace other-window by assigning each window a short, unique label. When there are only two windows present, other-window is called… If there are more, each window will have its first label character highlighted. Once a unique label is typed, ace-window will switch to that window.
…
By default, ace-window uses numbers for window labels so the window labeling is intuitively ordered.

I’ve bound ace-window to <F2>. Why <F2>? For ergonomic reasons. On most keyboards, the numeric keys (1-2-3-…) are located right under the <F2> key. It would be easy to press <F2> then, for example, 2 using the same finger.

The ace-window package has many other options; you can find more detailed information at the ace-window GitHub repository.

Happy emacsing!

— The Emacs Cat.

One of the strengths—or weaknesses, depending on your point of view—of Lisp is garbage collection. That means that memory no longer in use is automatically collected and made available to the system without depending on the programmer to release it the way we do in, say, C. Of course, that comes at a cost. Garbage collection can block other operations while it’s running. That’s especially true in the single threaded Emacs.

One often sees complaints about this in the various forums. There’s all sort of advice about what to do. Some say you should set the garbage collection threshold (the amount of collectible memory) high so that garbage collection isn’t triggered as often. Of course, that means that it takes longer to collect the unused memory.

Another suggestion is to set the threshold low so that unused memory can be collected quickly. That means, though, that garbage collection is run more often. Depending on your workflow, either—or possibly both—of these strategies may work well for you.

There’s a third, arguably better, strategy: only garbage collect when the system is idle. That’s facile advice, of course, because it begs the question of how you know when the system is idle. There’s a useful heuristic. If the system has been idle for x seconds it will probably continue being idle long enough for a garbage collection cycle. The question then boils down to the proper value for x.

Jack Jamison believes x should be small and uses 1.2 seconds in his implementation of this strategy. He says that he’s had excellent results with that value. The older GCMH system uses 15 seconds.

I’ve been using GCMH was several years and can’t remember having any garbage collection issues since I started. GCHH lets you configure the idle time but the 15 second setting has been working well for me so I’m not inclined to mess with it.

In any event, if your Emacs is experiencing garbage collection delays it’s worth trying this strategy. If you want a simple prepackaged solution, GCMH is for you. If you want to keep everything in your init.el and avoid external packages, take a look at Jamison’s post to get started.

Two Eamcs tweaks I forgot about (most of you will know these):

Use Consult’s recentf to see a list of files that were edited recently:

  (global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-r") 'consult-recent-file)

Consult’s org-agenda (jump to heading) is quicker than what I usually do, which is to list all ACTIVE keywords in emacs (this is how I list my projects), and then go down the tree to find the specific TODO header I want.

Since I often know what I’m looking for within active projects, I can use consult-org-agenda, which narrows headers dynamically as I search. Much faster and clutter-free:

  (global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-h") 'consult-org-agenda)

Back before I became an Emacser, a friend who was an Emacser said that I shouldn’t worry about the Emacs keybindings because I could configure them to be whatever I want. I remember thinking that that would be disaster. After all, what would I do if I were using Emacs on someone else’s computer or even setting up a new computer.

Now, of course, I have a very individualistic configuration that makes working on someone else’s computer uncomfortable. Uncomfortable but not impossible. That’s because although I have all sorts of specialized editing commands, I’ve left the “vanilla” editing commands—cursor movements, file visiting and saving, and other standard operations—alone. That means that if I use someone else’s Emacs I can edit successfully, if not optimally, as long as the guest Emacs also didn’t mess with the standard bindings.

That’s why I’m not entirely sympathetic to The MKat’s post on how to unset default key bindings. She’s got a lot of great advice on how to delete keybindings and I agree that it’s useful information to have. My objection is to the notion that you should delete bindings that you don’t like.

Just yesterday, I discussed how modern keyboards aren’t optmal for Emacs so it’s natural to want to fix that somehow. Yesterday’s post suggests some ways of doing that but none of them involve changing default keybindings.

Sure, some folks have special needs that make one binding or another difficult but in general, I think it’s a bad idea to be messing with them. Of course, this is Emacs and everyone can adjust it to their liking. I’m not arguing with that. I’m only saying that if you stay with the defaults it will be easier for you to use an alien Emacs.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, surveypoodle asks a perennial question: what are the best keyboards for Emacs? He points out that Emacs pinky seems to have appeared rather late in the editor’s history and speculates that that’s because the keyboards originally used with Emacs were better suited for it than modern keyboards that make many of the bindings awkward. He’s asking what modern keyboards are best for dealing with RSI.

If you’re interested in an answer to the question, see the comments to surveypoodle’s post. There are all sorts of suggestions. Reading through them, I realized that I didn’t care.

I used to yearn for a reincarnation of the Space Cadet keyboard—okay, I still have some vestigial urges—but I realized that these days I do virtually all my work on my laptop. I’m guessing the same is true many of us. Regardless, the use of a laptop pretty much makes the choice of a keyboard for you. Sure, you can use a third party keyboard but unless you’re always working at (the same) desk it’s just too much trouble. As I’ve said before, I do a lot of my work on the couch so an external keyboard isn’t a practical choice for me.

What to do? As much as it has become a cliche, Emacs pinky—or more generally Emacs induced RSI—is a real thing.The best solution I’ve found is some simple keyboard modifications. I’m using a MacBook Pro so keyboard firmware modifications aren’t an option. What I can do, though, is arrange for the modifier keys I use the most to be easy to reach. Two of those, Ctrl and Hyper are, configurable from within Emacs or macOS. The Meta key is bound to Alt by default so there’s nothing to do there. What all this means is that binding Ctrl to caps lock and Hyper to ⌘ Right Cmd, I can use my thumbs for Meta and Hyper and that Ctrl is an easy reach for my pinky.

I know that a lot of you are doing the same or similar things. If you’ve got a better solution, leave a comment.

If you’re an Emacs user (which I know you are), especially one who lives in dired-mode, you’re probably familiar with the quick power of isearch for finding files or directories. But if you’re like me, you might have noticed a tiny speed bump in the workflow: after finding a file or directory with isearch, you would typically have to hit <enter> to exit the search, and then <enter> again to open the entry. That’s two steps for something that feels like it should be one and this has been a very minor annoyance for me for a very long time now.

I had a little time to shave some more yak hair, so lets try and address this!

The solution I came up with was to add a bit of advice to isearch-exit, so now, when you’re in dired-mode and you use isearch to locate a file or directory, pressing <enter> will both exit the search and immediately open the file or directory, no need for a second confirmation.

Here’s the magic!

(defadvice isearch-exit (after dired-enter-directory-or-file activate)
  "In dired mode, enter directory or open file after isearch."
  (when (eq major-mode 'dired-mode)
    (let ((file (dired-get-file-for-visit)))
      (when file
        (dired-find-file)))))

The only thing I am a little worried about are the side effects, but I guess we shall see…

And another thing, now my dired navigation is one step smoother; how much time generally is it going to save me? Was it worth the effort?.

Let’s say, conservatively, that I have pressed that extra Enter 100 times each day. Each press takes, say, 150 ms, accounting for human reaction times, even though it isn’t really a reaction, more of a muscle memory response.

Let’s do the calculations! I have no idea why I’m doing this, but maybe I can validate the amount of time I spent on this for future time-saving gains. Maybe it will make me feel better about the countless hours of yak shaving I have done over many years (with Emacs, of course, although I do have a yak in the garden shed that really needs some attention!)

So, the savings are as follows:

• Day: 15 seconds
• Week: 105 seconds
• Month: 7 minutes
• Year: 1 hour 24 minutes

Well, the yearly total is probably about the amount of time I actually took to implement this, so that means in a year I will be making productivity gains! Sweeeeeeet!

The doric-themes is my new in-development package for Emacs. It is a set of themes that conform with a minimalist aesthetic: they use few colours and appear monochromatic in many contexts. Below are the screen shots.

In terms of my overall theme work for Emacs, the doric-themes are the most minimalist, ef-themes the most maximalist, and the modus-themes remain what I consider the best “default theme” style. All of them are designed to be highly legible.

I plan to add doric-themes to GNU ELPA within the next days. For the time being, they are only available from source code: https://github.com/protesilaos/doric-themes.

Finally, the backronym for “Doric” is “Doric Only Really Intensifies Conservatively”.

Enjoy your new theme!

Samples

doric-light

doric-marble

doric-earth

doric-wind

doric-dark

doric-obsidian

doric-fire

doric-water

• Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
  • Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #5 2025 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/5302f53d-05cd-437b-b885-80f07d307f31 Tue May 13 1900 CET
  • OrgMeetup (virtual) https://orgmode.org/worg/orgmeetup.html Wed May 14 0900 America/Vancouver - 1100 America/Chicago - 1200 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1800 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu May 15 0000 Asia/Singapore
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed May 21 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat May 24 0130 America/Vancouver - 0330 America/Chicago - 0430 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/GMT - 1030 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore
• Upcoming events:
  • Emacs APAC: Announcing Emacs Asia-Pacific (APAC) virtual meetup, Saturday, May 24, 2025
• Emacs configuration:
  • A few tweaks to Emacs (without elisp) to make it nicer (03:45)
  • Hiding Buffers in Emacs (Reddit)
  • Opening the Emacs Initialization File, or First Impressions Matter (Reddit, Irreal)
  • New Emacs Distribution: Nox Emacs
  • James Dyer: Discovering Treasures in Emacs-solo
  • dotfiles/.spacemacs at main · basteez/dotfiles (@basteez.bsky.social)
  • jjba23/sss: Supreme Sexp System - SSS 2.3.15 (@sss_project@mastodon.social)
  • minimal-emacs.d - init.el and early-init.el with Better Emacs Defaults and Faster Startup (Release: 1.2.1) (Reddit)
• Emacs Lisp:
  • Enhancing Git Diff for Emacs Lisp: Better Git Diff of Elisp function or macro definitions (Reddit, Irreal)
• Appearance:
  • Colourless themes for Emacs
• Navigation:
  • Hoagie's corner of the internet - Emacs: toggle narrowing (Reddit, Irreal)
  • TIL sr-speedbar for navigation (@lhp@mastodon.social)
  • TAONAW - Emacs and Org Mode: Emacs' windows navigations and some Emacs zen (Irreal)
    • TAONAW - Emacs and Org Mode: window management, terminology
• TRAMP:
  • Tip: TRAMP supports Gnome online accounts, so you can use it for Nextcloud files
• Org Mode:
  • My Exobrain - This is how I'm keeping my Org-mode files organized (Reddit, @jworthe@fosstodon.org)
  • Consistent Technical Documents Using Emacs and Org Mode Applying Literate Programming to Technical Writing
  • Jack Baty: Set point at first heading when opening Org mode file
  • Org-mode: Select a heading for link with completion, but use ID property for link heading text as default description · GitHub
  • (release) org-include-inline
  • catsup: pomodoro timers, Org (@caranmegil@mastodon.social)
  • On Orgmode and Obsidian: PTPL 151 · Why the Openest of Open Formats Isn’t the One for Me - Ellane W
  • @noctuaminervae is the new Worg maintainer (@bzg@floss.social)
  • Org Mode requests: [FR] Adding custom indices for Texinfo export (and maybe unaffiliated dual-value keywords?)
  • Org Mode requests: [FR] Accept nil outline path for file+olp+datetree org-capture-templates target
• Completion:
  • Tim Heaney: Magic completions in rust-analyzer
• Coding:
  • Tip: jq-interactive lets you run and edit dynamic searches across the current json buffer (@choffee@mastodon.me.uk)
  • Improving Frappe Developer Experience in Emacs | Ruthra Kumar (33:46)
  • A New Way to Edit Jupyter Python Notebooks in Emacs (Reddit)
  • Marcin Borkowski: Coloring Git output in Magit
  • Introducing nix-flakes.el: A Simple Emacs Package for Managing Nix Packages
• Shells:
  • Shell Scripts in Emacs: The Cyber Ghost’s Shortcut to Flow – Tom's IT Cafe (@TomsITCafe@mastodon.social)
  • Tip: sh-execute-region
• Doom Emacs:
  • IT'S ALIVE !! Doom Emacs On Windows (23:12)
• Fun:
  • dynasty-reader.el: Read MANGA comics in Emacs
• AI:
  • Control Emacs with Model Context Protocol (MCP) (04:05, (Reddit)
• Community:
  • Fortnightly Tips, Tricks, and Questions — 2025-05-06 / week 18
  • Emacs Elements channel is back!
• Other:
  • emacs — Matt Gemmell (@mattgemmell@mastodon.scott)
  • Jeremy Friesen: Migrating to Linux: Getting Emacs Installed (@takeonrules@dice.camp)
  • orgrr update: orgrr-super-compile-sequence (@laotang@mastodon.social)
  • The Emacs widget toolkit | Aleksandr Petrosyan (HN)
  • BSAG » All the editors (@bsag@social.lol)
  • Progress on Emacs Lisp interpreter in Scheme
• Emacs development:
  • emacs-devel:
    • Re: Failure building Emacs master on MSYS2 [MSYS2 PKG]​ - x86_64-pc-cygwin seems to be the future
    • Third-Party url.el replacement or wrapper packages
    • Re: Failure building Emacs master on MSYS2 [MSYS2 PKG]​ - msys supposed to be used only to build tools required to build packages using Autoconf
  • Fall back `eww-switch-to-buffer' to `eww'
  • New vc-async-checkin user option
  • Recenter for the calendar (bug#78205)
  • Derived types (i.e. 'cl-deftype') can now be used as method specializers
  • lisp/register.el (register-read-with-preview-traditional): Use PRED
  • ; * etc/NEWS: Add 'comment-setup-function'.
• New packages:
  • bookmarks-menu: Add a Bookmarks menu to the menu bar (MELPA)
  • cuckoo-search: Content-based search and saved-searches for Elfeed (MELPA)
  • jsonp: Resolve JSON pointers in ELisp objects (MELPA)
  • tomlparse: A straight-foward tree sitter based parser for toml data (MELPA) (Reddit)

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

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

Courtesy of JTR from The Art Of Not Asking Why, here’s a handy tip for dealing with window placement when bringing up a Dired buffer. There are two problems.

The first doesn’t really concern window placement. Most often JTR wants to bring up a Dired buffer for whatever directory he’s already in. The easy way to do that is to use dired-jump (bound to Ctrl+x Ctrl+j) to open a buffer in the same directory as the current file.

The problem with that is that it opens the Dired buffer in the current window. JTR doesn’t want that. He wants to open Dired in some other window so that he can see his current file and the Dired buffer. The answer to that is simple: just ask Emacs to open Dired in another window. There’s a general protocol for doing that. Simply use Ctrl+x 4 Ctrl+J to call Dired. That will open Dired in the same directory as the current file but in another window.

The Ctrl+x 4 … works for a lot of commands. I use it to open files or buffers in another window several times a day. I used to consider it an esoteric maneuver but now I use it all the time. You can also open your windows in another frame by using 5 instead of 4.

The 4/5 protocol doesn’t work for all commands but it does for a lot of them. It’s a real time saver that I use repeatedly. It’s well worth internalizing.

This month’s Emacs Asia-Pacific (APAC) virtual meetup is scheduled for Saturday, May 24, 2025 with BigBlueButton and #emacs on Libera Chat IRC. The timing will be 1400 to 1500 IST.

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

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

As I was looking more into widows management in Emacs, particularly viewing System Crafters' video about the topic which I mentioned in my previous post, I learned a couple of things (or maybe re-learned? I probably used to know about them at some point in the past).

One of my issues with windows in Emacs right now is that whenever I open Dired, it takes over my current window. I often just want to view my files in the directory my current buffer is in.

The answer is simple: instead of opening Dired (C-x d), just “jump” into Dired in another window, which is dired-jump-other-window or C-x 4 C-j. This improves my workflows twice: first, I usually want to open Dired in the directory the buffer I’m working in is, and second, I want it in another window. With this command, I don’t need to specify the directory; it just takes me where I want¹.

Also, as I was writing this post, I realized another problem with Emacs windows placement was actually my problem all along (user error dance, anyone?): C-x b is bound to consult-buffer-other-window on my system, which does what it says, opening the buffer I want in the other window. I thought this was the command to open a buffer, forgetting that there’s such a thing as opening a buffer in the other window. Using the logic I just learned, it would probably make more sense to bind consult-buffer-other-window to C-x 4 b (for me, it runs the default Emacs switch-to-buffer-other-window, which I don’t use²) and then consult-buffer (which is not bound to anything for me) to be C-x b. This will disrupt my muscle memory for a while, but eventually it will lead to a better workflow.

Another nice thing I didn’t know and learned from watching this video is that I can scroll up and down in the other window while still keeping the focus on the current buffer with M-pgup and M-pgdn. This is nice if I want to read help documentation while working on something, reading definitions with Emacs' built-in dictionary, or maybe using Occur or something similar, where just reading for reference is enough.

Then we have a built-in way to move between windows that I was looking for a while: windmove. Turns out it’s been there since Emacs 21, which means that for me, it was there all this time, and I didn’t know about it. Windmove lets you switch between windows using the shift and arrow keys by default, so that S-up would move you one window up, while S-down will move you down. You need to enable it and then enable its default keybindings, or assign it alternative keybindings.

Looking at these key-bindings, I can see why it’s turned off by default. Shift plus an arrow key is used extensively in org-mode, for example, so you can’t use these keys. Using something else, say, C+M+left or C+M+right, is not good either because on Linux, this will “swish” your workplaces (“spaces” in macOS), while the meta key plus an arrow is also taken by something else in Emacs… you get the idea, finding the keys to use is getting a bit problematic. You need to figure out what you can give up, or find a creative shortcut that works for you specifically. However, this seems too useful to pass up, so I think I’m going to dedicate keys to it very soon.

The video also goes over windmove’s sibling, windmove-swap-states-[direction], which switches the windows in the direction you tell it. So if I am working on this post in a window that is above a list of links I’m using as reference in the window below in another buffer, I can use windmove-swap-states-down to switch. Now I will be working in the lower window, and the list of links will be in the window above. This is good if I want my list of files in Dired to the window to the right, but dired-jump-other-window opened it in the window below, for example. Nice, it saves a few C-x 0 and C-x 1 maneuvers.

Then there are the external packages, of course. ace window is probably the most popular one, and this video provides a brief demonstration of it. The idea is that it numbers the windows for you on the screen, and then you select a number to jump to a window. Another package I learned about is winum, which is built on top of this idea, but it displays the window number in the minibuffer of each window all the time, and then it’s a matter of C-x # to jump to that window. It integrates into Emacs better in my opinion, and if you use many windows, it probably makes sense. I usually have no more than four windows open at once, so using the built-in windmove is probably better.

Alright, I’m off to rebind some keys and do some tweaking! Then we will see how much I need to mess with Emacs’s built-in logic for windows placement. It might just make a little more sense now.

Footnotes

¹: it’s building on dired-jump (C-x C-j), which opens dired in the directory the buffer I’m in. So, if I’m working on bills.org, which is under ~/Documents/personal/, dired-jump will open dired inside ~/Documents/personal/. The problem for me is that it will take over my current buffer (where I have bills.org open), which I don’t want; this is where dired-jump-other-window comes in: it will open Dired in a separate window.

²: this Emacs keys and windows management rabbit hole makes me re-appriciate Emacs’s default key binding. They’re there for a reason. They might not make sense at start… or maybe for several years, depending on how often and how much you use Emacs and what for, but now I see how C-x 4 is an entire family of key combinations tied to “other window” functions and then other key bindings start to make sense. For some of you veteran Emacs users, this might be obvious, but for me, that’s a slap on the forehead with a “Ohhh! So this is why this keybinding is like this!”