You open your favorite editor, and, out of the box, Emacs writes state files all over the place. It puts bookmarks in ~/.emacs.d/, drops #auto-saves# next to every file you edit, leaves .~lockfiles~ in your projects, scribbles recentf, history, saveplace, projects, transient/history.el, tramp, network-security.data, multisession/, url/, image-dired/, erc/, rcirc/... you get the picture. The features are great, don't get me wrong. The default locations are what annoy me.

Most of those files are not noise. They are the state that makes Emacs feel like Emacs across restarts. So you cannot just delete them. But you also do not want them spread across N different directories with cryptic names. (I know I don't.)

I want one directory I control, every cache-bound variable pointing inside it, and a switch to flip it between "persistent inside my config" and "ephemeral in /tmp". No external package, no naming scheme to memorize, just a small pattern I can read top to bottom in init.el.

My emacs-solo config used to hard-code a single relative path under user-emacs-directory for all these cache files. It worked, but it was inflexible. A user opened an issue asking if the cache location could be changed without forking the config, since they wanted those files somewhere else entirely. So I redesigned it around a defcustom root and an alist of relative paths, switchable through M-x customize. The version below is the same idea with the emacs-solo names dropped.

Our goal

Patch these three pieces:

→ cache directory: holds every piece of mutable state Emacs writes during a session.

→ alist map: lists every variable that needs to be pointed at that directory.

→ helpers: one resolve a key to an absolute path, and another pre-creates every directory so we never get "no such file or directory" warnings at startup.

In practice, a .emacs.d directory ends up looking like this:

.
├── cache
│   ├── auto-saves
│   ├── erc
│   ├── image-dired
│   ├── multisession
│   ├── rcirc
│   ├── transient
│   ├── url
│   └── ...
├── eln-cache
│   └── 32_0_50-25c5b284
├── eshell
│   └── history
├── init.el
└── tree-sitter
	├── libtree-sitter-markdown-inline.dylib
	└── libtree-sitter-markdown.dylib

Our switchable base directory

Start with a defcustom for the root. Using defcustom (instead of defvar) lets you change the value through M-x customize without editing init files, and the choice persists in custom.el:

(defcustom my/cache-directory
  (expand-file-name "cache/" user-emacs-directory)
  "Base directory for Emacs cache files.
All entries in `my/cache-paths' are resolved relative to this
directory.  Choose one of the presets or supply any custom path.
Changes take effect after restarting Emacs."
  :type `(choice
		  (const     :tag "Inside Emacs config  (cache/ in user-emacs-directory)"
					 ,(expand-file-name "cache/" user-emacs-directory))
		  (const     :tag "System temp          (/tmp/emacs-cache/)" "/tmp/emacs-cache/")
		  (directory :tag "Custom directory"))
  :group 'my)

The default puts everything under ~/.emacs.d/cache/, which keeps the rest of ~/.emacs.d/ clean and lets you back up or delete the whole cache as one directory. The /tmp/ preset is for sessions that should leave no trace. The directory choice lets you point at any custom path.

I use user-emacs-directory instead of a literal ~/.emacs.d/ because Emacs 29 added the --init-directory flag, which lets you launch Emacs against any config directory. I use it constantly to try other people's configs side by side with my own without touching ~/.emacs.d/. Anchoring on user-emacs-directory means the cache follows whichever config Emacs was started with, instead of every alternate config writing into the default ~/.emacs.d/ and stepping on each other.

In my early-init.el I already load custom-file, but I reload it here too. customize writes its changes to custom.el immediately, so if you change the cache directory mid-session through M-x customize and then restart, you want the new value to apply before the rest of init.el runs and calls my/cache--path:

(when custom-file
  (load custom-file 'noerror 'nomessage))

The when guard is there because in a brand-new config custom-file is nil, and (load nil 'noerror 'nomessage) signals (wrong-type-argument stringp nil) and aborts the rest of init.el. The 'noerror flag suppresses file-error, not type errors.

This whole reload is a bit of a hack. Loading custom-file twice during startup just to get a defcustom value hot before the next form is not what Emacs intends. It only matters the first time you switch presets. Without it, you would wonder why your new /tmp/emacs-cache/ is empty while your old ~/.emacs.d/cache/ keeps receiving writes.

Our single alist as the source of truth

The next piece is the mapping from keys to relative paths.

How you organize this alist is your call. The list below is what I wire through my/cache-path in my own config, but plenty of users will split things differently. I deliberately keep tree-sitter/, eln-cache/, and eshell/ outside this alist. tree-sitter and eln-cache are populated by long-running, expensive processes (grammar compilation, native compilation) that I want to survive when I reset my cache, so they live next to the config under user-emacs-directory directly. eshell carries my command history and aliases, which I treat more like dotfiles than throwaway state. Your workflow will pull these differently, and that is fine.

(defvar my/cache-paths
  '(;; Files:
	(bookmark-file               . "bookmarks")
	(ielm-history-file-name      . "ielm-history.eld")
	(project-list-file           . "projects")
	(recentf-save-file           . "recentf")
	(savehist-file               . "history")
	(save-place-file             . "saveplace")
	(transient-history-file      . "transient/history.el")
	(transient-levels-file       . "transient/levels.el")
	(transient-values-file       . "transient/values.el")
	(tramp-persistency-file-name . "tramp")
	(nsm-settings-file           . "network-security.data")
	;; Directories:
	(auto-saves                  . "auto-saves/")
	(auto-saves-sessions         . "auto-saves/sessions/")
	(multisession-directory      . "multisession/")
	(url-configuration-directory . "url/")
	(image-dired-dir             . "image-dired/")
	(erc-log-channels-directory  . "erc/logs/")
	(erc-image-cache-directory   . "erc/images/")
	(rcirc-log-directory         . "rcirc/logs/"))
  "Alist of (KEY . RELATIVE-PATH) for cache locations.
RELATIVE-PATH is resolved against `my/cache-directory'.
A trailing slash on RELATIVE-PATH marks the entry as a directory.")

The convention I follow: keys are usually the names of the Emacs variables they will fill. That keeps grep useful for both the definition and the usage.

A trailing slash on the value marks a directory (this matches directory-name-p in Emacs). No trailing slash means a file. The next helper uses that distinction.

Our helpers

The first helper turns a key into an absolute path:

(defun my/cache--path (key)
  "Return the absolute path for KEY in `my/cache-paths'."
  (let ((rel (cdr (assq key my/cache-paths))))
	(unless rel
	  (error "my/cache--path: Unknown key %S" key))
	(expand-file-name rel my/cache-directory)))

assq does an eq lookup on symbol keys. The unless rel branch is there because typos in :custom blocks are silent otherwise: you would get nil and Emacs would happily write to nil, which fails in confusing ways. Better to error at config load.

The second helper pre-creates every directory the alist mentions, so we never get "directory does not exist" warnings from packages on first run:

(defun my/cache--ensure-dirs ()
  "Create every directory referenced by `my/cache-paths'.
Entries ending in `/' are created directly; other entries have their
parent directory created."
  (dolist (entry my/cache-paths)
	(let* ((abs (my/cache--path (car entry)))
		   (dir (if (directory-name-p abs)
					abs
				  (file-name-directory abs))))
	  (make-directory dir t))))

(my/cache--ensure-dirs)

If the entry is a directory (directory-name-p returns t for values ending in /), it is created as-is. If the entry is a file, only the file's parent directory is created.

The t argument to make-directory is the "parents" flag, the equivalent of mkdir -p. So transient/history.el correctly creates <cache>/transient/ even though we never list it explicitly.

Wiring it into use-package :custom

Now every cache-bound variable points at our helper. Inside a use-package emacs block (or wherever you set built-ins):

(use-package emacs
  :ensure nil
  :custom
  (bookmark-file              (my/cache--path 'bookmark-file))
  (ielm-history-file-name     (my/cache--path 'ielm-history-file-name))
  (project-list-file          (my/cache--path 'project-list-file))
  (recentf-save-file          (my/cache--path 'recentf-save-file))
  (savehist-file              (my/cache--path 'savehist-file))
  (save-place-file            (my/cache--path 'save-place-file))
  (transient-history-file     (my/cache--path 'transient-history-file))
  (transient-levels-file      (my/cache--path 'transient-levels-file))
  (transient-values-file      (my/cache--path 'transient-values-file))
  (nsm-settings-file          (my/cache--path 'nsm-settings-file))
  (multisession-directory     (my/cache--path 'multisession-directory))
  (url-configuration-directory (my/cache--path 'url-configuration-directory))
  ;; The two below are *not* backups; they keep auto-save state
  ;; without scattering `#file#' next to every edited buffer.
  (create-lockfiles  nil)   ; no `.#file' lock files at all
  (make-backup-files nil)   ; no `file~' tilde backups at all
  (auto-save-default t))    ; auto-save *is* kept, just redirected below

On the three settings at the bottom:

→ create-lockfiles nil and make-backup-files nil are personal taste. Lockfiles warn another Emacs not to clobber your buffer, but they break frontend tooling that watches directories for changes (TypeScript, Vite, esbuild). The tilde backups I find redundant with modern VCS and auto-save.

→ auto-save-default t stays on because auto-save is what rescues you when Emacs crashes. We just want it somewhere else.

Redirecting auto-saves

Auto-save needs two extra settings because Emacs uses path transforms for it instead of single-value variables:

;; We want auto-save, but no #file# cluttering, so everything goes
;; under our cache/ tree. Directories are pre-created.
(setq auto-save-list-file-prefix (my/cache--path 'auto-saves-sessions)
	  auto-save-file-name-transforms
	  `((".*" ,(my/cache--path 'auto-saves) t)))

auto-save-list-file-prefix controls where the "list of files with pending auto-saves" lives. This is what M-x recover-session reads. Pointing it at our auto-saves/sessions/ directory means you can still recover after a crash, without ~/.emacs.d/auto-save-list/ cluttering your config.

auto-save-file-name-transforms is a list of (REGEX REPLACEMENT UNIQUIFY) triples. The t at the end is the uniquify flag, which encodes the original path into the filename so two files with the same name in different directories do not collide in the auto-save folder.

Both end up in <cache>/auto-saves/.

TRAMP, viper, and other late bindings

Some variables are not safely set in :custom, because they are defined inside packages that load later. For those, use setopt (which respects defcustom setters) inside the :config block:

(setopt tramp-persistency-file-name (my/cache--path 'tramp-persistency-file-name))
(setopt viper-custom-file-name      (my/cache--path 'viper-custom-file-name))

setopt is the modern equivalent of setq for customizable variables. It runs any :set function the variable defines, which tramp-persistency-file-name does (it triggers a reload). Plain setq would skip that and leave TRAMP confused.

What you get

→ ~/.emacs.d/cache/ (or wherever you point it) contains everything. du -sh tells you how much state Emacs is hoarding. rm -rf resets it all without touching your config.

→ M-x customize-variable RET my/cache-directory lets you flip between persistent and ephemeral modes without editing init files. Useful for screencasts where you want zero history showing, or for testing whether a problem is config or state.

→ New packages are a two-line change. When you adopt, say, newsticker, you add one entry to my/cache-paths and one (my/cache--path 'newsticker-dir) line in the package's :custom. The directory is auto-created on next restart.

→ You can grep for it. grep my/cache--path init.el lists every place Emacs writes state, and the alist tells you what kind.

The complete code

Here is everything in one block. Copy this into some temporary folder inside the init.el file. After that, cd into this temp directory and run emacs --init-directory=./. You can them navigate files, use Emacs features and check where the created files end up to.

(defcustom my/cache-directory
  (expand-file-name "cache/" user-emacs-directory)
  "Base directory for Emacs cache files."
  :type `(choice
		  (const     :tag "Inside Emacs config  (cache/ in user-emacs-directory)"
					 ,(expand-file-name "cache/" user-emacs-directory))
		  (const     :tag "System temp          (/tmp/emacs-cache/)" "/tmp/emacs-cache/")
		  (directory :tag "Custom directory"))
  :group 'my)

(when custom-file
  (load custom-file 'noerror 'nomessage))

(defvar my/cache-paths
  '(;; Files:
	(bookmark-file               . "bookmarks")
	(ielm-history-file-name      . "ielm-history.eld")
	(project-list-file           . "projects")
	(recentf-save-file           . "recentf")
	(savehist-file               . "history")
	(save-place-file             . "saveplace")
	(transient-history-file      . "transient/history.el")
	(transient-levels-file       . "transient/levels.el")
	(transient-values-file       . "transient/values.el")
	(tramp-persistency-file-name . "tramp")
	(nsm-settings-file           . "network-security.data")
	;; Directories:
	(auto-saves                  . "auto-saves/")
	(auto-saves-sessions         . "auto-saves/sessions/")
	(multisession-directory      . "multisession/")
	(url-configuration-directory . "url/")
	(image-dired-dir             . "image-dired/")
	(erc-log-channels-directory  . "erc/logs/")
	(erc-image-cache-directory   . "erc/images/")
	(rcirc-log-directory         . "rcirc/logs/"))
  "Alist of (KEY . RELATIVE-PATH) for cache locations.")

(defun my/cache--path (key)
  "Return the absolute path for KEY in `my/cache-paths'."
  (let ((rel (cdr (assq key my/cache-paths))))
	(unless rel
	  (error "my/cache--path: Unknown key %S" key))
	(expand-file-name rel my/cache-directory)))

(defun my/cache--ensure-dirs ()
  "Create every directory referenced by `my/cache-paths'."
  (dolist (entry my/cache-paths)
	(let* ((abs (my/cache--path (car entry)))
		   (dir (if (directory-name-p abs)
					abs
				  (file-name-directory abs))))
	  (make-directory dir t))))

(my/cache--ensure-dirs)

(use-package emacs
  :ensure nil
  :custom
  (bookmark-file               (my/cache--path 'bookmark-file))
  (ielm-history-file-name      (my/cache--path 'ielm-history-file-name))
  (project-list-file           (my/cache--path 'project-list-file))
  (recentf-save-file           (my/cache--path 'recentf-save-file))
  (savehist-file               (my/cache--path 'savehist-file))
  (save-place-file             (my/cache--path 'save-place-file))
  (transient-history-file      (my/cache--path 'transient-history-file))
  (transient-levels-file       (my/cache--path 'transient-levels-file))
  (transient-values-file       (my/cache--path 'transient-values-file))
  (nsm-settings-file           (my/cache--path 'nsm-settings-file))
  (multisession-directory      (my/cache--path 'multisession-directory))
  (url-configuration-directory (my/cache--path 'url-configuration-directory))
  (create-lockfiles            nil)
  (make-backup-files           nil)
  (auto-save-default           t)
  :config
  (setq auto-save-list-file-prefix (my/cache--path 'auto-saves-sessions)
		auto-save-file-name-transforms
		`((".*" ,(my/cache--path 'auto-saves) t)))
  (setopt tramp-persistency-file-name (my/cache--path 'tramp-persistency-file-name)))

Adapt the alist to the packages you actually use.

Other Resources

If you want to read more on the topic:

→ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Auto-Save-Files.html

→ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Variable-Definitions.html#index-defcustom

If you would rather install a package than maintain your own alist, the no-littering package is a popular ready-made alternative that covers a wide set of variables out of the box.

The version of this code I actually run, alist entries and all, lives in my emacs-solo config under the CACHE PATHS heading of init.el. If you end up adapting this for your own setup, I would love to hear which variables you added that I forgot.

ffs provides a minor mode for simple plain text presentations in Emacs, where the slides are separated using the page-delimiter, by default the form feed character (^L).

I wrote ffs in early 2022 for my LibrePlanet 2022 presentation the Net beyond the Web, and earlier this year decided to polish it towards being a proper package and submit it to GNU ELPA. The manual still needs some more work, but the overall package is in pretty good shape so I submitted for inclusion in GNU ELPA.

• Package name (GNU ELPA): ffs
• Official manual: https://kelar.org/~bandali/gnu/emacs/ffs.html
• Change log: https://kelar.org/~bandali/gnu/emacs/ffs-changelog.html
• Git repository: https://git.kelar.org/~bandali/ffs
• Backronyms: fabulous foolproof slides - for freedom's sake - ffs flips slides

ffs and I owe a debt of gratitude to Protesilaos for rounds of code review and feedback for improving and polishing the package in preparation for submission to GNU ELPA. You can watch videos of these sessions posted earlier on my website:

• FFS code review with Protesilaos
• FFS code review and Emacs extensibility with Protesilaos

Further, inspiration for parts of ffs's implementation was gratefully drawn from Protesilaos's Logos package for Emacs.

Dedicated to the loving memory of Farangis Yousefinia.

Below are the release notes.

Charlie Holland has a very interesting post about annotation in place. The idea is to take notes on digital content the same way you would if your were marking up a book or a physical paper. The important thing is that you don’t want to suffer a context switch disruption by switching to another app to take your notes and you want those notes to appear (even years later) when you revisit the file. A secondary consideration is that you want to be able to go not only from the text to the notes but also from the notes to the text.

There is—as we Emacsers always say—an Emacs package for that. That package is org-remark. It does its magic just as you’d expect. The notes are anchored in the text by highlighting the passage you’re writing about and the position of that highlight and its associated notes are kept in a separate Org file with enough meta data to get back to the original document.

The package comes with builtin support for several document types but Holland says that it’s pretty easy to add others and that in fact he’s added them for Elfeed, PubMed, and Wombag. The major shortcoming that I can see is that PDFs aren’t supported.

Holland’s post includes an 18 minute, 15 second video that demonstrates org-remark and provides a nice overview of the post. The post itself is long and comprehensive.

The org-remark package seems like a nice app that could be a big help for those of us that like to take notes as we’re reading. I could see myself using it to take notes on Web pages that I want to write about for Irreal. If it seems like it might be useful to you, take a look at Holland’s post.

Update [2026-05-21 Thu 13:48]: Added link to Holland’s post.

I chatted with Raymond Zeitler about Emacs, life, automation, Org Mode, Diary, and Calendar. There were a couple of cuts to get rid of accidentally shown passwords, but it was a great glimpse into someone's system for managing things.

View in the Internet Archive, watch or comment on YouTube, read the transcript online, download the transcript, download the audio, or email me.

Related links:

• https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RaymondZeitler (config is out of date)
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/raymondzeitler/ : Electrical Engineer | Electronic RF Components | Scripting & Automation | US Defense and Aerospace~ Modernizing your company’s legacy design tools
  • Acting Historian, IEEE Connecticut Section
• https://codeberg.org/ZeitRa
• The rest of his Internet presence is either private (Facebook) or anonymous (two blogs, Github and Gitlab, Mastodon, Bluesky).
• Writing Calendar Files (GNU Emacs Manual) - cal-tex-cursor-week-iso
• elisp/next-spec-day.el at master · chenfengyuan/elisp · GitHub

You can add the iCal for upcoming Emacs Chat episodes to your calendar. https://sachachua.com/topic/upcoming-emacs-chats.ics

Find more Emacs Chats or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat

Chapters:

• 0:00 Opening
• 0:58 Introduction
• 1:59 I love automating workflows
• 3:15 Org Mode switch
• 4:08 diary-float
• 6:48 Tip: Add links to task titles
• 6:59 diary-float
• 7:59 The difference between active timestamps and SCHEDULED
• 10:06 Including other diary files
• 11:26 cal-tex-cursor-week-iso, printing planner pages on index cards
• 14:59 Holidays
• 16:45 Making calendars for other people
• 17:27 Keeping track of when things were done on the house
• 18:49 My first customizations: backspace, buffers
• 20:32 Windows and super key
• 23:23 Org Mode class on Udemy, agenda custom commands
• 25:00 toggling tags
• 26:57 TODO states
• 27:21 Functions for Org Agenda
• 28:34 exeln, shellfn: executing things in DOS
• 30:22 Middle mouse click
• 31:59 Keybindings in other apps: Vivaldi
• 34:09 M-s M-w, eww-search-words
• 35:50 Saving links with org-store-link
• 38:29 How I got into Emacs
• 41:45 Maybe my own theme?
• 42:26 Other editors? Always Emacs
• 43:57 Package names
• 45:54 What's next? Maybe auto maintenance
• 48:31 Vibe-coding?
• 50:53 Where people can find me
• 52:02 Org Mode source blocks
• 52:49 Slideshows?
• 53:50 Emacs Chats?
• 56:33 Other resources that would be nice to have

Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Opening

Sacha: I'll go live if that's okay with you. Yeah, good to go?

Raymond: Okay.

Sacha: All right, going live.

Raymond: Let me just stop sharing right now.

Sacha: Hi everyone, this is Emacs Chat. Emacs Chat 23. Today I'm here with Raymond Zeitler who has been using Emacs for a long time. Your EmacsWiki page says since 2000. And I know for sure that you've been commenting on my blog since about 2008, probably even earlier, I don't know. Everything gets lost in the mists of time. I would love to chat with you about the things that you've learned over the years, what you're still fiddling with, and the things in your configuration or workflow that aren't obvious to people who are reading configurations. It's just Emacs Lisp, but it doesn't show people what you do with Emacs that makes you stick with it over all this time.

0:57 Introduction

Sacha: So yes, but of course, we should do a bit of context setting. You have a lot of different hats. You're a historian, you're an electrical engineer. How would you describe yourself?

Raymond: Well, right now, I would say I'm an electrical engineer, but I spend most of my time, instead of designing stuff, I work on the workflow for the design. And I'm writing scripts, you know, to automate various parts of the design. Now, I just want to pause here because I hear like a 10-second delay.

Sacha: Yes. Oh, you have the video open in another tab. Yeah, so the 10-second delay is there in case we need to panic, you know, in case you accidentally flash something you'd rather keep private. But it can be quite disconcerting to hear yourself talking at the same time that you're trying to say something.

Raymond: Okay, I think I fixed that. Okay.

1:57 I love automating workflows

Raymond: Yes, so I'm an electrical engineer, but I also love to do scripting. Automating any kind of workflow is my favorite thing to do, and I would just love to go around and help people to find ways to automate the workflow. Basically, I was doing that ETL, you know, extract, transform, and load many years ago, I mean, dozens of years ago, and showing people how to do that too for them, and you know, when they look at me and they say, oh my god, thank you so much, I'm so glad... You know, it used to take me hours to do this. Automating a design flow is a good idea once you have all your script in place, that serves as your documentation. If there is a problem with the design, you can go back to the script and update it. So the next time, you're not going to have that problem, hopefully.

Sacha: You've been learning Python recently, too, right? I can imagine that helps a lot with automation. Are you taking advantage of things like Org Mode as well for the things that you can partially automate?

Raymond: Absolutely.

Sacha: Tell us about that.

Raymond: Oh, I figured that we should save for the last, because it could take the whole thing.

3:20 Org Mode switch

Raymond: But yes, I started using Org Mode after you jumped ship from Planner Mode. I know that you and John Wiegley were big on that, and I used to use Planner. And I delayed switching to Org Mode, but eventually I latched onto it really well. So one thing I used Org Mode for at home was for bill pay, you know, because you can schedule things recurring. So you got your mortgage, you can recur, you know, and the recurrence is well thought out. You know, you could have it scheduled exactly 30 days away or one month.

4:05 diary-float

Raymond: What I found recently, though, is you can use the diary: diary-float and diary-warning. Those functions can be used in Org Mode in place of the schedule. So that's really cool. I have a lot of meetings that occur, let's say, the second Wednesday of the month and stuff. There's really no way to easily do that out of the box with Org Mode. So that's fun to do. Let's see. I'm going to share my Org now, if you want.

Sacha: Sure, go ahead. If that's okay with you.

Raymond: Sure. Well, I deleted some of the stuff. You know, not all the files are there.

Sacha: Thank you. It's always interesting to see, because a lot of times, when we're trying to demonstrate Org to people, we're like, okay, here's a small example. But when you see it in the context of someone's actual life, with the tons of reminders they have... Your agenda is very full, for example. I'm not the only one with things that are scheduled for over 100 days.

Raymond: And actually, your talk isn't on here, so that's kind of strange. So, for example, I was talking about bills, right? I don't know if you can see that.

Sacha: Yeah, I can see that.

Raymond: It's not the same.

Sacha: Yeah, I see. And you're using the logbook. You can keep notes in a task. You can put all the things there.

Raymond: Yeah. So, you know, something like a mortgage or your utility, that's pretty standard. That's just +1m, you know, for the recurrence. Let's see. Yeah.

Sacha: Yeah. So basically, you have the regular or repeat things, plus one month or plus one week for the things that can be expressed that way. But you also use diary-float for the things that are second Wednesday of the month.

Raymond: Yes. So let me try a different Org file for that. Oh, everyone, I have to do this too.

Sacha: Oh yeah, you can set a global font default scale thingy. I don't remember exactly how to do that, but... [cut due to passwords] I'll move your screen off the thing first while you talk, and then I'll move it back when you're ready. So we had a bit of a "Oh no, he's showing me like meeting passwords online." So if you saw that, which probably you didn't because 10 second delay, just ignore it. And then we'll go back and scrub things later. Let me know when it's safe to look again.

Raymond: Okay, here we go. So here's a meeting.

Sacha: Okay, okay. We got this. We got this.

6:48 Tip: Add links to task titles

Sacha: I also want to point out, I love how you're using links in the task title. You know, that did not occur to me to have the links right there so it's easy to get to from just the overview.

6:59 diary-float

Raymond: [cut due to passwords] ...which works really in a diary file.

Sacha: All right. Let me move it back so people can see.

Raymond: It works. This is great because it works in Org Mode too. If anyone doesn't know it, this is the month. And true just means that this meeting occurs every month. And I believe this means Monday.

Sacha: No, Tuesday. Although... Your comment says Tuesday, yeah.

Raymond: Yeah, Tuesday. So that's the second day of the week, with Sunday being zero. And then this is the week number, the second week. Second Tuesday of every month. And then you could just put the time there as well.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. I have actually personally never used this syntax, but I see people use it for things like Emacs meetups and they're like, okay, yeah, we meet every second Wednesday or whatever, but here's the thing that you can just put into your Org agenda and it'll work.

7:59 The difference between active timestamps and SCHEDULED

Raymond: But the problem with this, though, is that it doesn't obey the, you know, if you mark it done, it'll be marked done. So it won't show up again. So I'm actually starting to put these in my actual diary because you know, I don't really need to mark the meeting done.

Sacha: You know, you can take out, just remove the scheduled keyword. You can have the active timestamp and it will show up on your calendar, but it doesn't have to be marked as done. And it'll just keep showing up whenever you need to. So this is the distinction between scheduled, which is actually not like a scheduled appointment, it's like a task that you're scheduling for a specific day, versus just using an active timestamp, which is the stuff within the angle brackets. It can be anywhere in your entry. It doesn't have to be the second line after your heading. Then it will show up in your agenda, but it's not going to keep showing up like the next day. It's not going to say it's overdue. It's just going to be for that day.

Raymond: Okay. Yeah. There was somebody who tried to solve the problem, though. And they came up with next-spec-day, a function, but it's not possible to compile that with the modern Emacs. So I'm just happy with the way I have it now, though. Yeah. But when I first started using Emacs, the diary and the calendar were one of the first non-text editing uses that I had for it. And I'm really getting back into diary. I hope I don't show anything else.

Sacha: Tell you what, I'm going to move your window away. Okay. And then you can do your thing and then I can move it back when you're comfy.

Raymond: Okay.

Sacha: Yeah, I know how to do this now. This is good. I have two monitors so I can control.

Raymond: Where's my screen? Oh boy. So what I'm showing here

Sacha: I put it back so people can see.

10:06 Including other diary files

Raymond: My main diary is just diary. What I'm doing is I'm using includes, because I like to break it up into various files that I can comment them out if I don't want something so busy. The reason I'm doing that is because I was tooling around in calendar in the calendar functions and there's actually cal-tex-cursor functions that so when you go into calendar, for example... That's also small, right?

Sacha: It's okay. Everyone has seen calendar. Well, most people have seen calendar at this point, so we know what the calendar is. Okay. What are we showing? What are we seeing?

Raymond: So if I wanted to, let's say for next week, what I could do is create a, let's see, cursor... I forgot the command.

Sacha: I'm surprised you don't have completion set up.

Raymond: Yes.

11:26 cal-tex-cursor-week-iso, printing planner pages on index cards

Raymond: Okay, so this is what I like to do. So this function, cal-tex-cursor-week-iso

Sacha: It's okay. It's the curse of the live demo.

Raymond: All right, I'll create mine.

Sacha: Change cursor shape, huh...

Raymond: All right, so for some reason that's not working. But what you end up doing is you can create a weekly planner, kind of like a page in a date book, and it will show everything from your diary if you want...

Sacha: In a nice printed format or like a nice visual format.

Raymond: Yeah, I have to... How do I get that? I don't know why it's not working here. So...

Sacha: Certainly the layouts of things, the layouts of date planners is something that I sometimes envy about my paper planner days. Like you could see things. I also wanted to point out something that I hadn't considered. You were using diary for diary entries, it looks like also not just appointments and reminders, but also this is what happened that day. Ooh, that is pretty. Do you actually print these out or like read them on an e-reader or just look at them?

Raymond: I did. Yeah, I found out that my printer can print double-sided on index cards.

Sacha: Oh yeah, double-sided.

Raymond: So I actually created my own little book here. So what's nice about this is, you know, when you go into a store to look for some planner, many of them, like half of them, don't even have the lunar phases. And let's see if this has a lunar phase.

Sacha: So printing planner pages on index cards. Very cool.

Raymond: So you've got your full moon there. And because I was very active in photography, nature photography in particular, and doing landscapes and stuff. So it's really helpful to know when the full moon is, more so sunrise and sunset, which I have here. Because you get, especially in the winter, you get great shots at around sunset. Yeah, so that was something that I was really interested in.

Sacha: Oh, it's so cool. It's something I'd never considered using Emacs to generate your custom, you know, calendar planner thing that you then take offline because you're out there in the field. You're taking pictures. You don't want to open your laptop or look at your phone or whatever. It's just your index card. Nice.

Raymond: And there's some astrology in there.

Sacha: [cut due to password] We're back to streaming. Yeah, birthdays. Gotcha.

Raymond: Birthdays. And then, so I'll just... I wonder if I could do this safely.

Sacha: Give me a heads up, I'll move the screen off and then I can move it back when you give me the heads up again.

Raymond: I'm pretty sure my .emacs is pretty... If anyone wants to see this and download it, it's on emacswiki.org. Just look for the page RaymondZeitler.

Sacha: Yeah, it's in the related links now for the blog post. Gotcha.

14:59 Holidays

Raymond: So what I was looking for here is my list of holidays. So what you could do with... This is basically a calendar thing, but you can set up all your holidays. For example, Towel Day is coming up. It will be Monday for you Hitchhiker's Guide geeks. You've got your Star Wars Day, you've got Pi Day, which you won't find on a regular calendar, of course. And that's an atrocious thing here.

Sacha: I was just admiring that. It's a very complicated expression, but you can do it.

Raymond: You can, right. So that's what I came up for Election Day. And if anyone's a Seinfeld fan, you've got your Festivus. So that's a neat thing. Yeah, and don't worry about the longitude-latitude. Everyone knows where I am.

Sacha: [another password hiccup] ... dealing with the panic, it's good. It's good practice. And also everyone is very nice, so afterwards, I'll just probably make this unlisted and then see if there's anything that actually needs scrubbing. But probably it's all good. Yes, so you've got calendar, you've got holidays, you print them out. Are there other ways that you use Emacs, kind of in this online-offline way? Are there any other things that you like to print out, or do you do the rest of the things in your computer?

Raymond: It's all on computer, yeah. So the only thing that's printed out is the planner datebook. By planner, I mean this thing. Okay. So...

16:45 Making calendars for other people

Raymond: Oh, yeah. Anyway, getting back to why I break up my diary into multiple files is eventually I may want to create these things for other people, right? Print out a date book for my wife, for example. So she's going to want to know when Towel Day is, right? Well, that's a different thing, but she's not going to want a lot of other things.

Sacha: Yeah, it's very customizable. You can just say, okay, include these, you know, modules in the calendar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Raymond: So, and then getting back to the diary again, yes.

Sacha: I can move this. We're safe. Yeah. We're safe.

Raymond: Okay.

17:27 Keeping track of when things were done on the house

Raymond: So one thing I like to do is keep track of when things were done on the house.

Sacha: You've got a license plate?

Raymond: No, there's really nothing bad here. For example, if you want to know when you have to register your car, you can put that in there and it'll show up on your little planner. So I thought that was pretty neat.

Sacha: And I like that you can say a number of years ago, so it automatically keeps track of that. You can wish somebody a specific number of years, happy birthday, instead of just a generic happy birthday. You don't have to do math. Nice, nice. Diary, I think it's underutilized.

Raymond: It is, yeah. And what I like about Emacs is that the people who are, you know, creating functions and adding to it use it and have really good design ideas. So, oh, this is, let's go back to something else here. Okay, so back to my .Emacs. Let's see. Let me just... In the interim, before we come up with something else to talk about, I'll just talk about some of the modifications.

18:49 My first customizations: backspace, buffers

Raymond: And by the way, when I first started using Emacs, I decided not to do anything. I'm a Windows user, so naturally you might want to use CUA mode, but I never did that. And the first customization I did was... For some reason the backspace key was doing the delete function. I think that was Emacs 19. So that was the one thing I changed. And then the other thing I changed is very soon I had multiple buffers. Like if you're using Emacs for any amount of time, even like 10 minutes, you'll have multiple buffers. And I was using a tabbed web browser at the time, so it's easy. To switch tabs by just pressing the Ctrl-Tab key or Shift-Ctrl-Tab key to switch between tabs. And I figured, let me do that with the buffers. And so that's somewhere in here.

Sacha: Oh yeah, there's a control tab, control shift tab, next buffer, and previous buffer.

Raymond: Yeah, so that was one of the first things besides the delete key modification that I did. But I'm also now, since I have multiple windows open as well, I'm using the windows... Next and Windows Prior. Next is, I think, the page down key, I believe. And Prior is the page up key.

20:33 Windows and super key

Raymond: And how you can get to use the Windows key is, I got that from Xah Lee's website. And where is that now?

Sacha: Yeah, you make it the super key. I use Xmodmap but other people can use different things depending on their setup. Although lately I've been experimenting with using Kanata so that my modifiers are one-shot modifiers. I can tap the super key and then I can let go of it and then I can press whatever key is next so I don't have to hold them at the same time. Oh hey look at that it's actually an option! I didn't even know that it was. You can change it right from Emacs. Nice.

Raymond: Yeah, so this is what I set up. I lifted this from the website. There's the URL. And if you're curious, you can go to that Emacs wiki website and see this. The only thing that I wasn't able to get this to work until I added this statement, which I found in Stack Overflow or something like that.

Sacha: That is interesting. Yeah. All right. So does it mean that Emacs is entirely responsible for the Windows key? You don't do anything else with it outside Emacs?

Raymond: Right. So yes, it intercepts the Windows key before Windows does somehow magically, which can be kind of frustrating because sometimes I do want to open the start menu from within Emacs and I'm pressing it and saying, why isn't this working?

Sacha: This is where you just get used to having your own launchers within Emacs.

Raymond: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know that you're a good Emacs user if you start using the Emacs key bindings in other programs. You know, how many times I've used C-y to paste something in, you know, my web browser. Oh, boy.

Sacha: Yeah, it's not the C-y that gets me. It's the C-w because that closes your browser down.

Raymond: Yeah, oh yes, that can be dangerous. But actually C-y can be bad too, because it's like the redo function in a lot of programs. So if you've undone something, and then you redo it, you can get very confused very quickly. Anyway, so this is a neat thing to do. Some people might want to try that.

Sacha: Yeah, for sure. Having a super key means you can then go on and do other things with it. You can have all these key bindings because nothing binds to the super key. So you can have all the single character key bindings you like.

Raymond: Exactly, yeah.

23:23 Org Mode class on Udemy, agenda custom commands

Raymond: So I was taking, believe it or not, there's an Org Mode class on Udemy. And it's... Rainer König did it. I don't know if I pronounced his name right. But he inspired me to do custom commands. So for example, if I want to look at all my bills for the week, I would just press the b w.

Sacha: Do you want me to move the window?

Raymond: I don't know. Is there anything dangerous here? I'm not going to do it, but I'm just trying to point out my thing.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Different agendas for slicing and dicing your Org data in different ways.

Raymond: Yeah, yeah. Remember you pointed out earlier that my agenda was jam-packed with stuff. The way I manage that is I came up with a way to easily apply the today tag to all those things. And I came up with some functions somewhere which I bind to C-M-S-t. Let's see if I can find it.

Sacha: That is interesting. So you're using a tag for the things you want to do today.

Raymond: Yes.

Sacha: Versus scheduling them, because if you schedule them for today, then they will still show up tomorrow.

Raymond: Well, yes, that's true.

24:53 Toggling tags

Raymond: So yes, so these are the two functions I came up with. Oh, you're toggling. What's that?

Sacha: You toggle that. You have something that lets you add or remove a tag.

Raymond: Yes, yes. Yes, exactly. And maybe I could demonstrate that without displaying too much stuff here. Okay, so here, so in the agenda, I'm a little bit worried about updating. See, okay, so I don't know if you can see it, but I just invoked it and then down here in a little.

Sacha: Oh, yeah.

Raymond: It says you have to press s r to save and refresh the screen. And the reason why I didn't automatically refresh and save files is because I think that's a dangerous thing.

Sacha: Yeah, because you've been removing things. Okay, okay. But the idea there is you can turn the tag on and off from your agenda directly, which is interesting. Yeah, it's there. And you have a different view that shows you just the stuff you're focusing on for today.

Raymond: And I have that bound to "C-c a .". This is going to be small. So there on the top are my things for today.

Sacha: Yeah, so different ways of prioritizing. So your agenda is the stuff that you want to keep on your radar. And the today stuff is the stuff like, okay, you got some time. This is what you're actually going to work on.

Raymond: Right, so.

Sacha: Yeah, there are different ways to approach it. Some people have a much more minimalist, okay, if it's on the agenda, it's because I want to do it that day. And then they have a different view showing them the stuff that they want to keep on their radar. But the nice thing about Org Mode is that it accommodates all these different ways of working.

Raymond: Yeah.

26:56 TODO states

Raymond: And getting back to the Rainer's class on Org Mode, you know, it's not like the way Carsten Dominik set it up with the default tags of to-dos. What is it? To do, started, waiting. He does something a little bit different, but it works for him. So I think that's kind of cool too.

27:21 Functions for Org Agenda

Raymond: And by the way, you need two functions. You need one that works in an Org file and another one in the agenda because they don't work the same way.

Sacha: I have some functions that act that way, and I usually end up checking if the major mode is derived from the Org agenda. And then there's an with Org agenda. There's a macro that lets you run the code in the context of the task. So if you needed to kind of switch those together, it's possible. But you already have something that works, so it's fine.

Raymond: Yeah, and it's easy because, you know, I copied this from some existing function like, you know, when you press Z, for example, it creates a note. So you can leverage that code and write your own code instead.

Sacha: It's called org-agenda-with-point-at-orig-entry. It does the thing. You know, this part that you're doing at the moment with manually finding the marker and jumping to it and all that stuff. In the future, if you find yourself writing one of these agenda functions.

Raymond: Yeah.

28:34 exeln, shellfn: executing things in DOS

Raymond: So what else do I have here? Oh, so sometimes I just like to execute. So I do a lot of batch files or scripts, and I'll just do C-c x to send that particular line to the DOS prompt just to execute it.

Sacha: Oh, execute line. Okay, so that's what EXELN means. That's cool. So it's basically you can evaluate things without having to switch and paste and switch and paste and all that stuff.

Raymond: Yes. And just to demonstrate, if I wanted to do the dir command.

Sacha: It's like an eval-last-sexp, but for DOS. Yeah, so this is... And hats off to you for, like, batch scripting with DOS. I'm very spoiled with my bash and zsh, but you're in Windows and you're making it work.

Raymond: Yeah. Which is like a handicap, isn't it? And then I can just send the whole buffer to the command prompt, which I think now there's a function that don't really does that, you know, out of the box. Maybe not. And then if I wanted to insert the date, you know, just some easy stuff like that.

Sacha: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I recently added this insert date and time thing as an abbrev, So I just type it and that frees up more of my key bindings for other things. Yeah. But it's surprising. You always find yourself wanting to refer to the time and that way you don't have to look.

30:27 Middle mouse click

Raymond: I don't remember how Emacs treated the scroll wheel or the middle mouse button, but I found that this was very useful. I believe what you can do is click the mouse. Let's see what happens. It pasted what I had there.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. I think middle is usually paste, but it sounds like you've got it. Oh, okay. So, so you, you can scroll if you're dragging, but you can also click, just middle click to paste. Yes.

Raymond: Yeah. So it's fun. There are some things that down-mouse-2 does, and I'm not able to do that now. I think, for example, spell checking, if you want to correct a word at point, I think the command is to do the mouse-2 button, but I no longer can do that. But that's okay.

Sacha: Over 20 plus years of Emacs, I'm sure parts of your workflow have come in and out of viability as things change. I feel like Emacs does make more of an effort to keep things pretty stable for the most part, hence all the contortions that new Emacs development has to do in order to keep things working but also adapt to the times.

31:59 Keybindings in other apps: Vivaldi

Raymond: I think I mentioned before how I co-opted the ability to switch tabs. I got the idea from the web browser and incorporated it into Emacs. But I've started to do the opposite. So if you do C-k, which deletes anything from point to the end of the line...

Sacha: Yeah, you've up-cased a bunch of things.

Raymond: Yes, I am going to have to close this because I'm really scared now.

Sacha: revert-buffer, maybe? Or undo?

Raymond: Yes, I'm trying to do undo. That's what I meant to do. We're back. There we go. So, yeah, because I did C-x C-u instead of... whatever. So what I've decided to do then is if you're using a web browser and you're opening new tabs, which I do, so I am able to bind a key and I'm using control shift K to close all the tabs to the right of the current tab. So that's sort of like borrowing an Emacs keystroke and using it in my browser. [Sacha] How are you doing that? Are you using AutoHotkey or does Vivaldi let you do that automatically? Yes, it's Vivaldi. So if I go into the Settings - Keyboard shortcuts... So actually, I don't know how to increase the size of this.

Sacha: That's fine. We can see it. People can go open up Vivaldi if they're curious. But the idea there is you get used to these conveniences or these ideas from Emacs. And now you're like, OK, I want to make my other apps feel at least a little bit this way.

Raymond: Yeah. Yeah, so.

Sacha: Yeah?

Raymond: And I still keep learning stuff about Emacs.

34:10 M-s M-w, eww-search-words

Raymond: Believe it or not, I didn't know that you could select a region and then do an internet search on it, right?

Sacha: Today I am learning. How do you select a region and do an internet search on it?

Raymond: So M-s M-w (Alt s and Alt w) is loading in EWW. And this is what Atomic Chrome Start Server is. And that's actually a Chrome extension that you can... Okay, so if I go to some... Okay, okay.

Sacha: It is EWW Search Words. Okay, good. Cool.

Raymond: So if I go to your website now and I want to type a comment, which I think I can do, right?

Sacha: Oh, I switched to just doing comments through email. Because Disqus was getting all ads-y and annoying and tracking JavaScript and stuff. So now it's like every post has an email me if you have thoughts. Sometimes it has a Mastodon link if I've remembered to post it to Mastodon beforehand.

Raymond: So... What I'm trying to do is find a window that I can type into.

Sacha: There's a search box up there to the top. But basically, you're going to show us how you can take stuff from the browser and put it into Emacs for easier editing.

Raymond: Yes.

Sacha: All right.

35:50 Saving links with Org-store-link

Sacha: Charlie has a question. So Charlie asks, do you use Org Mode protocol at all for browser to Emacs interaction? If so, were there any complications to set it up on Windows?

Raymond: I don't.

Sacha: Is there like bookmarklets for capturing or doing things?

Raymond: Yeah. So, oh yeah. So capture is just a wonderful tool. Okay. So I'm not sure I'm I can answer the question, but what I would say is, let's say if I wanted to... Alright, let's try this. This might not be too bad. So let's say I wanted to create a link to some ad. So no, I don't use EWW to capture the link. But I just learned out how you can do it. But if I wanted to go to another, all right, well, this is a silly example. But if I were to do just a help, Let's say, if I just wanted to find a place in the info, in info, if I do C-c-L, it'll create a link for me, and then if I wanted to here, put that link. So it's already there in the mode line. Yeah. And then I can say info. And I can have that there. So this will go, and I'll close this help.

Sacha: Okay.

Raymond: And then if I click this, it'll open back up.

Sacha: So you use the org-store-link a lot. Do you use org-capture as well?

Raymond: Yes.

Sacha: I saw your keyboard, your key binding for it. But you don't necessarily have bookmarks or extensions in Vivaldi to do the capturing with the context from your browser. You'll just copy and paste the link manually.

Raymond: Exactly. That sounds like fun, though. [Sacha] That's a nice thing about Emacs. There's always one more thing to tweak, one more thing to learn. You've been tweaking your Emacs for a long time, and yet there's still more to do, to fiddle with and explore.

38:24 How I got into Emacs

Raymond: Yeah if you can think way, way, way, back, how did you get into Emacs in the first place? Oh, okay. So, you know, I was thinking about how my career, like the first half of my career, I've been using an IBM PC and MS-DOS, and it was all command line based. And as well, those machines were quite slow. So what we would often do is Write batch files and basically have things happen while we were away. Go and get a cup of coffee or leave for the day and come back the next day and hope it was done. I was working with text files for 20 years. I had a really good text editor. It was called Brief. And it had a lot of nice features. It was, of course... You could record and playback keystroke macros, right? Sounds familiar. It also had a scripting language. Of course, it had undo. But the nice thing I really liked about it is that you could do column editing, right? So you could delete columns of text, or add columns, or cut and paste and move them around, and stuff like that. Because if you're using a lot of csv files, it's really columnar in nature. I guess I can't pronounce that word. But when I moved to Windows, that text editor didn't work so well. It wasn't very happy in a multitasking environment And so I started looking around for stuff. I did find an editor actually that it had the same key bindings as brief, but it had one problem. And if you open, for example, if you opened a binary file, that had a null character, it would crash. So I don't know if that bothered me. So then I started looking around for another one. And then I guess it was in Usenet that somebody said, why don't you try Emacs? As if I heard of it and decided not to. So I did, and I really liked it. So maybe I'm going to go back and search for that conversation and thank the person. That'd be something I could put on my Org agenda.

41:05 Did it click for you right away or is it something that grew on you over time?

Sacha: Did it click for you right away or is it something that grew on you over time? I started right away with the tutorial And I said, ah, this is crazy to have to do. And I don't even know how to navigate with the original key bindings. So I expected to be able to use the arrow keys. And I don't think it was set up that way. But then I stuck with it. And like I said, I didn't adopt the CUA binding or anything like that. Yeah, and I just grew to learn it.

41:45 Maybe my own theme?

Sacha: I had thought about coming up with a theme for it, a different color theme. And I tried that for a while, but then when I would use a different mode, it just looked terrible. So I'm keeping the same mode now. What I hear more and more people are doing is they'll take something like modus themes and then they can change the colors of it without necessarily having to make all the mappings of, okay, this thing in this mode, you should use this kind of face. So if you still want to have your customized colors, that might be an approach to consider.

Raymond: Yeah. Going to stop sharing for a second.

Sacha: Sure.

42:26 Other editors? Always Emacs

Sacha: Did you ever flirt with other editors again after getting into Emacs? Or has it basically been mostly Emacs for the last while?

Raymond: Oh my gosh, how could you even say such a thing? No, it never occurred to me to do that. But some of the guys were using Notepad++, which, you know, mine is the only computer with Emacs. But if I go to another computer, they have No pad++. I would be using that. And it's nice. It has a tabbed interface so you can switch between files very easily. But I've never considered switching to something else. And even, you know, I took a vibe coding class. So they have you use VS code or anti-gravity or something like that. And I'm thinking, wouldn't it be nice if I could You know, switch to my Emacs editor and do the typing there and then switch back to anti-gravity. I don't know. But I hear some people are vibe coding with Emacs, so I might look into that.

Sacha: Yeah, there's been an explosion of different ways that people are interacting with these systems. And of course, people are also totally welcome to keep using Emacs without it. But if people are curious, as the usual Emacs way of doing things, there are more than a handful of packages all with their different workflows. You'll find something that fits.

Raymond: Yeah.

43:57 Package names

Raymond: I wanted to ask you, speaking about EWW, do people pronounce that ew? The thing about a lot of these packages, they have these wonderfully self-effacing names. There's one called Dismal. That's the acronym for it. And it's Dismode Ain't Lotus. It's basically a spreadsheet. So I was just curious about that.

Sacha: I think we spend so much of our time reading rather than you know hearing or talking to people so then it's only in the middle of a conversation of a very rare conversation one can have about Emacs either on stream or in person when you're like okay is it Magit or magic you know do I say ew but that that seems so rude ew ew ew the Emacs web thing yeah sure

Raymond: And that's pretty new, isn't it? That mode? Because I remember doing W3 and then WW3.

Sacha: There was a w3m and elinks. I remember that too.

Raymond: Links, I had a version of that on my, you know, like a DOS version of it, believe it or not. But it was very utilitarian, you know.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you just want to browse the web or get the information without all the clutter that goes on and, you know, just like all the layouts and the cookie pop ups and whatever. Just get me the stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Raymond: Well, I do think I'm going to be incorporating EWW more as I think it was Charles who said, you know, creating a link using C-c l to create that link and it basically copies what's around it. I do see the usefulness of that.

45:54 What's next? Maybe auto maintenance

Sacha: Yeah, yeah, because org-capture and 00:45:57.936 -> 00:46:00.339 org-store-link can just pick up the context for you and then it's so easy to go back to things afterwards. I've also heard good things about org-remark. So that's something that's on my to-do list as well. There are always all these things to be curious about and learn. What are you looking forward to exploring? So there's EWW. What's next for you in this Emacs journey?

Raymond: Oh boy. I was thinking of using Org as a car maintenance tool. And as you know, Org is great for scheduling and projecting out things. The thing about auto maintenance, though, is a lot of times something has to be done at a certain mileage. Like every 5,000 miles, you have to rotate the tires, for example. If you're driving regularly, like maybe 100 miles a week, you could say, oh, that's going to happen in a year. But if you're driving as erratic, then you'll probably want a way to download your mileage from the car. Cars are basically just computers, aren't they? I mean, they're computers that we drive around, or sometimes they drive us around, frighteningly so. I'm sure someone is thinking about or has already come up with a link between a desktop computer and a car. Okay, I'm not seeing. Well, maybe. Maybe that's giving somebody an idea there. But maybe Lori Wired or something can come up with that.

Sacha: And even, you know, even a manually scheduled reminder, hey, you know, just write down what your odometer says, and then some kind of logic that takes a look at that reading and says, okay, it's past this threshold, schedule this task. And have that done semi-automatically. Sounds really interesting. Because then you could have all sorts of things to say, all right, I have this manually scheduled recurring task to manually log something. But then it kicks off these processes that then surface all these other tasks that I should do. Could be fun. How would you do that? That sounds really cool.

Raymond: So I don't know if I'll ever do that because I'm pretty lax with my car maintenance anyway.

Sacha: It could be like every six months check to see whether, you know, it's time.

Raymond: Yeah, yeah.

48:31 Vibe-coding?

Raymond: But I probably would try the vibe coding with Emacs eventually. You know, every so often I see it on Reddit or Stack Overflow. You know, somebody is trying this package or that package. Yeah, it might be worth trying.

Sacha: What are the challenges that people sometimes find when it comes to vibe-coded stuff? It's great for the initial prototype, but once you start digging into it, it's hard to modify it yourself, so then you become dependent on it. And then, of course, the large language model can't quite get some things. How are you finding this so far? I mean, this is very early in your journey. I think you're still experimenting with it. But do you find that it's working out for you? How is it with Emacs?

Raymond: It was just like you said, like it just can't get it. Like I told it, well, fix this because I don't like that format, and then it will do it differently. And then, no, but it changed something else that it was doing correctly, and I just couldn't get it to work. And the other thing is, so the course that I was taking, they wanted... Next.js And I just can't describe it. So I was trying to back up my computer one day after installing it, and it's doing on and on in like 20 minutes. Just because there's so many files and it's just crazy. So I thought it was fun to try it, but I think I'll just stick with what I know best.

Sacha: In a way, I'm delighted. We've come full circle. Emacs is now the lightweight solution. It is a lot of fun. Emacs, less AI. AI is not quite at the fun point yet, I think. But I'm glad that there's still more to tinker with and explore. I have about eight minutes before the kiddo runs out and starts lunch break.

50:52 Where people can find me

Sacha: I'm guessing if people want to keep up with your adventures they can check your EmacsWiki page for updates. You have some code shared on Codeberg and you mentioned your LinkedIn profile which is in my thing, but how can people keep up with what you're learning?

Raymond: I'm surprised that people would want to.

Sacha: I want to. I do not have an auto to maintain, but I have a cargo bike that I've got to keep up with also. So I'm very interested in these mileage-based task reminders, if you work something out.

Raymond: Yeah, I'm not pretty good about publishing stuff. I don't know. That's a good question. I'll come up with something. Maybe I'll be more diligent pushing my updates to the Lisp Codeberg repository. I don't know.

Sacha: Sometimes it just takes somebody saying, your stuff is interesting. I'm telling you, your stuff is interesting.

Raymond: Okay. Thank you so much.

52:02 Org Mode source blocks

Raymond: By the way, I am using source code blocks now. So like we talked earlier about executing the batch file, I can now put a little batch file inside a source code and execute it that way.

Sacha: You have those links in your heading and in your Org task bodies. I've been enjoying using Elisp and Shell link types so that I can put in those partially automatable things. In my workflows, because sometimes you're like, I do have to do it manually. I just can't write a function to do everything. But at least they can document it step by step and say, okay, do this, run this code block, you know, just do all that stuff.

52:49 Slideshows?

Raymond: And the other thing I'd like to try to do is I know some people can create slideshows with Emacs. And so that looks like it would be worth pursuing. I'd like to try that.

Sacha: Oh, yeah. Are you thinking of it for the history stuff that you're involved with or other things that you're teaching?

Raymond: So I'm starting to present my photography as a slideshow. And I thought I would try that. And now I see that Emacs can support images. I don't know how it would work as an export, but I look into that now.

Sacha: Yeah. And even, you know, the couple of times that I've wanted to use Emacs to create, you know, even just a PDF of these pictures, just being able to automate that instead of pasting and resizing, it's like, ugh, don't do that that way, just have the computer do it for you, and Emacs is great for it.

53:50 Emacs Chats?

Sacha: I've been meaning to ask you, what is your viewership with these Emacs chats?

Raymond: Are you starting to see a lot of traction with that?

Sacha: I have no idea. My goal here is just to get stuff out of interesting people's heads. Interesting stuff out of, yes, interesting people's heads. And I think mainly I'm using it as a way to keep improving my transcription workflow. I guess I like to train everything into text afterwards. That way it's searchable. But it's been really fun getting a sense of how people are using it because we all have such different workflows. And as I was saying in the beginning, you don't see that when you're looking at someone's config. You're like, okay, I see that the code that sets the key bindings, but how does it work together? And then seeing your Org file, I'm like, Oh yeah, why am I not putting the links right there so that I can just get to them from the agenda? Diary can do that? All that stuff is really, really interesting. It's been great revisiting it after such a long break, taking care of the kiddo. Now the kiddo is slightly more independent and even has moments where she's like, bye mom, I don't need any help. Like, okay, yes, I'm just going to do my Emacs thing.

Raymond: Asking for the car keys yet or not?

Sacha: No, no, no. Also no car, but someday she's going to, you know, and she actually already likes to bike to the park on her own. So she's 10. She's not at the car level yet, but definitely in the biking and walking by herself, she's keen on that. Gradually, independence for both of us and the ability to explore things. I'm really liking these Emacs chats. With you and Shay Arison, who's also been a long-time reader, it's like this continuation of a conversation we've been having over decades now. I can't wait to see where this goes next. I've picked up a lot that I, again, would not have really understood just by looking at your EmacsWiki page and I hope that other people watching can also get a sense of, like, this is what it looks like in use. Sometimes people think oh, I need to make a video that's going to be a snazzy demonstration of this really technical setup, but sometimes it's just the little things that make your life better.

Raymond: Well, I really want to thank you for doing this, not just this Emacs chat, but just having your web page and organizing all the Emacs information. It's just been a wonderful resource.

Sacha: Thank you. In the last two minutes I have before I get like, "mom!",

56:39 Other resources that would be nice to have

Sacha: what kind of resources would you like to see going forward? What would make your learning even better?

Raymond: Well, you know, it's just, you know, just saying something that you did... For example, when you were... So when I visited your site and you showed how you could show the time in someone's native time zone, right? Which is a wonderful thing, right? But I had my own time thing that I was wondering. Like, I wanted to know if someone had a date, like May 21, what day of the week is that? I know that I can't go on a meeting on Tuesday. I'm trippable. So I figured out a way you could select it and send it to a custom search engine that searches on DuckDuckGo AI and says, what day of the week is this? And just include the date. And it tells you.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. It's nice to be able to modify things, not just in Emacs, but in browsers or anything else. And my personal approach for that date thing would be like, okay, I'm just going to do an insert date, like a C-c C-! in Org. Because if I type in, you know, the part of the date that will get it to show up, it will include the day of the week. But that only works in Emacs, of course. Everything should be in Emacs. So yeah, I guess one of these little workflows, oh, I just figured out something, sort of posts can ripple out into other people imagining other things that they can do. And on that note, I'm going to wrap this up very nicely. I will try to mark this as unlisted so I can see if I accidentally let any of your passwords slip past my 10-second panic window. You're okay with your coordinates. That's okay. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much, Ray.

Raymond: Oh, thank you.

Sacha: And I look forward to more conversations.

Raymond: Yeah.

Sacha: All right. Bye.

Raymond: Bye bye.

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

I have added two new themes to the current development target of my ef-themes package. Screenshots are available below. Remember that the themes are highly customisable: you can change practically everything about them.

• ef-arcadia is a light theme with a verdant, humid aesthetic.
• ef-atlantis is a dark theme with an aquatic feel.

Both deliver the familiar colourfulness and good legibility of the ef-themes.

Always click to enlarge the image for best results.

ef-arcadia

ef-atlantis

Coming in version 2.2.0 (next stable release)

The character of each theme is well defined. I may still make some refinements.

Remember that since version 2.0.0, the ef-themes are built on top of my modus-themes. This means that they are highly customisable, support a wide range of packages and face groups, and are extensively tested down to the finest details.

Enjoy!

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

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

This is my entry to the may 2026 emacs blog carnival hosted by Sacha Chua.

It is common knowledge that the default emacs keybindings can be a bit of a strain on the old hands. A common suggestion is to remap the caps lock key to act as control, and i did that for a while, but i don't think it's the perfect solution that is often suggested: stretching the pinky finger sideways and holding it down still results in pain after a while for me. Luckily i have the perfect solution with zero drawbacks: use your thumbs!

The first time i tried this was about five years ago. I put control on the key directly to the left of the space bar, and alt on the key directly to the right of the space bar. The thumb is very good at moving in this sideways motion, and i could immediately feel how much more comfortable my hands were with this layout. The trouble with this, though, is some keybindings using the thumb and fingers from a single hand still feel a little bit clumsy. Although the control and alt keys are in nicer positions, they still aren't perfect for all keybindings.

So i did the only sensible thing: i made the keys directly next to both edges of the space bar control, and the ones one key out alt. With this setup, i can use the left thumb for control or alt bindings using keys on the right side of the keyboard, and the right thumb for control or alt bindings on the left side.

Emacs is heavily based around keyboard shortcuts, so the benefits are immediately apparent. But as anyone who's ever used a mac will tell you, the command key is much more comfortable to use with all sorts of shortcuts than the control key is on windows or linux systems. You don't have to perform any sort of hand contortions, because your thumbs are almost already sitting on the modifier keys.

As i say, i've been doing this for about five years now, and i've never felt more comfortable typing. Setting this up is one of the first things i do when i reinstall my operating system, usually straight after i try to use a keyboard shortcut and realise it doesn't work because the modifier keys are in the original positions.

So if you're planning on trying out evil or something in order to make using emacs more comfortable, why not first try moving the modifiers around to see if those hench old thumbs or yours could alleviate some of the pain?

In my post on Omar Antolín Camarena’s May Emacs Carnival contribution explaining his reasons for using EWW as his default browser, I mentioned that Camarena said that one of the benefits of EWW not supporting JavaScript is that JavaScript is mostly used to make the user’s experience worse by doing things like loading ads, reconfiguring the user’s display parameters, and implementing paywalls.

If you had asked me, I would have said that any site using a paywall would also require JavaScript to load the content and, indeed, that’s true for some sites such as The New York Times but, as I discovered, it’s not true for a surprising number of sites.

After reading Camarena’s post, I decided to experiment a bit to see if it was possible to bypass paywalls simply by not running JavaScript. I mostly don’t care about paywalls because the majority of the sites that use them don’t have content that’s worth the effort of avoiding them. Still, I thought it would be interesting to test if the strategy was feasible.

I did this by opening any site that popped up a paywall in EWW. It worked for a surprising number of sites. Again, it’s almost never worth the effort but if you happen upon an article that you really want to read on a site that wants you to sign up for an outrageously expensive subscription, it may be worthwhile seeing if you can open it in EWW,

The other thing I learned is that reading content with EWW can be a very restful experience. No ads, no blinkenlights, and sometimes, no paywall either. I didn’t try running EWW with eww-readable but that would probably make the experience even more restful.

Last night I realized two things:

1. I haven’t touched Elfeed in about a month
2. I’ve been reading and interacting more with people’s posts than ever As I was looking at my Inkwell’s RSS feeds and cleaning up, I couldn’t help but notice how nice it looks:

And, yes, I prefer it over my list of feeds in elfeed, which are stored in an .org file - essentially lines of text with comments and tags.

I’m pretty sure this is the opposite case for most folks who use Emacs. First, Emacs users want to use Emacs more, not less, and second, Inkwell is not available without Micro.blog¹.

But I think this is the point I’m getting at: Inkwell belongs in Micro.blog; actually, it is Micro.blog.

When I started using Micro.blog three years ago, I considered it mostly an alternative to running my own static site with Hugo, between fixing issues with Hugo, my CSS, Netlify and understanding attempting to understand git and Magit. Yes, Micro.blog is an alternative to all of that, but it isn’t just a blogging platform; It’s a definition of a contemporary blogger.

If you look at Micro.blog’s set of tools, you’ll see what I mean: it contains tools to keep track and post about books, movies and TV shows, private (encrypted) notes, photos and self-made video clips², save articles and qoutes from around the internet (pocket style), automatic integration with other social media where possible - all of this around your hosted blog, complete with plugins and a theme (and let’s not forget the AI integration, if you want it and turn it on) you can tweak and take with you - your posts, media, css, everything - wherever you go.

And Inkwell adds an important direction to this mix.

My blogging hour in the morning now continues where I left off the night before, with saved highlights and complete articles from other people I keep track of. The integration between Inkwell and Micro.blog, where my reading turns into writing, still requires some work as the UI and some of the bugs get sorted out, but it’s there. And it’s already better and more intuitive for me than Elfeed, which takes place in its own isolated space.

Elfeed is very good at what it does (and hopefully, what it will keep on doing, with its creator leaving Emacs), and it has been good to me. It still is. But Inkwell, Micro.blog, and my recent adventures with finding out more bloggers and learning more about the Indieweb feel like an evolution. It’s the next step of whatever I’m doing here.

Footnotes

¹: I recall Manton borrowed the idea from a different RSS reader, but I can’t find the reference right now

²: Finding an alternative to YouTube these days is not easy, and if you’re not trying to “build a brand” and repeat the chant of “click and subscribe,” the only semi-reliable alternative that comes to mind is PeerTube and (maybe Dailymotion?) - but Manton found a way that seem sustainable, at least for now.

I think I’ll take my REPL neat
My parens black and my bed at three
CIDER’s too sweet for me…

– Bozier

Last week I announced Port, a small prepl client for Emacs. Today I’m following it up with another small Emacs package. Meet neat, a tiny, deliberately language-agnostic nREPL client.

Why?

For years I’ve been hearing some version of the same request: “could CIDER work with my non-Clojure nREPL server?”. Babashka, Basilisp, nREPL-CLR, even some homegrown servers people built on top of nREPL for languages I’d never heard of.¹ The answer was always the same kind of squishy “sort of, in theory, with caveats”, because while bare nREPL is genuinely language-agnostic, CIDER is not. CIDER was built for Clojure and assumes Clojure pretty much everywhere.

I always thought the right answer was “let’s gradually make CIDER more language-agnostic.” That’s the kind of plan that sounds reasonable until you actually try it.

The thing that pushed me over the edge was, oddly enough, building Port. Port is small, focused, and doesn’t try to be CIDER. Working on it for a couple of weeks reminded me how (deceptively) productive it is to start from a clean slate when the new requirements don’t match the assumptions baked into a mature codebase. Trying to retrofit CIDER into a language-agnostic shape would have meant fighting with every helper that ever assumed clojure.repl exists, every middleware contract cider-nrepl defines, every project-type heuristic that knows about deps.edn and project.clj and nothing else. A whole lot of “is the server Clojure, or is it the other thing?” branches. The Port experience reaffirmed that the right move for a genuinely different client is a new project, not a thousand cuts to an existing one.

So neat was born. The name is short, says what it does (it’s neat, both in the small-and-tidy sense and in the “no deps, no special assumptions, just the protocol” sense), and conveniently leaves room for puns I haven’t fully committed to yet. I might land on a backronym one day. For now it’s just “neat”.

What neat actually is

neat is a small Emacs nREPL client. The code is split across four files:

• neat-bencode.el: bencode encode/decode.
• neat-client.el: TCP connections, request dispatch, the standard nREPL ops.
• neat-repl.el: a comint-derived REPL buffer.
• neat.el: the entry point, customization group, and neat-mode minor mode for source buffers.

It only uses Emacs builtins. There are no external runtime dependencies, not even on clojure-mode, because neat doesn’t assume Clojure on the other end. If you write clojure-mode, fennel-mode, hy-mode, or anything else that talks nREPL, you turn on neat-mode in that buffer and it just works.

The connection routing is also intentionally library-friendly. There’s a buffer-local neat-current-connection override so downstream packages can implement their own routing logic, plus a global default for the simple “one server at a time” case that most people will want.

Capability discovery is done at connect time via the nREPL describe op. neat doesn’t hardcode “this server has completions, this one doesn’t” assumptions. If the server reports a completions op, the CAPF backend lights up (with type annotations next to each candidate, when the server provides them). If it reports lookup, eldoc starts working and M-. jumps to definitions via an xref backend. If neither is there, you still get a perfectly serviceable raw REPL.

Basic usage

Start an nREPL server. Anything that speaks the protocol will do. For a Clojure server:

1
2
3
4
5
clj -M:nrepl
# or
bb nrepl-server :port 7888
# or
lein repl :headless :port 7888

Then in Emacs:

1
M-x neat RET localhost RET 7888 RET

A REPL buffer pops up, the prompt follows the server’s reported namespace, and you can type expressions at it. Multi-line input works because RET only submits when the form parses as balanced under neat-repl-input-syntax-table (Emacs Lisp syntax by default, which is close enough for any Lisp). Input history is persisted across sessions.

If there’s a .nrepl-port file in the project, the prompt defaults to its contents, so M-x neat RET RET is enough to connect.

To evaluate from a source buffer, turn on the minor mode:

1
M-x neat-mode

The familiar bindings are there, intentionally compatible with what CIDER users expect:

neat-eval-buffer ships the buffer contents as an eval op; neat-load-buffer-file uses the standard load-file op instead, so the server can attribute file and line numbers to errors. Use the latter when you’re actually loading a file from disk and care about good diagnostics.

neat-set-ns sets the buffer-local neat-ns, which gets sent as the ns field on every eval op from that buffer. For languages where the namespace is declared in the source (Clojure’s (ns foo.bar), etc.), swap in a parser via neat-buffer-ns-function.

For juggling multiple connections, M-x neat-list-connections opens a tabulated-list buffer with one row per live connection, where you can set the default or disconnect interactively.

That’s roughly the whole user-facing surface today. There’s no jack-in command, no inspector, no debugger, no test runner. Likely there will never be, but if you need those you should probably be using CIDER anyways…

Should you use it?

If you write Clojure and CIDER works for you, keep using CIDER. It’s mature, full-featured, and supported, and I’m going to keep working on it for as long as people use it. Nothing about neat changes that.

But if you find yourself in one of these situations:

• you write a non-Clojure language whose runtime ships an nREPL server, and you’ve been muddling through with a half-supported CIDER setup,
• you write Clojure but you value minimalism and don’t need the full CIDER feature set,
• you’re building an Emacs package that needs to talk nREPL and you want a small, dependency-free library to build on,²

then neat might be a better fit. It’s small enough that you can read the whole thing in an afternoon, and the library/UI split (neat-bencode and neat-client are perfectly usable from other packages) is genuinely designed for downstream consumers.

The bigger picture

neat is part of a broader push I’ve been chewing on for a while now: making nREPL a healthy multi-language ecosystem rather than a Clojure-only protocol. That push has three legs:

1. An actual nREPL specification. The spec.nrepl.org draft is (will be) the formal version of what today is “whatever nREPL the project does”.
2. Reference clients. neat is one. The point of building a deliberately Clojure-free client is that it stress-tests the spec. Anywhere neat ends up needing to special-case the server, the spec has a gap.
3. A compatibility test suite. The parameterised integration suite in neat already runs the same assertions against multiple servers and surfaces real divergences (Clojure batching (println "hi") into a single out message where Basilisp emits two, for example). I’d like to grow this into a portable suite that any nREPL server can self-check against.

This is also why I keep teasing a “reference CLI client” in conversations. An editor client is one thing, but a small command-line nREPL client written in a non-Lisp language would be a much sharper test of how language-agnostic the protocol really is. neat is plausibly a precursor to that. Time will tell how far I push this; for now I just wanted to get the Emacs side moving.

Thanks

As always, big thanks to Clojurists Together and everyone supporting my open source work. You make it possible for me to keep tweaking and improving CIDER, nREPL, clj-refactor, and friends, and occasionally try something “neat” on the side. neat isn’t replacing any of the existing Clojure tooling for Emacs. It’s just another tool in the box for the people who want it.

Feedback, ideas, and contributions are most welcome over at the issue tracker.

Keep hacking!

Denote aims to be a simple-to-use, focused-in-scope, and effective note-taking and file-naming tool for Emacs.

Denote is based on the idea that files should follow a predictable and descriptive file-naming scheme. The file name must offer a clear indication of what the contents are about, without reference to any other metadata. Denote basically streamlines the creation of such files or file names while providing facilities to link between them (where those files are editable).

Denote’s file-naming scheme is not limited to “notes”. It can be used for all types of file, including those that are not editable in Emacs, such as videos. Naming files in a constistent way makes their filtering and retrieval considerably easier. Denote provides relevant facilities to rename files, regardless of file type.

• Package name (GNU ELPA): denote
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote
• Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote-changelog
• Git repositories:
  • GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote
  • GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/denote
• Video demo: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2022-06-18-denote-demo/
• Backronyms: Denote Everything Neatly; Omit The Excesses. Don’t Ever Note Only The Epiphenomenal.

Below are the release notes.

Version 4.2.0 on 2026-05-20

This version brings several improvements to the core denote package as well as all the Denote extensions I maintain. The core package is stable, its feature set is rich, and the wider ecosystem of extensions is growing.

Most of the changes documented herein are of interest to experienced users who may be looking for ways to refine their workflow. I recommend that new users start with the basics, as I explained them in the original video demonstration of Denote or as they are documented in the manual’s section for newcomers:

• Webpage: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote#h:c54bedb4-5377-4dbd-853c-5870ace6eb33.
• Info manual: With the latest denote package installed, evaluate (info "(denote) Getting started with Denote").

Remember that the release notes are true only at the time of publication. The single source of truth is the official manual.

Core Denote

Overview of the new features

• The command denote-dired-focus will filter the results of an existing denote-dired buffer. Use this to narrow down the results.

• In Org files, the denote: link type can now be previewed using the built-in org-link-preview command, starting with Org version 9.8.0.

• The command denote-link-or-create-with-command extends the existing convenience functions of the “do or create note” kind.

• The denote-file-prompt uses completion metadata to sort by most recently accessed, group by directory or file extension, and cover packages that display cosmetic icons alongside completion candidates.

• Denote now enforces a controlled vocabulary for keywords when denote-infer-keywords is set to nil, such that only the denote-known-keywords are provided as an option at the relevant prompts.

• The mechanism for integrating Denote with org-capture now supports prompting for an signature via denote-org-capture-with-prompts (the signature is an optional, free-form component of the Denote file-naming scheme).

• Several packages that extend Denote are documented in the manual. If you have a package for Denote, let me know and I will write a section about it.

Focus a denote-dired buffer with denote-dired-focus

The command denote-dired produces a Dired listing of file names that match the given regular expressions. Users can benefit from the Denote file-naming scheme to, for example, include all files that have the keyword _emacs. In the resulting Dired buffer, the new command denote-dired-focus can then be invoked to further narrow down the results, such as to only show files that have 2026 in their file (with default settings, the date is part of the Denote identifier).

I implemented this feature in response to issue 693 by 82Kang: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/issues/693.

Improvements to the file prompt

Various Denote commands prompt for a file name: for instance, denote-link asks which file to link to. This file prompt is now augmented with completion metadata that transform how files look and how the information is organised.

Before, the prompt presented full file names like:

20220610T043241--initial-thoughts-on-the-zettelkasten-method__notetaking.org
20220610T062201--define-custom-org-hyperlink-type__denote_emacs_package.md
20220610T162327--on-hierarchy-and-taxis__notetaking_philosophy.txt

Those same file names are now transformed to look like this:

2022-06-10  initial-thoughts-on-the-zettelkasten-method  notetaking
2022-06-10  define-custom-org-hyperlink-type  denote_emacs_package
2022-06-10  on-hierarchy-and-taxis  notetaking_philosophy

The files will be grouped by file extension or directory (if they are in a subdirectory of the denote-directory). Furthermore, they will be sorted by most recently accessed.

The underlying file names are still available except that their presentation is modified. This means that input at the minibuffer prompt will still match everything they contain.

This completion metadata extends to the packages all-the-icons and nerd-icons, which are now instructed to add the correct file icons to the completion candidates: an Org file will have the unicorn icon beside it, for example.

Users who do not like the new style can revert to the plain presentation by setting denote-file-prompt-extra-metadata to nil.

Advanced users who wish to set up the completion-category-overrides may target the denote-file completion category or, anyhow, modify the denote-file-prompt-extra-metadata.

Link to a file or create a new note using a specific command

Denote provides many “convenience wrapper” commands that do something quickly which can also be achieved with minimal configuration. For example, the denote command may be modified to also prompt for a file type and so the denote-type command is like denote with the addition of the file type prompt. Users can look at the source code of denote-type to write their own small variations (the manual provides several examples as well).

The denote-open-or-create-with-command may then use those to implement its specified behaviour of “open an existing file or create it using a convenience wrapper command”.

Same principle for the new denote-link-or-create-with-command: it makes possible the workflow of “link to an existing file or create a new note with the given command”.

Convenience wrappers are listed in the value of the user option denote-commands-for-new-notes.

Thanks to Matthew Batson for building on top of existing functionality to contribute denote-link-or-create-with-command in pull request 674: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/pull/674. Matthew has assigned copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

Preview denote: links in Org files

Starting with Org version 9.8.0 custom link types such as denote: can implement their own preview mechanism. In practice, this means that denote: links pointing to image files will now work as expected with org-link-preview (remember that the Denote file-naming scheme can be applied to any file and is in no way specific to note-taking—I use it for documents and videos, for example).

Thanks to Samuel W. Flint for the original contribution in pull request 683: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/pull/683, with further changes by me. The original contribution is small, meaning that Samuel does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

Signature support in Org capture

The denote-org-capture-with-prompts function now supports the signature file name component as an additional parameter. This function is meant to be used in tandem with the org-capture mechanism, as shown in the manual.

Thanks to Tobias Lidman-Strauss for the contribution in merge request 2 on the GitLab mirror: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/denote/-/merge_requests/2. The change is small, meaning that Tobias does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

The denote-fontify-links-mode is only relevant for .txt files

The denote: links are automatically highlighted as links in Org and Markdown bufers. Users who prefer to write notes in plain .txt files must enable the denote-fontify-links-mode to get the same effect.

I have revised denote-fontify-links-mode to only work with .txt as its other users were not necessary. In the process, I have deprecated the denote-fontify-links-mode-maybe function: just use the denote-fonftify-links-mode.

The keys RET and C-c C-o open the link (same keys used by Org and Markdown modes).

Growing ecosystem of Denote packages

In the Denote manual I mention packages that build on top of Denote. There is one section for each package. The manual now includes the following:

• denote-agenda (by Samuel W. Flint): Use Denote notes as Org agenda files.
• denote-journal-capture (by Samuel W. Flint): Enhanced journaling workflows.
• denote-lint (Peter Smith): Checks for inconsistencies in Denote file names and front matter.
• denote-project-notes (by Samuel W. Flint): Integrate Denote with Emacs’ built-in project support.
• denote-regexp (by Samuel W. Flint): Search and link notes using regular expressions.
• denote-review (by Matto Fransen): A package for reviewing notes over time.
• denote-sections (by Samuel W. Flint): Manage sections within Denote notes.
• denote-wordcloud (by Alexander Kuzmin): Generate word clouds from Denote notes.

Miscellaneous

• The command denote-dired (alias denote-sort-dired) is refactored to work as intended in all cases. Thanks to kilesduli for the contribution in pull request 666: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/pull/666. Further changes by me, including the option to maintain many separate denote-dired buffers, which I did in response to issue 693 by 82Kang: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/issues/693.

• I have revised the denote-grep mechanism and all of its ancillary functions and variables are revised in the interest of consistency and maintainability. Thanks to gnuhack for contributing a macro that was meant to streamline some commands. This was done in pull request 697: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/pull/697. I eventually changed lots of things so that the macro was not relevant anymore, though mine was a change with a wider scope.

• The Org link storage mechanism (denote-link-ol-store) now works correctly within org-capture buffers, allowing for more flexible linking workflows.

• Following non-Denote Markdown links no longer result in an error under certain circumstances. Thanks to bplubell for the contribution in pull request 685: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/pull/685. The change is small, meaning that its author does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

• Retrieving front matter is now more reliable, even when the buffer is unsaved. Thanks to kilesduli for the contribution in pull request 672: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/pull/672. Also thanks to Jean-Philippe Gagné Guay for reviewing the change and for reporting a problem with an earlier version of the code in issue 670: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/issues/670. Further changes by me.

• The various Denote rename commands that affect the front matter in files no longer change existing spacing. I did this to address the comment posted by Morten Kjeldgaard in issue 703: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/issues/703.

• Updated the documentation to explain how to automatically encrypt new notes when using a custom file type.

• Refined the internal helper functions for directory management and identifier validation.

• Thanks to nescias for fixing three typos in the manual. This was sent to me as a patch, which I installed as commit c772378.

Changes to the extensions of Denote I maintain

This is about packages I maintain. Some of them were originally part of the denote.git repository, but I moved them out into their own packages to make everything easier to reason about.

consult-denote version 0.5.0

• Package name (GNU ELPA): consult-denote
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/consult-denote
• Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/consult-denote-changelog
• Git repository: https://github.com/protesilaos/consult-denote

• Backronym: Consult-Orchestrated Navigation and Selection of Unambiguous Targets…denote.

• References to the long-obsolete “denote-silo-extras-” prefix are replaced by “denote-silo-”. Thanks to IT Ascalium for the contribution in pull request 20: https://github.com/protesilaos/consult-denote/pull/20. The change is small, so its author does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

• The consult-denote-file-prompt correctly handles relative file paths when denote-directory is set to a list of directories. This is what the underlying denote-file-prompt does (which I mentioned above about its metadata). Thanks to Kai von Fintel for the contribution in pull request 24: https://github.com/protesilaos/consult-denote/pull/24. The change does not require copyright assignment.

denote-merge version 0.1.0

• Git repository: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-merge
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote-merge
• Backronym: Denote… Merging Eventually Reformats the Given Entries.

This is an optional extension to the denote package. It provides commands and relevant user options to streamline the work of merging contents from one Denote file to another. This is for users who periodically review their notes to add, remove, or otherwise consolidate their accumulated knowledge.

denote-journal version 0.3.0

• Package name (GNU ELPA): denote-journal
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote-journal
• Git repository: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-journal

• Backronym: Denote… Journaling Obviously Utilises Reasonableness Notwithstanding Affectionate Longing.

• The user option denote-journal-keyword now supports a nil value, allowing users to create journal entries without a specific keyword. Thanks to nescias for sending me the patch via email, which I installed as commit d4cc501 in denote-journal.git. The change does not require copyright assignment.

• Fixed an issue about how the function denote-directory-files was used. Thanks to Donald Brady for reporting the bug in issue 656 on the main Denote repository and to kamchy for confirming the problem: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/issues/656. The approach was utlimately revised in denote.git courtesy of a change by Jean-Philippe Gagné Guay in pull request 661: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/pull/661.

denote-markdown version 0.3.0

• Package name (GNU ELPA): denote-markdown
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote-markdown
• Git repository: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-markdown

• Backronyms: Denote… Markdown’s Ambitious Reimplimentations Knowingly Dilute Obvious Widespread Norms; Denote… Markup Agnosticism Requires Knowhow to Do Only What’s Necessary.

• The package defines a markdown-obsidian file type which can be used by relevant note-creating commands, such as denote or the convenience wrapper denote-type. This file type is updated to be more robust, in accordance with some changes in core Denote (I am not even documenting those, as they are not intended for users).

denote-org version 0.3.0

• Package name (GNU ELPA): denote-org
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote-org
• Git repository: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-org

• Backronym: Denote… Ordinarily Restricts Gyrations.

• The command denote-org-link-to-heading now supports linking to the current file when called with a prefix argument. This way, a file can have links between its headings. Thanks to Tonus for pointing out that it was impossible to create a link inside the current file. This was done in issue 17: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-org/issues/17.

• A helper function for retrieving the backlinks of a heading is updated to return full file paths. Thanks to Vedang Manerikar for the contribution in pull request 20: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-org/pull/20. Vedang has assigned copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

• Another helper function is updated to conform with changes to core Denote with regard to how the denote-link-description-format is handled. Thanks to Jung Han for reporting the bug in issue 21: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-org/issues/21.

denote-silo version 0.3.0

• Package name (GNU ELPA): denote-silo
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote-silo
• Git repository: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-silo
• Backronym: Denote… Silos Insulate Localised Objects.

The minibuffer prompt for silo directories uses the corrent completion category (consistent with what I mentioned above about completion metadata). Thanks to Wilf-bog for reporting an error with the completion prompt in issue 1: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-silo/issues/1.

denote-sequence version 0.3.0

• Package name (GNU ELPA): denote-sequence
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote-sequence
• Git repository: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-sequence
• Backronym: Denote… Sequences Efficiently Queue Unsorted Entries Notwithstanding Curation Efforts.

This package deserved its own release notes, as I did a lot of work on it. But as this file is already long, I will focus on the essentials:

• The denote-sequence-scheme used to support a numeric and alphanumeric option. There now is a third one called alphanumeric-delimited. It combines features from the other two and may be better suited for especially long/intricate sequences.

• The denote-sequence-reparent command now works recursively to produce the desired consequences to all descendants of a given sequence note. Thanks to Peter Prevos for the contribution in pull request 13, which further changes by me: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-sequence/pull/13.

• The command denote-sequence-view-hierarchy produces a bespoke buffer with all the sequence notes that form a hierarchy. The buffer displays file titles, the concomitant sequence, and file keywords. Each level of depth is expressed by a number of spaces, controlled by the user option denote-sequence-hierarchy-indentation. In the hierarchy buffer, there are commands that move to the next/previous item, or forward/backward at the same level of depth. RET opens the file at point, TAB folds/unfolds the tree. The user option denote-sequence-hierarchy-move-and-open controls whether motion commands should automatically open the file, which by default happens in the other window (users who modify the variable denote-open-link-function will get the specified behaviour in this context as well). The denote-sequence-view-hierarchy can be called with one or two prefix arguments to limit to a given sequence prefix and/or level of depth (something that denote-sequence-dired also supports). In short, this is a way to visualise your sequence notes in a buffer that has a different presentation than Dired.

• Thanks to alan-w-255 for renaming and refining a prompt that is also used in the hierarchy feature. This was done in pull request 15: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-sequence/pull/15. The change is small, meaning that its author does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation. Further refinements by me.

• Thanks to Nicolas Semrau for binding q to quit-window in the denote-sequence-hierarchy-mode-map. This was done in pull request 20: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-sequence/pull/20. The change is small, meaning that Nicolas does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

• The denote-sequence-file-prompt-extra-metadata is the functional equivalent of the aforementioned denote-file-prompt-extra-metadata.

• Thanks to liyingzhi for pointing out an inaccurate comment in the docstring of denote-sequence-scheme. This was done in issue 18: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-sequence/issues/18.

• The denote-sequence-dired is updated to align with the modalities of denote-dired, as noted above. Thanks to juh for reminding me about the need for changes in issue 14: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-sequence/issues/14.

• Thanks to Stefan Monnier for pointing out a stylistic mistake in an older version of denote-sequence-dired. This was done on the emacs-devel mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2025-11/msg01119.html. Also thanks to Stefan for telling me about some other compiler warnings: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2025-11/msg01119.html.

Git commits

~/Git/Projects/denote $ git shortlog 4.1.0..4.2.0 --summary --numbered
   184	Protesilaos
     4	duli
     3	Jean-Philippe Gagné Guay
     3	Matthew Batson
     2	alvmts
     2	gnuhack
     1	Alvin Hsu
     1	Matto Fransen
     1	Samuel W. Flint
     1	Tobias Lidman-Strauss
     1	bplubell
     1	gvalson
     1	nescias

Pretty much every project that I actively maintain on my GitHub account has a change log of some description. For a long time now, whenever I add a new entry to the log, I'll include a link to the PR that implements that change. Inevitably, this results in me adding the ChangeLog entry, creating the PR, then doing a follow-up change and commit now that I know the PR number, which allows me to add the link.

So I've created next-gh-pr.el to save me just a little time and let me be just a little more lazy. Inside it I've currently got a next-gh-pr-insert-markdown-link command which, when run, as you might imagine, inserts a link to the next likely PR URL as Markdown.

Working out the next URL is simple enough: get the latest issue and PR number, take whichever is the highest, and add 1. There is the wrinkle that discussions also cause this number to bump, and getting the latest discussion number is a little extra faff that I can't be bothered with right now, but my projects very seldom have discussions taking place anyway.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) really likes all the ways you can mark files in Dired but noticed that an easy way to mark recently modified files was missing. He knows quite a bit about writing Elisp so it was an easy decision to decide to write some code to implement the missing feature.

The code, which you can see at his post, is pretty simple and easy to follow. What wasn’t so easy were some annoying design decisions. For example, what constitutes the current day? Is it 24 hours ago until now or is it the previous midnight until now? And by the way, should that be UTC or local time?

The natural interface is to specify the number of previous days you want to mark as a prefix argument but that leaves open the question of how to unmark the last n days. The natural solution—and the one mbork chose—is to use a negative n to mean “unmark the last n days”. So positive n, mark files modified in the last n days; negative n unmark file modified in the last n days. What about 0? Mbork made the arbitrary decision to have that mean mark files modified in the last 60 minutes.

There are a couple of other nuances that you can read about in mbork’s post. The real takeaway for me is how tricky it can be to get the small details right. That seems especially true when you’re dealing with time calculations. Questions like, “What, exactly, does ‘yesterday’ mean” turn out to be a lot harder to answer than they first seem. Take a look at mbork’s post to see what I mean.

I haven't been very active on this blog for the last few months. I've recently started a new job, and part of what I've been doing in my spare time is adding to my Emacs configuration to make some of the daily chores easier (or to remove them entirely).

If you know me, you know I'm not a fan of WebUIs, or just mouse-focused GUIs in general. Jira is no exception. Previously, I've had to deal with Jira's annoying click and drag nonsense and sort of dealt with it, but I've always wanted to be able to use it from within Emacs. Not just because that means no mouse-based WebUI, but also because it potentially means making custom automations around tickets. Enter the new job, where I'm able to make myself an API token, and therefore make use of org-jira for the first time.

You can see the config I've written around it here. This works basically exactly as expected, although I have had to do something a bit hacky to keep the API token properly stored. Storing the key on MacOS as recommended in the readme wasn't working for me, so instead I've stored it as a generic password. When launching Jira, this password is fetched into the kill ring to be pasted into the prompt if needed. This is kind of terrible, but it does work well enough.

(when (equal system-type 'darwin)
  (kill-new
   (string-trim-right (shell-command-to-string (concat "security find-generic-password -a \""
                                                     jiralib-user "\" -s \"jira\" -w")))))

You should be careful when storing the API token with add-generic-password, make sure you write it in the command with -w "<token>" and don't copy it into the prompt. When I was copying it into the prompt, the token was getting cut off, which was a pain to debug because Jira cloud doesn't have 401 errors for this sort of thing on the JQL search. You may also notice string-trim-right here: the output of shell-command-to-string includes the trailing newline, which will mess up the auth.

I'm also using my org projects space as the Jira workspace locally, which means I can use all the same organisation helpers as I do with my personal project files.

In terms of automations, org-jira already provides useful enough keybinds for progressing tickets, leaving comments, etc., and at the moment I don't feel like I need to improve there. However, since this Jira instance is integrated with Bitbucket, it's convention to use the ticket number when opening a new branch for work related to that ticket. That way Jira can show things like PR status, etc.

Because each Jira board or project only has one repository associated, I'm assuming that there will be only one directory for that project work, and that can be a customizable variable.

(defcustom jira-key-directory-alist '()
  "Directories associated with a particular project --- git repositories.
For example, (\"CBM\" . \"~/build/etc\") will use ~/build/etc for ticket-specific commands in the CBM project."
  :type 'alist
  :group 'jira
  :group 'theurgy)

Then this simple function fetches the Jira issue ID under the cursor, opens a magit status buffer in the appropriate directory, and starts branch creation.

(defun jira-branch-ticket ()
  "Create a branch from the current ticket, in the repository specified by `jira-key-directory-alist'."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((issue-key (progn
                    (org-jira-copy-current-issue-key)
                    (substring-no-properties (car kill-ring))))
       (project-code (car (split-string
                           issue-key
                           "-")))
       (project-dir (cdr (assoc project-code jira-key-directory-alist))))
    (magit-status project-dir)
    (kill-new issue-key)
    (call-interactively #'magit-branch-create)))

I'm not pre-selecting main/master as the origin here because it's possible that I may want to branch off something else. Nor am I pre-populating the branch name, just killing the ticket number, in case I need multiple branches per ticket.

Ideally, I would like to pre-populate the magit branch prompt with some editable default values, but I'm not actually sure how to do that, so this will do for now.

The next blog will look at the AWS CLI customisations I've built up, so stay tuned.

My favourite post this week was oantolin's tip about using Eww. It's always interesting to see what people can do when they apply Emacs's power and composability to all sorts of things, including evaluating code snippets from webpages. Outside Emacs, there was a lively conversation on HN about personal software. Enjoy!

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

Of all the built-in editing commands in Emacs, the commands that work with rectangles delight me the most. Once understood, they can save effort in many situations.

That said, the biggest downside to rectangles is the amount of setup it takes to use them. As with many things Emacs, by default you have to memorize a bunch of keybindings to get anything done with them.

In Casual, I addressed the above downside by providing a Transient menu for rectangle commands. Since building that, I've come to use rectangle commands routinely. But even then, there is ceremony to set up a rectangle selection.

With my recent work on mouse-driven interactions in Anju, I’ve learned that rectangle selection is trivial via C-M-<mouse-1> dragging. Once selected, having a menu of rectangle commands makes working with them even easier. So I made one for the latest v1.4.0 update for Anju, now on MELPA.

The “Rectangle” sub-menu is available via the main menu bar “Edit” menu (as shown in the screenshot above) or via context menu. Using rectangle commands in conjunction with the align-regexp (“Edit › Align Regexp…”) and whitespace-cleanup (“Edit › Delete › Whitespace Cleanup”) can make short work of editing text that is laid out in columns. Anju makes both of these commands available from the main menu.

Side note: on using C-M-<mouse-1>, sometimes Emacs will only read M-<mouse-1> and do a secondary selection, leaving an unwanted highlight. Enter M-<mouse-1> to dismiss the highlight.

If you find Anju to be useful, please support its development by buying me a coffee. I’ve got a number of new features planned for it.

I have been a VC-mode loyalist for years, it is built in, it is simple, it covers the basics - commit, push, pull, diff, all there with C-x v bindings. I never really felt the need for Magit, honestly. VC-mode just works, right?

Until it does not. Or rather, until you need something that is not quite available. As vc-mode is source code control agnostic then there were always going to be some limitations and my git usage is now starting to become a little more advanced.

Recently I hit a divergent branch situation, remote had moved on, I had local commits, and git refused to push, I reached for C-x v m (vc-merge) to pull in the upstream changes, and that worked fine as a merge. But what if I wanted a rebase instead? Clean linear history, no merge commits?

Turns out there is no vc-rebase at all in Emacs! You can use vc-pull and it will rebase if pull.rebase is set in your git config (I think, although I haven't tried it), but there is no interactive vc-rebase command to invoke directly. And vc-merge only merges, If you want a rebase, you have to drop to shell or configure git to default to it. I wanted something more cohesive, more discoverable, and #sigh, here enters magit, I used it a few years ago so I still had a residue of muscle memory, but that said, I am not abandoning VC-mode entirely. For quick operations, a single file commit, a blame, a quick diff – C-x v I still like vc-mode. Magit is great for repo-level operations; VC-mode is great for file-level ones. They complement each other nicely, and there is no reason to pick one over the other, this is Emacs!

I added use-package magit to my config with a C-x g binding, full-frame status display, word-granular diff refining, and also released C-w in the magit status map so my window-management prefix still works (small things, but they matter):

(use-package magit
  :bind ("C-x g" . magit-status)
  :config
  (setq magit-display-buffer-function
        #'magit-display-buffer-same-window-except-diff-v1)
  (setq magit-refresh-status-buffer t)
  (setq magit-section-initial-visibility-alist
        '((untracked . show)
          (stashes . hide)))
  (setq magit-diff-refine-hunk 'all)
  (define-key magit-status-mode-map (kbd "C-w") nil))

On May 29, I'll chat with Omar Antolín Camarena about Emacs and Life.

<2026-05-29 Fri 10:30>–<2026-05-29 Fri 11:30> (America/Toronto) = Fri May 29 1030H EDT / 0930H CDT / 0830H MDT / 0730H PDT / 1430H UTC / 1630H CEST / 1730H EEST / 2000H IST / 2230H +08 / 2330H JST

Related links:

• Omar Antolín Camarena: a researcher at Instituto de Matemáticas, UNAM in Mexico City
• M-x apropos Emacs
• oantolin/emacs-config: My personal Emacs configuration · GitHub
• oantolin (Omar Antolín Camarena) · GitHub
• Omar Antolín (@oantolin@mathstodon.xyz) - Mathstodon
• u/oantolin on Reddit

This session will be recorded, and I'll update this blog post with notes: https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/

You can add the iCal for upcoming Emacs Chat episodes to your calendar. https://sachachua.com/topic/upcoming-emacs-chats.ics

Find more Emacs Chats or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat

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

I see a lot of blog posts recommending EWW. Sometimes I even write about them. The common theme is something along the lines of, “No, you can’t really replace a full-fledged browser with EWW but you can do a lot and a ”real“ browser is only a keystroke away.”

In another May Emacs Carnival entry, Omar Antolín Camarena offers his reasons for using EWW. He agrees with the conventional wisdom that EWW isn’t a replacement for a normal browser but that it is useful in many situations and even has some advantages over your default buffer.

He believes that one of the chief advantages of EWW is that it doesn’t run JavaScript. That’s ironic, of course, because EWW’s lack of support for JavaScript is one of its most oft cited shortcomings. But Camarena says that lack is often an advantage because JavaScript is often used to load ads or a paywall or to reconfigure your display preferences often choosing low contrast colors that are hard for anyone but the young to read.

His second reason for using EWW is that it brings the power of Emacs to your Web browsing. Among the advantages he lists are:

• You can easily resize images without changing font and other sizes.
• You can read the Web site content in multiple columns using follow-mode.
• You can use occur for a search and keep a list of results and easily navigate among them.
• You can evaluate ELISP directly in the EWW buffer and many other language as well with a bit of plumbing.
• You can use eww-readable to eliminate a lot of the junk that comes with many Web pages.

And, as Camarena stresses, you can always escape to a normal buffer with eww-browse-with-external-browser, bound to & by default.

Philip Kaludercic wanted to continue the conversation from YE24: Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs - Newbies/Starter Kits. He's spent a lot of time thinking about this as one of the main contributors to newcomers-presets. We talked about newcomers-presets, the idea of a "reset theme" that lets experienced users pin defaults to a specific version of Emacs, upcoming changes, and working with emacs-devel.

View in the Internet Archive, watch or comment on YouTube, read the transcript online, download the transcript, or e-mail me.

Transcript

Expand this to read the transcript

0:00 Opening

Sacha: I'm going to start recording. I'm going to do the thing. I'll let you know. Okay. Let's do this. Yeah.

Prot: Yeah.

Sacha: Yeah. Okay. Hang on a second. Starting, going live. Okay. So, hello, everyone. This is Yay Emacs 29. And today I am here with Prot and Philip Kaludercic. We're having this conversation about Emacs newcomer experience, which started off with an Emacs carnival last month about newbies and starter kits, which Cena started and you fleshed out with more questions. And now this is snowballing to, okay, let's figure out what we can do to make Emacs easier for newbies who are coming in, maybe they're non-developers who have heard good things about Org Mode, or maybe they're developers who want to try out what this Emacs thing is and what's all the fuss about having an editor that's been around for so long. Or maybe they're actually still VS Code or Vim fans, but they really just want to use Magit, so they're coming in just for that. A lot of different paths to coming into Emacs. We do have this live stream, so if people have questions, I will at some point figure out where the chat is on my screen so I can read them out to you. But my plan here is I'll just be in the background taking notes most of the time and interjecting with occasional questions. And maybe Philip and Prot, you can go brain dump all the wonderful things you've been thinking about the Emacs newcomer experience.

Philip: At this point, regret not having written down any notes from the last video or from your last recording of YouTube, because I noticed I had a few things I wanted to add or intersperse. But I guess we can take a look at two things. So first one is the state of introducing people to Emacs now. And the question there is, who are we introducing Emacs to? Just like you said, you sketched out a few different profiles of people who presumably have entirely different interests, motivations, like if someone wants to just use Magit like Emacs is there. It's the tool, it's the GUI that implements Magit, then these people have an entirely different motivation than someone who actually says, well, I'm coming at it from, I heard it's an interesting tool for free software development. Build your own or understand free software in a different sense, where you can actually do find-function and open the definition of the function you just used. I think malleable is the current catch word that people like to use in that context. So there's some issue in that sense.

2:59 newcomers-presets user option theme; would be nice to explain what the changes are

Philip: And then the specific comment from the last discussion which caught my attention was We were talking about Emacs 31, there's this preset theme, the newcomers-presets theme, which is implemented as a user option theme, or that's how I like to refer to it. And I probably should just briefly stop and say that everything I'm saying is from my own perspective. I don't feel comfortable saying that this is the Emacs-devel perspective or that any other of the Emacs developers necessarily have to agree with me. I just think that I might have a few things.

Prot: Sorry, I lost your audio. Just to say I lost your audio, Philip. Excuse me. Sorry, I lost your audio for a second. You could hear it fine. I will hear it in the recording.

Sacha: Okay, so basically, you can repeat it, I guess. Go ahead.

Philip: What did I say? So you were saying that... I'm not representing emacs-devel. These are my views which are informed by the discussions that we had in emacs-devel that I hope will be represented. I think I'm the maintainer of the preset theme, but of course other people are also contributing to it and adding other options. Specific points I had like the target audience of the preset theme was not people who would be particularly interested. What the options are. I think that was a discussion point last time. I admit it's a technical deficiency currently. There's no pretty way. I think it would be nice if we extended describe theme to actually list the options that are modified with hyperlinks so that you could look into these options. That's currently not there. We didn't add it in time for the feature cut for Emacs 31, but I think for Emacs 32 that's going to be an interesting Feature to have at some point.

5:00 finding a balance between "it's fine the way it is" and "just use Doom Emacs"

Philip: And actually the idea had been floating around I think like every time there was like there's a periodic, periodical discussions like how should we make Emacs more user-friendly on Emacs level and people say we have to like say the extremist position is what do you mean not user-friendly. It's perfect the way it is. It's God-given configuration. And the other people who say, well, why don't we just install Doom Emacs and make that the default then? Somewhere in between, I think there is a reasonable position to be had. But in these discussions, one of the reasons this came... I participated maybe in four or five of them, and then this point came up: why don't we have a theme, like a collection of user options, which you can toggle in one switch, which enable all the options from which we would not find, which existing users would not find interesting, which are always the bulk of the users. Most people are already existing users. They don't come in and... One of the things is, lots of existing users, I'm thinking of like a 60-year-old professor who has been using Emacs for 30 years, or a software engineer who's using it, and maybe consciously or unconsciously appreciates the fact that it doesn't change every few years. You don't have a graphic designer. This is, of course, me against graphic designers and UI designers who have a need to reinvent the UI interface every few years and then things change. And how do I save now? What's the... What's the button to do this? And the UI changes.

6:37 people value stability, but also conventions have shifted.

Philip: The people who value the stability. But of course, the common conventions have grown apart. What Emacs does and what people are used to from other programs.

6:50 ways Emacs does things differently: ex: terminal vs eshell, output is editable; new users want to edit the previous prompt; sometimes goes against people's intuitions

Philip: Now, at this point, we also have to distinguish that there are things which Emacs doesn't do the way other programs do, which are... Which I would argue are actually sensible. For example, I think one issue I remember was when I first started using Emacs, I had a terminal emulator. I wanted to have a terminal emulator within Emacs. Nowadays I use Emacs Shell, which to me seems like a more truer Emacs experience. It's an opinion, a strong opinion maybe. And it's also influenced by a history of using Plan 9 and that kind of terminal where actually the output is just as editable. You can just search it. You can edit it. You can cut it. You can interact with the output any way you would use a normal text, which is not something you can do with a terminal for purely historical reasons. At my university, the university where I studied computer science, I frequently helped people in the introductory Linux course. One thing you notice there, these are real newcomers. These are people who have never used Linux or a terminal or anything like that before. The first thing they do when they want to, like, they use the arrow keys expecting or click on, they use the mouse and click on the previous prompt. And they want to modify the previous prompt. Of course, that doesn't work because that's not how terminal emulators work. All the previous output, that's fixed. You don't touch that anymore. Everyone, I guess even people who we describe as newcomers, talking about Emacs, obviously know of course you don't touch the previous prompt in the terminal. These are some expectations you have, if you use Eclipse, if you use VS Code, if you use... I'm not sure how the NeoVim terminal emulator works. I know they have a built-in one. I think Vim also, but I'm guessing right now. So there are some accumulated intuitions which Emacs actually intentionally doesn't want to give, doesn't want to give in all purpose, because I'd argue that one of the strengths of Emacs is really having this uniform text interface where I can use isearch, I can use occur, I can use the highlighting commands, I can just select a region and write it out to a buffer, and stuff like that. That shell buffer is no different than anything else in that respect. Please interrupt me by the way. This is not supposed to be a monologue.

Prot: No, no, no. Go ahead.

Sacha: So it sounds like there's an interesting challenge here.

Philip: Breaking some of these intuitions is legitimate.

Sacha: Yeah.

9:21 How do people develop Emacs intuition? Immersion

Sacha: How do we help people develop the Emacs intuitions?

Philip: To some degree, it really feels like it has to be something that you immerse yourself in. The issue, I guess, is, well, I know, I mean, I knew people who actually used Emacs. I mean, you can help them in a face-to-face setting or like Prot does in his teaching settings. Then you communicate certain things, which I don't want to say they're ineffable. It's not like you couldn't write them down in a manual, but it's also... Like the mentality that people have.

9:55 example: dabbrev, there's no undo? Ah, it's just the regular undo.

Philip: A different example I have, like, I remember I was using daabrev for the first time or something. For a while I was irritated. There was no undo. Like, how do I go back to the previous text expansion? Until at some point I realized, oh wait, it's just regular undo. That's just the way you undo it. But somehow writing this down in a manual is... It's not an easy thing to always think of these things. For me it seems obvious now, but at that point I specifically remember it was unintuitive. I had this accumulated expectation from other programmers if I have a text expansion in this case that I'm actually cycling through some special sort of menu, not thinking of it as just regular text buffer operations. Just text editing in some fancy way. But that's one We should keep in mind. This was all related to the preset theme in some way, right? You're writing this down.

Sacha: Yes, I'm writing this down. That's why we have notes.

11:00 newcomers presets: smooth over the intuition-disrupting things that are not actually necessary/beneficial; ex: enable which-key

Sacha: So what I'm thinking is you wanted the idea behind the newcomers presets is to kind of smooth over some of those intuition disrupting things where people are coming in with maybe expectations of how stuff should work in a modern editor.

Philip: Specifically, the intuition. Specifically, the intuition-disrupting things which are not necessary, in some sense. Like, we wouldn't want to be an intuition disrupt... like you could probably... Like Cua mode or something, that would be something where people if they would start using... If you would enable Cua-mode by default, that would inhibit further development, because then it might be confusing with using C-c, like if you... because suddenly Delay becomes a user input, which is usually not the case with Emacs. I know which-key is an exception in that case, because which-key pausing actually is an action and displays a pop-up buffer. And we do enable which-key due to popular requests and the preset theme. I personally was a bit hesitant about that one, but it seems to be something. where you have to really weigh it on a case-to-case basis. But, Sacha, do you have the... What version of Emacs do you have running there? I can't make it out.

Sacha: Yeah, this is Emacs 31, so I do have...

Philip: So you can open the preset theme, right?

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. Hang on a second. Let me bring up a... I have now a terminal, so I can... Let me bring up a completely fresh Emacs.

Philip: No, I just want you to open the file. Because in the file there is a prelude. There's a commentary section that actually explains the curve. It's not a library. That's exactly the joke with the...

Prot: Yeah, that's part of the problem with those themes.

Philip: That's the problem. Themes are not libraries.

Prot: It would be easier if they were all there. It's a kind of an implementation detail that from a user, it doesn't really make a difference.

Sacha: All right, newcomers-presets.

Philip: If I remember correctly...

Prot: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Philip: Yeah, and you see up there the commentary section?

Sacha: Yeah.

Philip: If you scroll up a bit, it's above line 37. The theme configures which we can reasonably expect the average user to want to enable, but would otherwise be unlikely to discover on their own. That's sort of the overall guide of what options we want to add. That's why it's also an option on the splash screen. You just tick it, and then the user options enabled in the theme should be activated by default. That's sort of the idea.

Sacha: It is available on the splash screen. So if I say display-splash... Oh my goodness, how do I get to the splash screen?

Prot: It's C-h C-a or not? I forgot. C-h a maybe?

Philip: There are two things. There's a splash screen and there's the...

Sacha: Hang on a second. I'm just going to start a new Emacs.

Prot: Yeah, I haven't done that in, like, I don't know...

Philip: That's the about Emacs screen. But you have a display splash screen.

Prot: C-h C-a on mine. About Emacs. M-x about-emacs.

Sacha: No, I have a better idea. I'm going to start this new Emacs person. Okay, here we go. New Emacs. Fresh person.

Sacha: So we click on this, right? And it turns on a bunch of things including the tab bar.

14:32 newcomers-presets choice is not saved at the moment

Sacha: I wasn't entirely sure how people would save that so that it happens again next time. Is the idea that they just keep checking that box?

Philip: That's not done currently. That's something we haven't simply decided on. The current presentation is you enable it in that mode and then you'd have to, which is of course saying it out loud makes it sound stupid, but you'd have to persistently save the themes. So then I think it's optional to save themes and then...

Sacha: It is possible for people to get to it if we leave them a breadcrumb. But it's not going to occur to them because it would never occur to them to say customize Emacs, custom themes, and then I can pick newcomers themes from here.

Philip: It's a point that I at least intended to mention at some point on emacs-devel, whether we want to make this, because currently it just loads the theme, but it doesn't persist the choice, but it could just as well persist the choice. There's a discussion to be had which of these two behaviors is more intuitive, because of course, if you persist the option, then you have the disadvantage that someone might enable it, but doesn't actually want it, but now somehow their Emacs is broken from their perspective. I don't want tabs or whatever they say, or I don't want which-key, and they don't know how to disable it. So this is... I wouldn't say it's an obvious decision in either direction.

Prot: Like if there is an enable button or save, there should be a disable and unsave, like remove.

Philip: Yeah, that's the checkbox idea in that case.

Prot: That would be the tricky part. And especially, finding the place on the splash screen so that this actually works for everyone... Because if you open it in a TUI mode, I think then initially, if I remember correctly, we had this button or this new to Emacs line was underneath the copyrights. No, no, that was a different thing.

Prot: If you click on newcomers preset, for example, then you are redirected to the manual entry. And I think we had some, yeah, there's this, the top line. If you got here by clicking the link on the splash screen, that was on the bottom. That was on the bottom of the manual entry. But if you open it up in an 80x24 terminal, you wouldn't see this line.

Sacha: You can't see it and you don't know how to... These are the complications that you have to keep in mind in that case.

Philip: You might not have the intuition that SPC is scroll, which I think that's the case in less. But yes, again, you have this accumulated intuition from using Unix tools. Which is one of the points I wanted to bring up.

17:08 newcomers without much computing experience might even find it easier (no C-c expectations, C-v etc)

Philip: Who is this mythical newcomer? What's their actual background? Because I claim, and this might be controversial, that if someone's actually new to using computers at all, which is something I have seen, like people who have never programmed, people who have never used Unix, people who have never used more than a web browser, to exaggerate, they appear to do fine with Emacs because they have no expectation of using C-c, C-v, C-c, and so on. They know that they have to use the buttons up there. So in that sense, they're fine. There's an optimization loop when you're used to these shortcuts and a few of these conventions how to move around, that Emacs defaults appear to be inconvenient. So that's also a distinction you have to make in that setting.

Prot: Exactly, exactly. Plus you cannot optimize for everybody. Eventually you just have to make some assumptions.

Philip: Exactly. But what these assumptions are is the controversial...

Prot: I think the way you approached it makes sense. This is the reasonable way, I think, to do it. You have to assume that they have this background knowledge. And if they don't, it's what you said. They don't have to relearn something because they didn't know it to begin with. So they start from a good basis.

18:30 Focus group?

Sacha: Is there interest in having some kind of focus group or something like that so that if we come across newbies, we can say, hey, you know, the developers would like to be able to float some questions once in a while to see what actual newbies would think of this?

Philip: I have actually tried this once. I was in a hacker... what's it called? There's this computer club in Germany and they have local events on a regular basis and I was going to one anyway because a few friends of mine were going there and then I did an introduction to Emacs course there and printed out a survey basically, a questionnaire for Emacs neophytes. I think if you search for that string on the Emacs development list, you're going to find that. And I gave a few people these texts. I printed it out. It was actually pieces of paper, so it wouldn't be personally identified. There wouldn't be any information there. And one of the things I thought was interesting in the results was that the main thing people were saying was it's overwhelming. Like the amount of things... Just the default Emacs. No configuration, no options, no auto-completion, no fido, whatever. It was just so many new things, so many differences that they lost an overview, basically. This was a group of people who, I think there were questions, and they were like, how long have you been using computers? Because, of course, it was so generic. What previous UIs have you had experience with? Most people use Eclipse or Vi, NeoVim and even reasonably complex Vim configurations. Of course, this is a bias due to the setting in which I was asking these questions. I'm actually planning to repeat this experiment because I'm going to another one of these congresses or these meetups in a month or so. I wanted to offer this again to people, specifically seeing if these newcomer presets are valuable or if they help people or not. But of course, doing this in a properly scientific setting would be much more difficult. Yeah, of course. We need money. Difficult steps of doing this.

Sacha: Maybe even like a mailing list. We can say, hey, you know, you're new to Emacs, but you kind of want to make it better. Email this person. And every so often when developers have a question, they can say like, does this make sense to you? Here's a screenshot. Or would you prefer this versus this?

Philip: As in, we would send an email to all the people, but then I think, I mean, the big question, difficulty in that sense is then data protection, I think. That's what I was trying to avoid with having this just printed out and no personal identification, because then we have to store email addresses.

Sacha: Okay, all right. That's fine. That's fair.

Philip: So, sounds like an excuse. Partially it is, but something like, I mean... I'm not saying that my approach, what I was doing was unbiased. There are people who would be more willing to answer these things and people who are less willing. I know the bias in this case because I actually saw the people and I had a feeling for what kind of people they were. So I think I'm in a better position to factor it out. But if it's actually properly, if you just have people who you send emails to

22:15 Emacs survey before

Philip: I'm not sure if it remains represented because there have been these Emacs surveys in the past. I remember at least two generations. And they're of course the ones which are circulated on Reddit, on Hacker News, on IRC, which I still think is a bubble of maybe 200 people. Like mainly 200 people and some people who are Surrounding these groups. So I'm always sort of dubious because these are the people.

22:48 people's backgrounds influence their responses

Philip: I mean, these are people who are much more likely to have heard of, what's it called, Evil Mode or something like that, or had some experience with other editors. And these things all influence their responses. always taints the results. Every time these discussions are brought up on Emacs devel, people have some level of doubts as to how reliable the results are.

Prot: Correct, correct. It's hard to get reliable results, though some data is still better than nothing. But granted, you don't want to base decisions on those results, of course not.

Philip: Yeah, that shouldn't be the last decision-making factor. You should just have a function where the input is whatever the data is, and then the output is mechanically determined by that. Yes?

23:46 Hypothetical: Reset themes, to reset things back to the defaults of a specific Emacs version

Philip: Now, related to the preset theme, there's also been a discussion (I don't think this has been mentioned much online) of so-called reset themes. I'm not sure if you've heard of these. So the idea would be, additionally to having preset themes of options, which we have changed, which we would recommend because the newcomer preset theme makes no real assumption that the options will be stable, so we might change them from version to version, this gives us some flexibility to say we have a new option. Like, for example, if the preset theme had existed since Emacs 29, and now in Emacs...

24:22 package-autosuggest-mode suggests based on file extension

Philip: That was actually the reason this entire discussion started when Emacs 31, that's the current release... to be released, there's this package-autosuggest-mode so that's a little prompt, when it's enabled, a little prompt in the mode line. You can click on it, Emacs installs the package which it believes to be the right one for the current file.

Prot: The major mode, right?

Philip: No, it's a minor mode. It's a global minor mode.

Prot: No, no, I mean, but it installs based on the major mode, right?

Philip: Ah, yes, yes, yes. It installs a major mode package, which matches the current file format being used based on auto-mode-alist or the magic, what's it called, magic file alist and all these things, and it can... We didn't want to enable this by default, but we wanted to enable it for newcomers. That was actually the first option in the newcomers preset. If the preset had been older, we would have still wanted to add this to the preset theme. It's not supposed to be set in stone. Now the idea with the reset theme is, and this is still hypothetical since we haven't implemented it, is to have reset themes for specific Emacs versions. So we, in Emacs 32, we might have an Emacs 31 reset theme for all the options that we have changed in Emacs 31, in Emacs 32, so that we could reset them to the previous option. So that in this sense too, if the discussion, if the question is really just, we don't want to annoy people who have... When upgrading, of course, it's still a minor inconvenience because they have to write load-theme emacs31-reset in their configuration, but it would be easier for them to actually undo any changes. And in future versions of Emacs, hopefully also persist these changes so that you can really sort of like pinning your version of Emacs, a soft pinning of options. So this is something for the future. Consider as well, which would be reusing the theme approach, which is another reason why I hope that the notion of user option themes will become more, because it's been there from the beginning. The Customize system has always supported user options to be added, but people have always only customized, not only... I'm not sure no one has ever done it, but it has not been a popular approach to use the user options, even though the technical facilities have been there all the time. That's also going to be interesting if the reset theme would be forwards compatible. But that's another discussion that makes it even more complicated. So that you could add them hypothetically to ELPA as a core package.

Prot: Nice. Yeah. Of course, the reset themes, if you implement them, that's great because it opens up the possibility to be a little bit more ambitious with the defaults and break.

Philip: Yeah. Because that's exactly... Every core... Every default discussion boils down to: if we break this, people won't understand what changed. If we change this, people won't understand what broke. But on the other side, people like all new... Can we reasonably assume that all new people would actually want this theme? Then we want to give us some sort of more flexibility in this sense without actually the support, because I think that the value proposition of having a stable interface where you can expect the appearance of the theme to be somewhat stable over time, how Emacs behaves, that's actually a positive thing.

27:52 Emacs 32: bundled versions of Emacs (Big Emacs - distributions that include more packages)

Philip: And finally, in Emacs 32, this is also a finally. For now, one thing I just thought of, which I was reminded of, there's a big plan for Emacs 31. This is one of, I've never pronounced his name, Sean Whitton, I think it should be pronounced. He said that one of his plans as a maintainer will be to work on the bundled version of Emacs, which some people, including myself, have been calling Fat Emacs. So adding, selecting certain packages from ELPA, from GNU ELPA, and bundle a secondary distribution of Emacs which would include additional packages, Which are currently, so for example, one example would be org-tex. And then you could, when you install Emacs, you could install, I don't know, big or fat or whatever... Big Emacs with all these packages pre-installed, which would be pinned to the right version which we would have hopefully ensured that they're actually compatible with one another. And then you have the normal Emacs, which would be the thinner one. And an interesting corollary of all of this would also be that if the way from ELPA into the core would be made easier, that the way out of the core into ELPA would also be made easier. Because that would mean it's more easier to deprecate packages over time since you can install it. This protective layer, let's say, protective layer, protected merely by inconvenience and the annoyance of moving these packages in and out, would fade away over time. Some cruft within Emacs itself, within core Emacs, could be moved to ELPA. So we could actually thin down Emacs. That's one possibility. Oh, that's big. Yeah. One strand of commentary in that direction. That's something that I'm planning to help in the Emacs 32 development cycle. Because these options then could also be in... Any options related to this could also be added to the newcomers preset theme.

29:54 Selection versus multiple completion

Philip: So one could of course... Vertico or these interactive selection packages... I think I've commented that before there is a certain controversy there. I think that there's a certain controversy that selection is not always the same as text expansion, which is sometimes like... There are, I think, the certain... skeleton, or there's this insert... what's it called, auto-insert command... It's not auto-insert, something like that, that prompts the user for multiple things, but it's not written using [completing-read-multiple], but it's written in a way that there's a manual loop, which waits for an empty input to occur. But if you're using vertico or fido, by default, if you just press RET, you don't actually have an empty input. You just select the default option. There's settings like these which where these sort of these two kinds of completion diverge from one another which which is also something I've been talking about for a few years but never came around to implementing that there should be an API distinction between actually selecting user options from a list and the completion interface which we have for files or commands currently. These are semantically two different things, which would be interesting to see if it would be worth distinguishing the two in a technical sense, because that would mean that in certain settings, we could enable Fido. I totally admit that Fido and Vertico have their advantages when it comes to discoverability over standard text completion. The compromise now was that in Emacs 31 there's this option, I think it's eager completion updating or something. It's a combination, it's a permutation of these words in some sense. So that's if the completions buffer pops up. No, you don't have to... It doesn't matter. You don't have to visualize it. Yeah, where they update as you type. Updates as you type, yeah. But that doesn't occur down there, but it only occurs in the completions buffer. That's sort of a compromise. That's Fido, right?

Prot: But the generic completions has had a lot of improvements over the last few years. And in Emacs 31, it's in a very good state, all things considered.

Philip: Which was also partially driven by your MCT package?

Prot: MCT, yeah. Which was an experiment, of course. But yeah, it's basically that idea. Because I have used this in earnest, like the default like this, I have used it for a long time in earnest, like just defaults. It's very good. It's for sure very good. Whereas Fido and Vertico are better if you are just getting started and you don't know that there is a completion on the mini buffer and somehow there is a distinction between the two. Like, for somebody who is getting started especially, I think this interface is not good. But if you know what you are doing, I think this interface actually works perfectly. And it has a lot of options. So, Sacha, what you are showing there is the absolute default, but it has so many options that you can make it look actually quite different from this and very similar to Vertico, for example, in terms of the user experience. I just realized that...

Sacha: Oh, I just realized that if you do the TAB TAB, if you do the TAB TAB, it now goes to that one, which is great, but you can't filter it from there. You can't type into it and have stuff happen.

Philip: Yeah, it's not down there. If you're down there in the mini-buffer, you type. There you have just a regular text buffer, so you can search or you can select stuff out of there.

Prot: And that's also an option, by the way. So what happens on the second tab, for example, so you can configure that.

Sacha: Right, so that was the second tab behavior from newcomer-presets.

Philip: That's the option I proposed and then objected to.

Sacha: Yes, work in progress. So basically, you have these newcomers. We're trying to figure out how to get them through their learning journey. The newcomer presets can smooth over some of the edges. It can get over that "Yes, there are a lot of options, but at least M-x with tab completion will show you the things so that you don't have to memorize the names as much." You can recognize them from the list. You can narrow it down.

Philip: The behavior is supposed to actually be similar to Bash, the way Bash does completion.

34:39 Manuals

Sacha: It's probably still... we're going to need them to read the tutorial, and we're going to need them to use a lot of patience as they get used to Emacs. I am not quite sure yet if we can get them all the way to, all right, here's how you open your config file and define your own keyboard shortcuts, for example. Bit of a journey.

35:08 More examples?

Prot: I think that one way to do that is to have more examples in the manual. Like, here is how you do this, here is how you do that.

Philip: Or there's this other manual, the Emacs FAQ.

Prot: I don't mind where it would be, like FAQ is totally fine. I don't mind exactly where it would be, but somewhere in the documentation, like common patterns of Emacs configuration kind of thing. Maybe it already exists, so if it exists, then of course even better.

Philip: Emacs FAQ has some things on finding related packages, common requsts, bug reports, but maybe it was... I remember there's something. If I link to it...

Prot: Where is the FAQ?

Philip: It's a separate manual.

Sacha: We do not have it from here, not from the splash screen, but it is available from the Help menu.

Philip: I think it's not been that thoroughly maintained.

36:22 find-user-init-file?

Sacha: I'm going to take advantage of the fact that you've actually been reading emacs-devel. Has there already been a long discussion about whether a M-x visit-user-init-file makes sense? An interactive command that you can use to open... I was trying to find it, but even with Yhetil's search, I was like, okay, there are four threads. One of them was a long time ago, and the other one was from even longer than that, so I didn't know whether it was some other discussion.

Philip: I don't recall any such discussion recently, but I also don't think that anybody Objection to it. So it's really just a matter of someone writing it down and adding the documentation.

Sacha: I would like to do that.

Philip: It would be quite likely 24 hours.

Sacha: Okay.

Philip: On the master branch and not Emacs 31 branch, which would be slightly... It's fine. Yeah, but even having a button...

Sacha: If it makes it in someday, it doesn't have to be in the splash screen. It just has to start off being available through... And then we don't have to keep telling people, oh yeah, do a describe-variable on the init file just in case your init file is actually .emacs instead of the .emacs.d/init.el that other people are telling you to use instead. It's a bit of a mess, right?

Philip: I think some people have been recommending doing M-: and then calling the [find-file] function with the user init... What's the name of the variable again?

Sacha: user-init-file.

Prot: User Emacs file.

Sacha: Here we go. user-init-file. Here we go. That's the thing. Yeah, exactly.

Philip: And if you do M-: (find-file user-init-file), then it would basically do the same thing. That's why I'm saying it's such a minor function that I don't expect any objections.

Sacha: Okay, okay. So I'm going to suggest that to Emacs Devel at some point.

Philip: I've had the same idea many times myself, but the transience of memory has thrown its way before I actually ended up doing it.

38:38 Getting over the reverence for Emacs's history

Sacha: Sometimes I am reluctant to suggest things because I figure Emacs is such a long history. Probably someone has thought of this already, and it's probably been discussed and bike-shedded. But I think there are little things that we can do.

Philip: Yeah, but then in that case, Yeah, but I think that's actually related to another thing I wanted to talk about. There's a certain sort of reverence that people have for Emacs, because it's such a historical project. But I mean, the preset theme was something that was discussed for many times, and there were basically no objections. No one said, no, we shouldn't do this, this is a bad idea. I hope it's not only because I proposed it or something, or like the package also suggests that. Most of the things I've been working on for Emacs 31, no one objected to. And there's two sides to this. There's some people who actually go overboard with this and try and reinvent. Like when reviewing packages, you see this a lot of people try and reinvent functionality, which is basically just giving a new name Combining two things and giving it a new name which isn't always necessary but might be useful and then it's some discussion like can we actually make more out of this and that's a different thing but then there's the people who I probably lean more towards that side when I think to myself the way I'm doing this is stupid or this is not as efficient people have been using Emacs for 40 years of course there probably has to be a better way to do this

40:11 Changes are more likely to happen when someone puts in the work to make a patch

Philip: And sometimes it turns out it simply hasn't been implemented and no one has simply done this actually small effort of preparing a patch and ironing out the details just some people don't like discussions of course and it's understandable but you can I mean there's really no harm in sending a patch and then saying I'm sorry I don't have It's annoying, of course, from a maintainer's perspective. I don't recommend doing it, because if you prepare a patch but don't have the time to finish it up, then if it's a useful thing and you actually get someone to be interested in maintaining it, then bringing the patch to completion, then it's well worth just sending a feature. Even sending a feature request, you don't even have to... I mentioned the idea of this preset theme many times. I wish people would be more conscious of this mentality, but I totally understand people who think otherwise, because when the first time I sent a patch to a mailing list, I was, I don't want to say I was sweaty, but I was really nervous because I don't know what if they insult me or they say, "you fool, you didn't format the test properly, [??] secret handshake you have to do every time you send a patch. Begone." Whatever. Which is of course not the case. Which is not to say that there are no unpleasant people on mailing lists but I think that there is especially the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines, which are supposed to give some sort of goodwill, good faith, attention to how people should behave on mailing lists, how they should treat each other. Lots of these preconceptions turn out to be false in there. That's why I also wanted to participate in this, so that people see, oh, the people maintaining Emacs aren't wizards locked up in a tower, but just, I hope, normal people who happen to spend more time with Emacs.

Prot: Yeah, that's a very good point.

Philip: Which is why they're valuable, these discussions.

Prot: And I think, Philip, just to add to this, your example of leading with a patch, I think, is also key here for someone who can write a patch, of course, because it cuts out a lot of that noise, that initial discussion of, well, maybe yes, maybe no, because it frames minds. It focuses the attention on something concrete. And that can also... Yeah.

Philip: Yeah. And... I mean, having a patch is useful, but getting someone interested is also helpful. Like the discussion when we merged which-key, I helped with that process. And I'm not, I think it was, I don't remember his last name, Jeremy, who actually did most of the work. And I was reviewing his patches. I was helping along, but I wasn't actually writing most of the code. I was just going over the proposals and helping along and basically pushing the... Stunning the process whenever it got stuck so that we actually made the necessary changes for it to get merged.

44:03 Preserving Git history of packages absorbed into the core

Philip: And then I did the last finishing touches of merging, because that was also something... Every time... We'd like to preserve the Git history of packages we merge upstream, which is probably something we won't be doing in that way when we do the Fat Emacs releases. But the entire history of Eglot and the entire history of which-key is actually preserved in the Emacs Git repository. So if you open the file, you have, it's not anymore a tree in a computer science sense, but it's actually a proper DAG, because suddenly you have multiple roots of the project which come together with the history preserved. And that's an annoying thing to do with Git, but you can do it. And not everyone knows how to do it, but a few people have the commands written down somewhere or look it up on a mailing list, as I do. Then that goes through, but that's...

Prot: So they are wizards after all.

Philip: Wizards just reading pre-written down spells.

Sacha: It'll be interesting to see if some of the starter kits move to using that kind of fat Emacs infrastructure once that's in place. Because a lot of times the starter kits are there to package together. Okay, here's a list of the packages that it uses. Here's the configuration that makes them play nice together. And then here's some kind of Documentation or videos or a demonstration on how to use it to help people get started.

Philip: So I'm curious to see, I mean, I went reviewing the options to add to the preset theme. I actually went through a number of these starter kits to see the options they suggested. Selected those out which seemed reasonable to me. And of course, this was discussed and people objected or added other things. But I am curious to see how the starter kits will evolve in the future, because that's also something we should mention.

46:00 Dealing with multiple types of Emacs

Philip: I mean, there is a big problem with the fat Emacs approach and suddenly you have two versions of Emacs. You can write a package which appears to work fine in fat Emacs, but it depends on a package which is not in the core Emacs release, and then that's something we will have to deal with in the future as well. Yeah, that's a tricky part indeed. Yeah, but another thing relating... Yeah, the sort of fragmentation of what core Emacs is. It might be a showstopper, so maybe everything I'm telling here is just a wishlist. It doesn't end up actualizing. And that fragmentation of the setup is one of the things... Because it's not actually really difficult to solve. I mean, if you have a package that depends on something from Fat Emacs who just added to the package requires lines, you explicitly state the dependency. But if people are sloppy, then they might not notice this immediately. And you have runtime issues when people are slow.

Sacha: It's a little bit more than that, right? So for example, if you have a newbie asking a question, because they're using a starter kit or in the future, a fat Emacs thing with different packages installed and different configuration things that they have not personally set up. And they don't have the experience to know, oh yeah, this is going to be related to that. So I should mention it in the help message. I mean, large starter communities like, like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs will have their own Discord or mailing list where people can go and ask for help. And so people will say, okay, I think I kind of know which starting point you're coming from because it's the base. But if we're, you know, with the smaller starter kits, they don't even know how to ask for help. And everyone is like, on the regular Emacs communities, there's a lot of back and forth if you want to dig into, okay, what do you have enabled? What is affecting your setup? Fat Emacs is going to run into that problem.

48:09 Fat Emacs is just about bundling more packages from ELPA, not changing the configuration for them

Philip: To be fair, my understanding currently is that it wouldn't enable any other options. It would just bundle more packages.

Sacha: I see.

Prot: So it would be more of an issue for package authors.

Philip: Yeah, for package options. The idea is, I mean, I've used Emacs in offline settings where it's like, really inconvenient or impossible to install additional packages, and just having more functionality out of the box which ELPA provides and you don't have to install additionally, is basically the idea. Because this has been a project which has been ongoing for years. I think this is ever since the conception of ELPA itself, which is precisely the reason why GNU ELPA requires all packages to be signed or to be covered by the copyright assignments, while NonGNU ELPA does not: so that this is possible. It's just that finally it looks like we're starting to move somewhere in that direction. It would be interesting if a decision were to be made that we're going to give up on this sort of bundling, what decisions that were made for the legal status of GNU ELPA, if we would merge GNU ELPA and NonGNU ELPA together, which is unlikely currently. This is just pure speculation at this point, but it's something that might be a discussion, which will be had in the future.

Sacha: Okay, so it dispenses with a package install part, and so people don't have to worry about, okay, how do I make sure The package archives are set up, and how do I install the packages? All that stuff will be pre-installed. The auto-mode-alist will be... Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Philip: The package archives wouldn't matter that much, since we are just talking about the GNU ELPA packages, which are installed by default. It's really just that you don't have to install additional packages. You don't need a network connection. You don't need to know about the package existence. It would be registered in the auto-mode-alist anyway. So if you open a, I don't know, what's the package, some major mode that's not going to open, which is not in the core.

Prot: I think you might [??] earlier. I think that would qualify. I think you mentioned auctex earlier, which is on ELPA, but not in Core.

Philip: The tricky thing there is that Emacs already has a LaTeX mode by default, and that already applies, but auctex extends it. That's why I was looking for another example. Okay, that's the idea, but it wouldn't only be major modes, I assume. There's going to be some discussion as to what packages we want to add. Currently, it's not certain. Because we're working on finishing up Emacs 31. That's where most of the bug fixing efforts are going in right now before we progress to any further developments. But that also includes proposals. That includes proposals as to the preset theme, which I am still interested in reading.

51:23 Customize

Sacha: I want to come back to something Prot mentioned in my conversation with him about newcomers, and that is the Customize interface versus getting people to the Emacs Lisp directly. And I think, Prot, you were not very keen on Customize.

Prot: Yeah, basically if I say it in one sentence is: I think the earlier they get into Emacs Lisp, like seeing it and interacting with it, the better it is for them long term. Granted, I am making the assumption that this is a user that will be there long term, right?

Philip: Of course. And this is specifically about the Customize UI, right?

Prot: Yeah, yeah, not the underlying functionality, like, yeah.

Sacha: It's great for simple options like, yes, we can check the checkbox, or we can select from the drop-down list or whatever, but browsing it is, as you mentioned, overwhelming in the general sense of Emacs being overwhelming, and when you start wanting to do something slightly more sophisticated like you know, let's add some more capture templates, then it's challenging for people to do. So I'm wondering whether, in general, we should be... Is our general strategy to be guiding people to, yes, Customize is there, but really you want to be doing Emacs Lisp as quickly as possible. Let's make it easier for you to get your init file. Let's make it easier for you to test your init file and not fall apart when you miss a parenthesis and all, things like that. Do we want to guide people that way?

Philip: One question I think we should distinguish is the idea of a UI the problem or is it really... Because I personally I have a new Emacs configuration at my day job, and I do everything using Customize. I don't even care about using use-package or whatever. Just customize the stuff using... There's a big blob of user options which I've modified, and that goes through, and I don't care about it, but I claim to have some understanding of what's going on, and the rest of the function is just some defuns which I find convenient. But for me, it's okay, because I have some sort of intuition of how the Customize UI works. If there were a better UI for Customize, would you still say that if it were written in an intuitive way, say using Fido modes. So that's, it would use interactive narrowing and it would somehow work in a build on existing intuitions because the current Customize, the Customize UI, the easy customization interface I think is a technical term to use is based around this widget library interface and sort of make replicating a TUI menu but not... And then you have to... And yeah, of course, the intuition... Like, if you click on things, it doesn't always behave the same thing you would expect from a regular settings menu, which is by the way also something that CUA specifies.

54:41 CUA - Common User Access

Philip: I recently looked into what CUA lists. Like, if you look at the Wikipedia page, CUA specifies that every application has to have these settings menu with tabs on the bottom on the top where it lists all the options you can specify and interestingly C-c and C-v is not listed as...

55:00 ini file format? https://sdf.org/~pkal//blog/emacs/ini-init.html

Philip: Apparently not CUA, but Shift Insert and Control Insert... I might be misunderstanding this, but this seems to be a misnomer.

55:10 Emacs configuration generator

Philip: But if we had some sort of a UI like this CUA configuration UI, would that be something where you'd say as an intermediate stage for just setting options? Because that was part of my thought process with Emacs Configuration Generator. Just configuring Emacs is such a subset of Lisp as it's actually not programming Lisp. You can easily get by by just using add-hook, set up or setq, and add to list or stuff like that. But you don't really have to understand. It's just a peculiar syntax for how to program Lisp.

55:54 INI-style configuration

Philip: I'm not sure if either of you have seen, I wrote a blog post last March, no, not March, what's the name of the month? November, October or something, where I gave a prototype for a INI-like configuration syntax.

Prot: I must have read it, but I don't remember it. You must have read it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I always read my feeds, but now it doesn't ring a bell.

Philip: Exactly. You see there's this basically a simplified syntax, which should be... The idea was it should follow a conventional configuration-like format, and each of these lines gets translated directly to an Emacs Lisp expression. And due to this, I don't want to call it an isomorphism, but the easy translation in both directions, I think that the expectation of saying write Emacs Lisp... There has to be some defun or something if you're writing Emacs Lisp. That's to exaggerate. If you're just writing setq, set, add-hook, add-to-list, these common configuration patterns, which are well worth documenting in the manual, to understand what are the patterns that you have to use to configure a package, even understanding the signature... The distinction between add-to-list and add-hook is that hooks are lists which can have mode-local extensions but also inherit from global settings. Not obvious from the beginning to everyone. This is not list programming.

Prot: Yeah, fair enough. Though even then, they start to see the parentheses, get used to the syntax. They have to remember to quote stuff. Even though it's not really programming, I see what you're saying. They put themselves in the situation.

Philip: One of the ideas precisely in the config syntax is that if you have an option like set, you see the first line, set mode line compact long. Long is a symbol. I just use regular read to read this, and it's not evaluated. There's an option down there somewhere, I think, eval set, where the format expression is an S expression that's evaluated to a string. So you have to opt into evaluation. which seems more intuitive to me for a regular configuration when you're writing it, because all these things... Like, I have to think about quoting. Then there's the issue like with with-eval-after-load... Can I customize this variable before the package is loaded, after the package is loaded? If it has, like... If you're adding something to a list and the list has a default value that you don't want to set the value of the default, don't want to add it to the list because then it's not loaded, and it could trigger a undefined variable signal. So these are other inconveniences that I don't, I personally do not see any value in teaching people or having people to deal with these sorts of issues before they have any broader intuition. Which is a very idiosyncratic take perhaps, but...

Prot: No, no, it's fair.

Philip: What I'm trying to get at is this sort of any configuration syntax would be something that a UI could generate a lot easier and in a way that wouldn't have this artificial split between your own personal handcrafted configuration and the generated part of the configuration. Mechanically changing this, finding the section package avy, because it has all of these primitives which didn't exist early on in Emacs, like packages and features exist and so on. The sort of structure which use-package usually provides.

Sacha: I have about one minute before the kiddo starts on lunch break, so I'm going to interrupt a little bit and do a quick summary. But the two of you are welcome to keep hanging out and chatting. I'll leave the Big Blue Button room open. And if you want, I can set it up so people can join you, depending on your time, et cetera, et cetera.

1:00:21 Quick summary

Sacha: But basically, what I'm getting for a quick summary of the conversation: Emacs 31: the newcomer presets is work in progress. People are definitely open to improvements, ideas, other suggestions for other features. The kiddo is just running out now. I will put the chat in the thing.

Prot: Yeah, of course, of course. That's fun. So, what's happened?

Sacha: Do you want me to open up the chat to everybody? Or do you have other things?

Prot: Me, I can stay for another 20 minutes. Just to say I can stay for another 20 minutes because then I have to take the dog.

Sacha: Yeah, and Phil? Oh, you have to leave.

Philip: 20 minutes is fine. 20 minutes is fine for me as well.

Sacha: Okay, okay. I will put the thing in the chat and people can continue because the kiddo was like, ah! Okay, yes.

Prot: Okay, okay, okay. Good. So, yeah, of course, there is a chat going. Yeah, let's see. So, Sacha, you will link it there. Ah, nice.

Philip: So, I presume there has been an idea of people watching this.

Prot: So this is live.

Sacha: And I can copy the chat thus far since we didn't even get to any other questions. Hang on a second. Where am I even?

Prot: We're trying to deal with those, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, eventually to have a discussion and also take questions, eventually you need to have more time, I guess.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. But thank you all so much.

Prot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Sacha. Thank you very much. And of course, the kiddo overrides all.

1:02:27 Continuing with INI

Prot: That thing with the INI, I think it's very promising. I mean, if you flesh that out. Because the other thing is, yeah, with the INI configuration, because what would be, though, the fate of what is now added, you know, when you modify something and it adds this, you know, this has been set by Custom, do not touch it kind of thing. You know what I'm talking about, right?

Philip: Yeah, you mean the generated user glob. Well, my idea, or if I were, if I had the time /motivation/whatever to flesh this out, because currently it works... Currently it's an actually existing Elisp file which you could use, but I think it would be most interesting if it would be upstreamed. It would sort of be like, if you don't have a .el file, Emacs would look for it .ini file, or emacs.ini file or something like that. Then, of course, you can check, like, does the INI file exist or does the .el file exist? Probably there would be a user option to select into which it would inject the new options. And by default, it would select, for example, if the INI file exists, then it would use the INI file. But there is some controversy to this, because I totally understand the sentiment we're coming from with... You're using Emacs, so you have to learn Lisp. But for me, the bar is a bit higher than just the inconvenience of writing out this more or less. It's, as Joel Sussman referred to it, this ritualistic Lisp. You always have to repeat the same stuff all over again, like with eval, afterload, set. add-to-list, then you have to quote the option in one case. And if you change something in a map, then you don't have to add it. And of course, if you know Lisp, then you know that in one case, a keymap is a cons cell, so you're actually modifying the rest of the cons cell. That's why you don't need to quote it. But in the other case, you're accessing it via symbols, so you need to quote it. But this is all technical details. There's no necessity in it. It doesn't have to be that way.

Prot: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fair, that's fair, of course.

1:04:42 Motivation

Philip: One thing I wanted to bring up in the discussion when we were talking about reverence was there is, I mean, one part of the thing that gave me the motivation to go through with learning Emacs, even though I didn't use the tutorial initially, was sort of a reputation I heard about Emacs. And the videos I saw, wow, you can do these cool things. And this motivation, this image I had of Emacs help me go through, but if you overshoot this approach, then people expect too much in the beginning and are disappointed in the end and don't pull through. There's this question of having, how's it called, the ??... How to motivate people enough to be interested in Emacs, to actually learn it, but not to oversell it. If you give some sort of a demo of using Emacs, which is simply not representative of how it actually works, then that's something which would backfire. But I guess we can take a look at the questions, right? Yeah, let's see. Let's see.

Prot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I didn't read them. I had the chat open, but I didn't have the time to read them. Sorry? I'm not sure how to parse these. Is this from top to bottom? I guess from top to bottom is how they arrived in the chat. The top is the earliest.

Philip: The usernames are mentioned below.

Prot: I guess that's a copy-paste thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are some...

Sacha: I gave the kiddo some packed lunch, so I'm back.

Prot: Oh, hello there!

Philip: We were just wondering about how to read the comments you posted. Maybe you have a better UI.

Sacha: I pasted them into the chat. So in the Big Blue Button...

Philip: But that's the order of occurrence?

Sacha: That's order of occurrence. It's totally not very... It's just like a big paste.

1:06:50 Politics and philosophy

Prot: While you read it, let me... Yeah, there is a comment there from LC2000 about the splash screen having a lot of emphasis on the legal side, which is a fair comment. I think the legal side is important though, because of course, free software and all that, but of course, it could be rearranged. So maybe you don't want to have it at the top front and center, you want to have it further down. Maybe. I don't know. I don't have a strong opinion, but I think the legal side is it should be there at some point. I feel like it's a political minefield though.

Sacha: Just leave that alone. Otherwise: 200 comments on emacs-devel, one of those really long threads.

Philip: I cannot under-emphasize how surprised I was when my suggestion to add a checkbox on the splash screen just went through. Because I expected people to object, no, we can't add it there because of some system. It wouldn't look the way it should look and that would be confusing or whatever. But apparently change is possible. You have to be careful and be patient.

Prot: And I guess here there is an assumption, right? There is also an assumption that people will attack you or be unreasonable. And I think this is not true. You mentioned it earlier as well. Eventually you have to get on the mailing list because people, if they don't hear the opinion, the counterpoint, they will never know what to do with it.

Philip: But it's not entirely unreasonable because there are discussions that can be... There are people on emacs-devel, it's sad to admit it, but there are people who voice strong opinions, like strong opinions, with no power behind them, which can scare people away because there's no... There are no tags. There's no index of people on emacs-devel, so you don't know if some John Doe responding to your message, if he's actually responsible for this and makes a decision, or if it's if Eli is sending a message and his decision on the discussion actually weighs a lot more than other matters.

1:09:23 Experimenting with things outside core

Sacha: I feel like sometimes experimenting with newbie-focused resources, like the unofficial ones that are around... At least we can try the ideas out and then say, hey, here's the patch and also here's what people have been using it for, so you can see it a bit more concretely, than dropping an idea into the discussion and then having the whole bike-shedding happening without as much data.

Philip: That's seriously my main recommendation. If you want to propose something, add a prototype, add a patch, add something to narrow down the discussion. That's something people would take away from this discussion, from my experience.

Prot: I 100% agree. I think that's the way to go. Just implement something so that it focuses the attention. Otherwise, you will get those endless discussions very quickly.

Sacha: Or try it as a package first, and then it can be core.

Philip: Excuse me?

Sacha: Oh, I was thinking if it's possible to prototype something as a package, now that Emacs has made it a lot easier for people to install packages, then at least it can be tested before having all the conversations about whether it should be as part of core or part of the splash screen or everything else.

1:10:42 Extending the core

Philip: The counter tendency I feel obliged to mention is that many times proposing something as a package or as an extension to the core can actually simplify the implementation vastly. Especially if you need to make one or two twists upstream and you need something like an additional hook or something to exist upstream. If it's a package in the core, then it's a lot easier to explain why you have to make this change than having to deal with some sort of advice and changing a lot of things. There was a certain tendency during the mid-2010s, which I only know from history, was to re-implement a lot of stuff in logs, in packages, instead of working on them upstream. That created a lot of divergence between packages, and in my opinion, complicated things because it introduces this entire choice fatigue. Should I use Flymake? Should I use Flycheck? Should I use LSP mode? Should I use Eglot? Which is not a historically accurate example in the stats that I'm given, But I'm certainly in favor of at least considering upstream contributions.

1:11:52 Guide to contributing to ELPA

Philip: Even like packages, of course, it's the way we recently published these guidelines, or not guidelines, this contribution guide to publishing packages on ELPA, which is on, if you want to open it in the browser, it's on the ELPA homepage, which lists sort of these hard criteria which we require from ELPA. Just elpa.gnu.org, yeah, it's... That's going to be a link to the page.

Sacha: Yeah, this is pretty recent.

Philip: This is recent, and then there's a list of suggestions. But this is getting off the actual point. I'm just saying that relating to the general point, my experience is that proposing something concrete but also be open to hearing the opinions of other people These are the two necessary but maybe not always sufficient ingredients to making the changing stuff. Because if you just say, I want this to be different but don't put in the work, then everyone's going to forget it. But if you propose something and then insist that it has to be exactly this way, then you're just creating social tension. Maybe missing out on interesting things.

1:13:11 Making the newcomer experience better

Sacha: And especially since people are using Emacs for so many different reasons and coming from so many different backgrounds, what you are very firmly committed to might very well work for one set of people, but will run into these issues for all these other people. So if we want to bring it back to this, you know, how do we make the newcomer experience better? It's great that in core, there's starting to be a little bit more infrastructure for supporting things like sets of reasonable defaults for people. And maybe we as a community need to figure out, all right, how do we write documentation around it? How do we make tutorial videos? How do we encapsulate, okay, this is what this typical newcomer experience is like for this set of people and maybe these options or packages or a glue code might be helpful for this group? Maybe.

Prot: Yeah, like in theory, you can imagine something like, if you are a Python developer, here is your Python presets theme. If you are doing Org or whatever, here is your LaTeX and friends, right, and you could also have extensions like that in the future.

Philip: I mean nothing about the idea is... It could have been used as a package people can load otherwise.

1:14:30 "user option themes" versus "appearance themes"

Philip: And hopefully, as I said, there is certainly additional work which can be put in to support making user option themes better supported. I think one of the things that will be useful is actually referring to them just in nomenclature points as user option themes to distinguish them from.

Sacha: From themes.

Prot: From color themes, yeah.

Philip: Color themes, yeah. We even introduced the distinction that themes have kinds since like Emacs 20.

Prot: 29, I think.

Philip: 29.

Prot: I think you did that, right?

Philip: I think I worked on a patch. But that was exactly, I mean, that was already where the seeds for the current theme were started, because we wanted to distinguish between these different kinds of things. Were there any other questions?

Prot: I don't think so.

1:15:24 find-library

Prot: But yeah, as we saw now with the find-library that Sacha did in the beginning, it would be nice to also eventually be able to find the theme or whatever. Maybe it's a different find-theme, if for whatever reason it cannot be find-library.

Philip: That's actually no reason why that shouldn't be the case. I mean, you could just extend the logic to not only consider the load-list, but also the... Whatever the variable is for the list, then it should be able to find that as well, even though it's strictly speaking, that's a library. But that's a decision that someone has to make at some point or convince someone.

Sacha: I think find-library does work for it. Like, find-library will find it only if it's loaded. And then since I can't, like, undo it...

Prot: If it's a package...

Sacha: Yeah, yeah.

Prot: If you install it as a package, yes.

Philip: Because then the theme is in a directory which package.el has added to a load list. I think the preset, if my memory serves me correct, then find library only looks through load-path.

Sacha: I see, I see. And etc/themes is not in the load-path.

Philip: Exactly. Because these aren't, this is, I don't know why. It's not...

Sacha: Okay, all right. That's another message to emacs-devel.

1:16:49 configuration generator in Emacs? maybe more wizards?

Philip: It's the sort of annoyance which from my perspective is so inconvenient that I forget it every time and then you don't change it.

1:16:59 Starter kits

Sacha: @brongulus says the Doom Emacs module approach is very nice for beginners and entices them to get into things more. People interested in a certain common set of functionality can get an opinionated starting point in Emacs, rather than worrying about what to install. And someone else in the previous That's sort of like the theme approach, isn't it? Sort of, yeah. It's not just, hey, these are the packages and you can comment and uncomment lines that load the different modules, but also here's the glue to sort of start to make some of them work better together or to change them to reasonable defaults.

1:17:39 Configuration generator in Emacs Lisp?

Sacha: I was wondering, actually, along those lines, any thoughts about making your configuration generator type thing in Emacs?

Philip: The reason I, in the configuration generator, did not implement it in Emacs was precisely due to if it were in Emacs and would use, for example, something like the widget library and there would be these fine UI discrepancies which people wouldn't expect to behave the way they do, then scrolling doesn't behave exactly the way they expect it to do. But there has been an idea, I think, when I mentioned the configuration generator the first time. It was the notion of having actually a shared file format behind it, just some S expression, which could be loaded by both the configuration generator and a generic configuration wizard, which could also be used like every package could define their own configuration wizard for asking the user selected options and configuring these.

1:18:40 extending the archive format

Philip: That's also another thing in Emacs 32 which I plan to work on, to extend the package archive format. Among other things, allowing for multiple packages to be listed in it, because GNU ELPA and NonGNU ELPA both store multiple versions of all packages, but you can only install the most recent one. That's why pinning doesn't work. Absolutely no technical reason why this shouldn't also list other versions as well. And then you could have pinning without having to use Git. Packages as well. And there are a few others. There was a thread I think earlier this year where I collected a number of these extensions for the archive formats which could be extended. And now I forgot my thread. Now I lost my thread of those.

Prot: But basically extending package.el and the archive, yeah.

Philip: Specifically the archive, so that...

Prot: Showing the previous versions which are already listed, like you said.

Philip: Yeah, so that you could pin the version so you could install the version. I honestly do not remember what I was saying just a few seconds ago, which is embarrassing. Okay, that's another problem.

Prot: Things happen, no worries.

Philip: You were talking about Doom Emacs?

Prot: There was a comment about the Doom Emacs and specifically the fact that there are these modules and you can load the module without thinking specifically about the packages. But then Sacha told you about your package configurator wizard.

Philip: Package configurator wizard and then extending the metadata could also include this sort of configuration option. So that packages, in some sense, could specify what options the user would primarily be interested in and what order they should be traversed. And you could have some sort of dependency, of course. This is some effort which has to be put in, but it's not something that's unreasonable, from a technical perspective, from implementing this. And it would make, I think, it could make, if you have the infrastructure for that, that would make installing and using packages a lot nicer. It sounds very promising, for sure.

1:20:56 User interfaces

Philip: The UI question remains the thing. Do you want to reuse the Customize UI, which has its historical warts? Of course, can they be ironed out? That's a different question. Or do you reinvent something from scratch? And I'm usually not that big of a fan of reinventing the UI. I'm more in the reuse existing interfaces, just into the back end.

Prot: Plus, if you were to invent a new UI, you wouldn't have this new feature already because you have too many things that you need to implement. Whereas just using custom UI allows you to just implement the feature and then the interface, maybe it's something that somebody else will work on or you work on at the latest.

Philip: Yeah, but then, of course, that's... Even if that is the case, then you have to make sure that you don't make assumptions that depend on your own customizer in the future. It's a whole list of dependencies which is just complicated.

Sacha: That sounds like a newcomers presets to un-wartify Customize, a reset theme to put the warts back on as needed, and then we can use the slightly more modern interface for the things that we had wanted to do, maybe two or three years down the line.

Philip: Maybe something like that. A little long-term planning.

Prot: I think just to say this, but of course everything we have covered thus far, always we have to state it. Newcomers with an asterisk, right? With the caveat that you still have to put in the work, read the manual, be patient, all that, right?

Philip: Ideally, it would be nice if you could even start without it. I mean, I started without it, but it took me three or four years to actually write this one. I didn't want to write defun. I thought, what? I don't write my own functions. I just want to set options, which was wrong and appealing to this. That was the point from the beginning. But I think, Sacha, you wanted to close there.

Sacha: Oh, I just wanted to acknowledge that we are coming up in the 20 minutes that you said you were available for. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I need to go. Yeah, yeah, the dogs and everything.

Prot: Yeah, yeah, I have to take them for a walk because I have a meeting afterwards.

Sacha: Right. I wanted to thank both of you. I really like this conversation and the heads up and the interesting things coming down the pipeline. So thank you for that. We're going to continue, I think, working on the user experience for newcomers. which will probably be a mix of documentation and packages and other experiments and occasional email to emacs-devel suggesting things like the find-user-init-file and whatever. But thank you so much to you and to everyone who's tuned in.

Prot: You're welcome.

Philip: Thank you for hosting.

Prot: Thank you.

Philip: Thank you, Prot, for your comments as well.

Prot: Take care.

Philip: Bye-bye.

Prot: Goodbye, goodbye. Where do we close from here?

Philip: I'm just going to close the tab. Bye.

(bind-key "C-c r" 'org-capture)

Some screenshots of a fresh Emacs

Trying pkal's Emacs Configuration Generator

Emacs Configuration Generator - old source code, site is no longer live

sbcl --load ecg.lisp --eval "(ecg:start)"

Sample generated configuration:

;;; Personal configuration -*- lexical-binding: t -*-

;; Save the contents of this file under ~/.emacs.d/init.el
;; Do not forget to use Emacs' built-in help system:
;; Use C-h C-h to get an overview of all help commands.  All you
;; need to know about Emacs (what commands exist, what functions do,
;; what variables specify), the help system can provide.

;; Load a custom theme
(load-theme 'modus-operandi t)

;; Use whatever the default monospace font is
(setq font-use-system-font t)

;; Miscellaneous options
(setq-default major-mode
              (lambda () ; guess major mode from file name
                (unless buffer-file-name
                  (let ((buffer-file-name (buffer-name)))
                    (set-auto-mode)))))
(setq confirm-kill-emacs #'yes-or-no-p)
(setq window-resize-pixelwise t)
(setq frame-resize-pixelwise t)
(save-place-mode t)
(savehist-mode t)
(recentf-mode t)
(defalias 'yes-or-no #'y-or-n-p)

;; Store automatic customisation options elsewhere
(setq custom-file (locate-user-emacs-file "custom.el"))
(when (file-exists-p custom-file)
  (load custom-file))

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

Charlie Holland has an interesting contribution to May’s Emacs Carnival, which this month is on the topic “If I may recommend…” His notion is that Emacs is an effortless bloom. The “effortless” part is because Emacs—contra conventional wisdom—is easy to use and can, in fact, significantly simplify your work flow by providing a uniform interface to several different computer programming languages and their environments. If you’ve ever had to negotiate such a collection, you know that this is not a trivial thing.

The “bloom” part is more nuanced. The idea is that like a rose whose roots “fan in” water and nutrients and whose flower “fans out” its petals and beauty to encourage pollination, Emacs has its own fanning in and out. The center of this action is the text buffer. Data from various sources can be fanned into a buffer from which it can be fanned out to various functions for processing. The altered text buffer can then be fanned out to other targets.

Holland’s post is a bit lyrical so you need to read it to get the full impact of his fan in, fan out metaphor. He considers whether any other editor could achieve the same power as Emacs. He concludes that any editor could, in theory, achieve the same power but in order to do so it would have to replicate the idea of the buffer as the single important data structure on which everything else operates.

It’s an interesting post worth a few minutes of your time.

Before we discuss Rewrite Bun in Rust, there's something that needs to be said, because no one is saying it.

Bun stands where it does today because of Zig.

Jarred chose Zig back then not because it was "cool," but because Zig enabled a small team to rapidly prototype a high-performance JS runtime without a GC, without a heavy runtime. Zig's low friction, direct memory manipulation, and straightforward C interop were the core reasons Bun could punch above its weight on performance with an extremely small team in its early days. The architecture, data structures, and low-level design of Bun that you see today – that was shaped by Zig.

In the recent weeks I've been engaging Prot as an Emacs coach to help with doing review passes over my upcoming ffs package as I work on polishing and documenting it in preparation for offering it for inclusion in GNU ELPA.

UPDATE 2026-05-15 08:50:10 -0400: Prot also published an article about our session on his website: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-05-15-emacs-amin-bandali-ffs-display-buffer-org-capture/

Today we had our third session where we started by reviewing and talking about my recent changes to ffs, then ventured to other Emacs-related topics with the overarching theme of the flexibility and extensibility of GNU Emacs, including display-buffer-alist, keyboard macros, defining a custom ox-bhtml Org export backend derived from Org's ox-html for ultimate flexibility when exporting my site's pages from Org to HTML, Org capture, plain text files and Emacs's diary and how it compares to org-agenda, and keeping a journal with the help of Emacs.

Here is the video recording of our session, which I share with Prot's permission:

You can view or download the full-resolution video from the Internet Archive.

Lastly, here is the snippet Prot shared for having Isearch treat space as a wildcard, helpful for more easily matching multiple parts of a line:

(setq search-whitespace-regexp ".*?")
(setq isearch-lax-whitespace t)
(setq isearch-regexp-lax-whitespace nil)

Take care, and so long for now.

Yesterday I met with Amin Bandali to talk about Emacs. Amin asked me if he could record the session, which I agreed to. The video is available on Amin’s website: https://kelar.org/~bandali/gnu/emacs/ffs-emacs-ext-prot.html.

We started with a review of the latest changes to the ffs package that Amin has been developing. We had looked into it before and wanted to check on its current state.

Amin then asked me about the display-buffer-alist, which I had mentioned before. To me, this is the single most important variable for making Emacs feel more like your own. The reason is that it allows you to control the placement of buffers to match your expectations. I demonstrated some of the main ideas.

Another nice little feature is the built-in isearch. I explained how it is especially helpful while recording keyboard macros. Though it is nice to use in general. One tweak for it is to display a counter with its matches. Another is to change how it treats spaces, so that it can match any character in-between. This is not as flexible as, say, consult-line (from the consult package) when combined with vertico and orderless. Though it still has its uses.

[ I have lots of little extras for isearch, but those should be good for most users. ]

Amin told me about rediscovering the value of Org in the context of statically generating his website. He showed me the custom Org HTML export backend he has been working on. Org has so many nice features which can be used independent of each other. In this light, we also discussed the diary compared to the Org agenda.

Find all of Amin’s publications on his website: https://kelar.org/~bandali/.

Thanos Apollo has an interesting post about an almost forgotten Emacs battle: the choice between Bazaar and Git as the new version control system for Emacs. Twenty years ago, Emacs was still using CVS, a venerable RCS that was well past its sell date.. It was clear to everyone that a new system was needed. The question was which one. The two contenders were Bazaar and Git.

On the technical merits the choice was clear. Git was faster and more reliable and most, if not all, of the developers wanted to move to it. But there were political considerations. Bazaar was a GNU project and Git was not. RMS felt strongly that the GNU project should support its own applications and insisted that Bazaar be used and given a chance to improve. It was maintained by Canonical but they eventually abandoned the effort. Even though the development was stalled and error reports were piling up unresolved for years, RMS insisted on staying the course.

The saga would probably still be going on were it not for Eric Raymond (ESR). He had been working for some time on a utility to import various RCS systems into Git while maintaining whatever metadata the old system offered. At one point he decided to convert Emacs to Git. It was a particularly difficult problem because there was more than one source RCS in play and because some of the records were old and incomplete.

Nonetheless, ESR managed the conversion and in 2014 announced that he had the conversion scripts ready and was set to go. In November 2014 he ran his scripts and suddenly Emacs was available as a Git repo. The developers started using it and the battle was over.

After starting to make use of the GitLab/Codeberg sync approach for various repositories, I found that my muscle memory in Magit was getting the better of me and, on occasion, I'd push a new branch to backups when I wanted origin. I sensed there had to be a way round that.

Here's what I settled on:

(advice-add
 'magit-list-remotes
 :filter-return (lambda (remotes) (delete "backups" remotes)))

Now I never see backups in Magit and now I can keep using my muscle memory (rather than actually reading what is in front of me, it seems).