Planet Emacslife

Earlier this week I wrote about Bozhidar Batsov’s post on short Emacs configuration hacks. As I mentioned then, my favorite was a simple configuration variable that causes the Help buffer to get focus when you open it.

It’s easy to take the position of “who cares” but, as I said, I almost always want to interact with the Help buffer if only to dismiss it. Often though, I also want to scroll the buffer—yes I know about scroll-other-window and its siblings—or follow one of the links in the buffer.

After I wrote that post, one of the first things I did was enable the option to give the Help buffer focus. I can’t tell you how much I love the change. It turns out I use the help command more than I thought I did and every time I wanted the focus to be in that buffer. Not once since I made the change have I wished the focus remained in the original buffer.

It’s pretty easy to imagine a case where it would be more convenient to have the original buffer retain focus but in those cases one can simply change windows back to it. One thing for sure, I’ll be doing that a lot less than staying in the Help buffer and dismissing it when I’m done.

You really should try it out. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. As I said, it’s simply a matter of setting help-window-select to t so you can try it out in your current session without involving your init.el.

Time zones are hard, so I let calendaring systems take care of the conversion and confirmation. I've been using Google Calendar because it synchronizes with my phone and people know what to do with the event invite. Org Mode has iCalendar export, but I sometimes have a hard time getting .ics files into Google Calendar on my laptop, so I might as well just create the calendar entry in Google Calendar directly. Well. Emacs is a lot more fun than Google Calendar, so I'd rather create the calendar entry from Emacs and put it into Google Calendar.

This function lets me start from a timestamp like [2026-04-24 Fri 10:30] (inserted with C-u C-c C-!, or org-timestamp-inactive) and create an event based on a template.

(defvar sacha-time-zone "America/Toronto" "Full name of time zone.")

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-emacs-chat-schedule (&optional time)
  "Create a Google Calendar invite based on TIME or the Org timestamp at point."
  (interactive (list (sacha-org-time-at-point)))
  (browse-url
   (format
    "https://calendar.google.com/calendar/render?action=TEMPLATE&text=%s&details=%s&dates=%s&ctz=%s"
    (url-hexify-string sacha-emacs-chat-title)
    (url-hexify-string sacha-emacs-chat-description)
    (format-time-string
     "%Y%m%dT%H%M%S" time)
    sacha-time-zone)))

(defvar sacha-emacs-chat-title "Emacs Chat" "Title of calendar entry.")
(defvar sacha-emacs-chat-description
  "All right, let's try this! =) See the calendar invite for the Google Meet link.

Objective: Share cool stuff about Emacs workflows that's not obvious from reading configs, and have fun chatting about Emacs

Some ideas for things to talk about:
- Which keyboard shortcuts or combinations of functions work really well for you?
- What's something you love about your setup?
- What are you looking forward to tweaking next?

Let me know if you want to do it on stream (more people can ask questions) or off stream (we can clean up the video in case there are hiccups). Also, please feel free to send me links to things you'd like me to read ahead of time, like your config!"
  "Description.")

It uses this function to convert the timestamp at point:

(defun sacha-org-time-at-point ()
  "Return Emacs time object for timestamp at point."
  (org-timestamp-to-time (org-timestamp-from-string (org-element-property :raw-value (org-element-context)))))

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

Let's try something new - quarterly update. I found great joy from reading ones from マリウス , so why not? I don't want it to be a week-note type of list, as prose is from humans and lists are from machines.

I want such updates (name may be subject to change) where I mind dump things, which never grew into full posts. So, instead of a 5 sentence post, they will be 5 sentences in a combined post.

Personal

Health

What I've been up to this year? Well, mostly I've been sick. The Kid is old enough to be sick less often, but when he does, he brings the best viruses with him. I wanted to write this update a few weeks ago, but well. I'd rather be healthy than published.

Speaking of The Kid. We are continuing our Montessori education, as we accepted to such school. Let's just hope he won't grow to be a Musk of something.

But, returning to health: since I'm an old, sickly person with a high cholesterol level, I needed to return to eating healthier. No more cakes on the go, no more sushi rice. I have, however, rediscovered a love from a few years back: natto. A friend showed it to me and it was superb. I now order it and eat it a few times a week. It tastes as good as it looks!

Phone and reading

My love towards the Hibreak is only growing stronger. I find no downsides of not being in Apple/Google duopoly. Yes, it's an android, but I'm using only FOSS applications. My random usage of social media on the go went down to zero. No Mastodon, no Google YouTube. It's a purposeful device: I can use it as a communicator, and I can use an e-book reader. The latter is going extremely strong! It took a while, but now I pick a book for a page or two just waiting in line. Reading became just a regular thing I do though the day! It's less taxing than looking at TechCrunch, but it's much more stimulating.

Books are a good idea. Who would have thought?

As for future plans: I was going to pick up Dune and FINALLY read the entire saga, but this has to wait. I got into possession of In Search of Lost Time , which I aim to dig into. I'll mix it up with Dumas, so I'm in my Emily in Paris phase. Just less dumb... I think. I haven't seen a single episode. Ergo: then plan: is Dumas -> something small -> Proust -> Something small and back to Dumas.

I also take much fewer photos. Not having a good camera on me all the time is a nice thing. I picked up my old, trusty Fuji X-100S as you may have noticed on how bad the photos look in recent posts. I need to finally learn to measure light...

Random other things

I rebuilt my pantsu-collection with a few Wrangler Frontiers. They are the best fitting jeans I've ever used, and now I own 6 pairs. No random hole will a problem and one of them is now my house pantalons. Screw sweatpants.

I also returned the PS5. It was an eventful period where I became disgusting gamer. The games were nice, but now I'm back at PS4 and I fail to see as a significant downgrade. We have peaked long time ago. I strongly prefer to use PS4.

Computer stuff

Thinkcentre

I replaced my Lenovo Thinkpad with an Lenovo Thinkcentre. I don't leave the house, so I don't need a laptop. MiniPC is very small and fits the desk nicely.

But, most of all, it's an all AMD system. This makes rocking FreeBSD a pleasure! No more breaking things due to Nvidia driver incompatibility. Things just work.

Lathe

In between being ill, I rewrote this page. The old version had posts written in plain old HTML. Some post-processing (like images) was necessary, so I put myself into regexp hell. Not that those were big regexp, but they are big enough for not to want to update them ever.

This means I needed something in between me and the HTML. Markdown was a no-go, as I hate it. It's good for small notes, but anything bigger? Nah. The answer was clear: LISP. Who wouldn't want to write in LISP? And so I wrote a LISP-like processor in the old python-based generator. It worked, it was fun to write in, but it's also terrible. I had no idea how to parse lisp, so I made it something with parens. The POC was there, just the implementation needed to entirely change - it was a a great example in how to not to do LISP.

And so I am writing a small Lisp parser now. I'm not aiming at being full common-lisp compatible, but still I try the API to be as correct as possible. Now, this will not be real LISP: I use arrays under the hood, not CONS. But all defuns, setqs, and so are already working. This is my first project on Go and I have to say that I love it. It's a modern language and environment, so writing in it a lot of fun... unlike some other languages, but more on them later on.

The project I call Lathe will be open sourced in the coming weeks. This site will also be fully migrated over coming months, but it will require some translators. I am able to write then in Lisp now, so it will be fun.

The biggest missing element of the puzzle is Macro support, but that's not needed for first release.

All this comes with a huge asterisk: I have no idea how to write Lisp. I am not a Lisp developer, and I am learning as I go. Here, it's the cherry on top. I like what I'm writing, I like that I'm learning, and I like how I'm writing. Go is now my friend.

The things some people will do just to not have to deal with Markdown nor Hugo.

Masto-mailo-inator

I got my first feature request! I am officially an open-source developer. And by that, I mean: unpaid.

I plan to add import from export next month, as currently I am fully focused on Lathe

GPG

I also started using GPG again. You can find my key on keys.opengpg.com

Work

Well, I'm still employed, which is great. It's over a decade in the same company! However, there are two things which changed in the first quarter

GenAI

I am not hiding this, but let's make it official: I use LLMs at work. Not because they make me more productive, nor because they make me happy. There is one reason: I am expected to. It's a sign a great technology where most people either reject or all together or are forced to use.

My team was moved to a different product, which is written in Java. I already miss Ruby.... They say that in the (age of ai) you don't need to know what you are doing, but I disagree with it on all fronts. I see it in my own experience. While, yes: I am able to generate hundreds lines of code, but I find to be terrible.

I always tried to understand what I'm doing, and I was even praised for it. Using Claude makes it extremely difficult. It's a new language, new framework, and yet we are expected to ship features within the first couple of weeks. Some teams are proud of skipping the standard few-month-long rump up. I think they are managed by dangerous morons. The code is still essential - it needs to work, it needs to it a reasonable fashion, and it needs to be readable. Whatever vibe coders say about prompting the next google, they are lying to themselves. Opus 4.6 is the best coding model out there (as I've read on multiple occasions) , and it still requires anal level of hand holding. While mostly everything it creates is a more-or-less correct java code, it's rarely good java code nor a properly designed system. It makes random changes, makes incorrect assumptions, just plain lies.

To give an example. We are integrating this service with another service. I wrote code which worked on localhost, but not on server. I try, debug, use curls - nothing. Finally, a few sessions laster I learn that it never worked. I didn't double-check the local curl, and I trusted Claude when it said that everything is working. This was a learning lesson, and I will never trust a clanker again. It will lie, to make me happy. Even if means not doing its job. Lessn learned: never, ever trust a clanker.

And the debugging, oh my god the debugging. It reads a million files, runs tests, does magical things - and boom, solution. So I ask a basic question (what about...?) . Of course, you are right - the moron replies, let's burn yet another 20 USD (LLM is a short for LLM Like Money) . It can go for like this few dozen prompts, back and foth, and still sometimes it will return to incorrect assumption from half an hour before. It will ignore requests, specs, do random things. It's far from an intern...

The fact stands: it's a better java developer than I am. But I am a terrible java developer. I never wrote any line of Java before! I have no idea how it will play out, as I see it with all my colleagues (and, most likely, the entire industry) have no idea what we are doing. Something looks like it's working, and we are expected to ship it. Not that there is any hard requirement, but it's a race. Layoffs are a regular thing now, and it's a dumb idea to be on the naughty list. I'd not use any SASS in the comming years, as I trust them even less than I used to.

Now, I have a great manager who understands that understanding is essential. I am able to slow down, and learn - little by little and with obvious expectatins of stil shipping stuff. But I am lucky to have him, and who knows for how long.

Java

The other thing: I am now a Java developer. Oh, what a terrible life it is. The language is... OK, at best. Nonetheless, is extremely stagnated. The developer experience is abysmal!

I have a working theory that IntelliJ is the worst thing which happened to Java folks. They have zero insensitive to fix things, or work on adding modern things. There is CLI, but it's a pita to work on. There is an LSP, but it's barely working. Both are under-invested, as IntelliJ is there, keeping the entire ecosystem in its dark ages.

I try to use Emacs, and with the genai is almost nice. More on this later. But, I understand why people use this godforsaken IDE: people use IntelliJ because other people use IntelliJ. It fixes a million things which should not be fixed in an editor, but in the ecosystem. Toying with (Go) at the same time just shows how primitive Java is.

And there is Spring . If anyone comes to me and whines about how much magic is in Rails , I will point them here. This and Lombok are much bigger obstacle to learn to read code than the language itself.

It's better to have experience in Java than not to have. We are living in the age of layoffs, after all. But it's a miserable life.

RTO

And, starting next month, I am expected to be twice a week in the office. I don't have a long commute (15 mins?) , and I'll be able to drop The Kid at school on the way. This changes nothing: the idea of office should be left in the past.

Emacs

My beloved editor deserves a special method. Since I'm again actively coding (after hours mostly) , I finally set up LSP, consult and all that jazz. At work, I'm rocking Agent Shell. And Ready Player One became my music player, and I moved to using mu4e for my email needs.

I also finally managed to get X11 forwarding over SSH working. Therefore, I get my private Emacs (with emails, rsses, mastodons) at my work Macbook. This will be a short guide in the coming weeks, but it's working over the local area. We'll see if RTO won't make it more challenging...

Following on from yesterday's experiment with webp I got to thinking that it might be handy to add a wee command to blogmore.el that can quickly swap an image's extension from whatever it is to webp.

So v4.1 has happened. The new command is simple enough, called blogmore-webpify-image-at-point; it just looks to see if there's a Markdown image on the current line and, if there is, replaces the file's extension with webp no matter what it was before.

If/when I decide to convert all the png files in the blog to webp I'll obviously use something very batch-oriented, but for now I'm still experimenting, so going back and quickly changing the odd image here and there is a nicely cautious approach.

I have, of course, added the command to the transient menu that is brought up by the blogmore command.

One other small change in v4.1 is that a newly created post is saved right away. This doesn't make a huge difference, but it does mean I start out with a saved post that will be seen by BlogMore when generating the site.

I want to make it easier to add chapter markers to my YouTube video descriptions and hyperlinks to specific times in videos in my blog posts.

# -*- mode: snippet -*-
# name: insert time
# key: zt
# --
`(format-time-string "[%Y-%m-%d %a %H:%M]")`

(with-eval-after-load 'org-capture
  (add-to-list
   'org-capture-templates
   `("l" "Timestamp" item
     (file+headline ,sacha-stream-inbox-file "Timestamps")
     "- %U %i%?")))

(compile-media-sync
 '((combined (:source
              "/home/sacha/proj/yay-emacs/ye16-sacha-and-prot-talk-emacs.mp4"
              :original-start-ms "51:09"
              :original-stop-ms "51:16"))
   (combined (:source
              "/home/sacha/proj/yay-emacs/ye16-sacha-and-prot-talk-emacs-link-overlay.png"
              :output-start-ms "0:03"
              :output-stop-ms "0:04"))
   (combined (:source
              "/home/sacha/proj/yay-emacs/ye16-sacha-and-prot-talk-emacs-qr-chat-overlay.png"
              :output-start-ms "0:05"
              :output-stop-ms "0:06")))
 "/home/sacha/proj/yay-emacs/ye16.1-stream-show-string-and-calculate-offset.mp4")

(defun sacha-org-time-at-point ()
  "Return Emacs time object for timestamp at point."
  (org-timestamp-to-time (org-timestamp-from-string (org-element-property :raw-value (org-element-context)))))

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-google-youtube-stream-offset (time)
  "Return the offset from the start of the stream.
When called interactively, copy it."
  (interactive (list (sacha-org-time-at-point)))
  (when (and (stringp time)
             (string-match org-element--timestamp-regexp time))
    (setq time (org-timestamp-to-time (org-timestamp-from-string (match-string 0 time)))))
  (let ((result
         (emacstv-format-seconds (sacha-google-youtube-live-seconds-offset-from-start-of-stream
                                  time))))
    (when (called-interactively-p 'any)
      (kill-new result)
      (message "%s" result))
    result))

(defvar sacha-google-access-token nil "Cached access token.")

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-google-access-token ()
  "Return Google access token."
  (or sacha-google-access-token
      (setq sacha-google-access-token
            (string-trim (shell-command-to-string "gcloud auth application-default print-access-token")))))

(defvar sacha-google-youtube-live-broadcasts nil "Cache.")
(defvar sacha-google-youtube-stream-offset-seconds 10 "Number of seconds to offset.")

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-google-youtube-live-broadcasts ()
  "Return the list of broadcasts."
  (or sacha-google-youtube-live-broadcasts
      (setq sacha-google-youtube-live-broadcasts
            (request-response-data
             (request "https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/liveBroadcasts?part=snippet&mine=true&maxResults=10"
               :headers `(("Authorization" . ,(format "Bearer %s" (sacha-google-access-token))))
               :sync t
               :parser #'json-read)))))

(defun sacha-google-youtube-live-get-broadcast-at-time (time)
  "Return the broadcast encompassing TIME."
  (seq-find
   (lambda (o)
     (or
      ;; actual
      (and
       (alist-get 'actualStartTime (alist-get 'snippet o))
       (alist-get 'actualEndTime (alist-get 'snippet o))
       (not (time-less-p time (date-to-time (alist-get 'actualStartTime (alist-get 'snippet o)))))
       (time-less-p time (date-to-time (alist-get 'actualEndTime (alist-get 'snippet o)))))
      ;; actual, not done yet
      (and
       (alist-get 'actualStartTime (alist-get 'snippet o))
       (null (alist-get 'actualEndTime (alist-get 'snippet o)))
       (not (time-less-p time (date-to-time (alist-get 'actualStartTime (alist-get 'snippet o))))))
      ;; scheduled
      (and
       (null (alist-get 'actualStartTime (alist-get 'snippet o)))
       (null (alist-get 'actualEndTime (alist-get 'snippet o)))
       (not (time-less-p time (date-to-time (alist-get 'scheduledStartTime (alist-get 'snippet o))))))))
   (sort
    (seq-filter
     (lambda (o)
       (or
        (alist-get 'actualStartTime (alist-get 'snippet o))
        (alist-get 'scheduledStartTime (alist-get 'snippet o))))
     (alist-get 'items

                (sacha-google-youtube-live-broadcasts)))
    :key (lambda (o)
           (or
            (alist-get 'actualStartTime (alist-get 'snippet o))
            (alist-get 'scheduledStartTime (alist-get 'snippet o))))
    :lessp #'string<)))

(defun sacha-google-youtube-live-seconds-offset-from-start-of-stream (wall-time)
  "Return number of seconds for WALL-TIME from the start of the stream that contains it.
Offset by `sacha-google-youtube-stream-offset-seconds'."
  (+ sacha-google-youtube-stream-offset-seconds
     (time-to-seconds
      (time-subtract
       wall-time
       (date-to-time
        (alist-get 'actualStartTime
                   (alist-get 'snippet
                              (sacha-google-youtube-live-get-broadcast-at-time wall-time))))))))

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-google-clear-cache ()
  "Clear cached Google access tokens and data."
  (interactive)
  (setq sacha-google-access-token nil)
  (setq sacha-google-youtube-live-broadcasts nil))

(mapcar
 (lambda (o)
   (list (concat
           "vtime:"
           (sacha-google-youtube-stream-offset
            o))
         o))
 timestamps)

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

In this livestream, I showed Prot what I've been doing since our last conversation about Emacs configuration and livestreaming.

• 00:00 Opening
• 04:24 Workflow checklist
• 04:47 Demonstrating sacha-stream-show-message and qrencode
• 05:54 qrencode
• 07:55 Embark
• 17:14 My objectives
• 19:00 keycast-header-mode
• 19:45 Trade-offs when livestreaming while coding
• 21:24 Trade-offs: seeing less text on the screen
• 23:52 Lowering the effort needed to announce a stream: Prot just announces it and the blog post embeds it
• 24:43 Timestamps
• 27:29 Different types of livestreams
• 28:14 Reading other people's configs
• 30:12 Hanging out
• 31:40 Livestreams for explaining specific things
• 32:00 Prot on didactic livestreams
• 34:07 Prot suggests breadcrumbs
• 37:59 Announcing livestreams
• 38:58 Embeds: Prot embeds specific YouTube videos instead of the general channel one
• 39:32 Demo of my new shortcut for converting time zones
• 41:48 Ozzloy's questions about time zones and QR codes
• 43:46 Prot on announcing livestreams on blogs
• 45:25 Processing the recordings
• 47:15 Commitment devices
• 48:29 Automating more of the process
• 51:14 Copying non-packaged code
• 52:25 Prot on defcustom
• 55:12 helpful and elisp-demos
• 56:23 Prot on code libraries
• 56:50 Prot rewrites functions to fit his style and naming conventions
• 59:18 Prot's preference for small functions
• 01:00:23 avy-goto-char-timer
• 01:02:40 One-shot keyboard modifiers
• 01:03:29 Toggling
• 01:05:08 System-wide toggle shortcuts using emacsclient
• 01:07:25 My next steps
• 01:08:18 Tips from Prot: small functions used frequently
• 01:09:06 Maybe using the header line for tips?
• 01:10:23 Reorganizing keys

2026-04-16-01 Preparing for chat with Prot.jpeg

• Recap of my objectives:
  • Overall: capture and share more, create opportunities for conversation
  • Timeline:
    • April, May, June: take advantage of predictable-ish schedule and set up streams, chats
    • July, Aug: Focus on posts, videos, spontaneous streams
    • Sept-: prepare for EmacsConf, see what I can squeeze in at the same time
  • This session:
    • Share my updates, see if you have other ideas, hear what you've been learning about
• #YayEmacs 10: Emacs coaching with Prot: Emacs workflows and streaming
  • Emacs config modularization
    • Moved the functions of my config into .el files and renamed to sacha- prefix
    • Experimenting with using keyd for one-shot ctrl/alt/super modifiers on Linux
    • Used C-z to toggle live.org and C-Z to toggle now.org
    • Reading people's configs
  • Streaming
    • Set up mode for livestreaming and obs-websocket-el
      • Saves variables, changes agenda / refile targets / capture templates, changes theme, etc.
    • Planning upcoming videos / livestreams:
      • Looks like there's lots of interest in Emacs Chat (config demos)
        • Mastodon thread with interested people
        • Emacs Chat
      • I have a video call with jwiegley and Karthik which we will post afterwards
    • Watching lots of other people's videos, reading people's configs
    • Could have fun with a Thursday show-and-tell
  • Contributing upstream
    • Sent revised patch for org and sentence-at-point
    • Bumped into something in which-key which I want to tweak
• GNU Emacs configuration | Protesilaos Stavrou
• Sacha Chua's Emacs configuration
• qrencode
• Time zones

Questions I'm thinking about / areas I'm working on improving:

• (Log) Getting more out of livestreams (for yourself or others)
  • You've mentioned that you don't really go back to your videos to listen to them. I was wondering what could make the livestreamed recordings more useful to either the person who made them, people who watched it live, or people who come across it later.
  • Tradeoffs for livestreaming:
    • Plus: debugging help, capturing your thinking out loud, conversation, sharing more practices/tips
    • Minus: Fitting less stuff on screen, distractability
  • A few types of livestreams:
    • "I'm going to spend the time doing this anyway, I might as well open it up in case other people are interested."
      • Your package maintenance videos Emacs: live stream about maintaining the modus-themes - YouTube
      • My Emacs News categorization
      • People coding other things
      • Other types of tinkering with code, debugging, etc.
    • "I have something that I specifically want to teach/show."
      • After writing a post
      • Before writing a post
        • [2026-04-16 Thu 10:54] Leaving yourself breadcrumbs ZZZ consider also colour (font-lock-keywords), maybe occur
    • Reacting to other things
      • Config: YE15: Fiddling with my Emacs config and streaming setup - YouTube
    • Chatting with a guest
      • I had fun fiddling with my two-speaker workflow for whisperx and subed; hooray for the visual distinction between your subtitles and mine on Yay Emacs 10: Talking to Prot about Emacs workflows - YouTube =)
    • Chatting with the community, hanging out
    • Playing
  • (Log) Announcing livestreams
    • You add a post for scheduled/spontaneous livestreams and then you update it with the description; probably fine considering RSS readers - people can visit the page if it's finished

    • Debating whether to embed the channel livestream (picks next public scheduled stream, I think) or embed the specific livestream

    • Now on https://yayemacs.com (also https://sach.ac/live, https://sachachua.com/live)
    • Added timestamp translation to Embark keymap for timestamps, sacha-org-timestamp-in-time-zones
    • ☐ TODO: Post template
    • ☐ TODO: ical file
    • ☐ TODO: Easier workflow for embedding streams
    • ☐ TODO: Google API for scheduling a livestream
  • (Log) Processing the recordings
    • I like editing transcripts because that also helps me quickly split up chapters
    • Tracking chapters on the fly
    • Extracting screenshots and clips
    • Turning videos into blog posts (or vice versa)
    • ☐ TODO: Automate more of the downloading/transcription, common edits, Internet Archive uploads
• (Log) Do you sometimes find yourself copying non-packaged code from other people? How do you like to integrate it into your config, keep references to the source, check for updates?
  • convert defvar to defcustom

  • Current approach: autoload if possible; if not, add a note to the docstring

       (use-package prot-comment                ; TODO 2026-04-16:
        :load-path "~/vendor/prot-dotfiles/emacs/.emacs.d/prot-lisp"
              :commands (prot-comment-timestamp-keyword)
              :bind
              (:map prog-mode-map
                                      ("C-x M-;" . prot-comment-timestamp-keyword)))
    

       ;;;###autoload
    (defun sacha-org-capture-region-contents-with-metadata (start end parg)
      "Write selected text between START and END to currently clocked `org-mode' entry.
    
       With PARG, kill the content instead.
       If there is no clocked task, create it as a new note in my inbox instead.
    
       From https://takeonrules.com/2022/10/16/adding-another-function-to-sacha-workflow/, modified slightly so that it creates a new entry if we are not currently clocked in."
      (interactive "r\nP")
      (let ((text (sacha-org-region-contents-get-with-metadata start end)))
        (if (car parg)
            (kill-new text)
          (org-capture-string (concat "-----\n" text)
                              (if (org-clocking-p) "c"
                                "r")))))
    

  • prot-window: run a command in a new frame
  • ☐ Look into using keyd for tap and hold space?
  • ☐ header line format with common tips

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

Over at the Emacs subreddit, _DonK4rma shows an example of his mathematical note taking in Emacs. It’s a nice example of how flexible Org mode is even for writing text with heavy mathematical content but probably not too interesting to most Emacs users.

What should be interesting is this comment, which points to Dan Davison’s Xenops, which he describes as a “LaTeX editing environment for mathematical documents in Emacs.” The idea is that with Xenops when you leave a math mode block it is automatically rendered as the final mathematics, which replaces the original input. If you move the cursor onto the output text and type return, the original text is redisplayed.

It’s an excellent system that lets you catch any errors you make in entering mathematics as you’re entering them rather than at LaTeX compile time. So far it only works on .tex files but Davison says he will work on getting it to work with Org too.

He has a six minute video that shows the system in action. It gives a good idea of how it works but Xenops can do a lop more; see the repository’s detailed README at the above link for details.

boxquote.el is another of my oldest Emacs Lisp packages. The original code itself was inspired by something I saw on Usenet, and writing my own version of it seemed like a great learning exercise; as noted in the thanks section in the commentary in the source:

Kai Grossjohann for inspiring the idea of boxquote. I wrote this code to mimic the "inclusion quoting" style in his Usenet posts. I could have hassled him for his code but it was far more fun to write it myself.

While I never used this package to quote text I was replying to in Usenet posts, I did use it a lot on Usenet, and in mailing lists, and similar places, to quote stuff.

The default use is to quote a body of text; often a paragraph, or a region, or perhaps even Emacs' idea of a defun.

,----
| `boxquote.el` provides a set of functions for using a text quoting style
| that partially boxes in the left hand side of an area of text, such a
| marking style might be used to show externally included text or example
| code.
`----

Where the package really turned into something fun and enduring, for me, was when I started to add the commands that grabbed information from elsewhere in Emacs and added a title to explain the content of the quote. For example, using boxquote-describe-function to quote the documentation for a function at someone, while also showing them how to get at that documentation:

,----[ C-h f boxquote-text RET ]
| boxquote-text is an autoloaded interactive native-comp-function in
| ‘boxquote.el’.
|
| (boxquote-text TEXT)
|
| Insert TEXT, boxquoted.
`----

Or perhaps getting help with a particular key combination:

,----[ C-h k C-c b ]
| C-c b runs the command boxquote (found in global-map), which is an
| interactive native-comp-function in ‘boxquote.el’.
|
| It is bound to C-c b.
|
| (boxquote)
|
| Show a transient for boxquote commands.
|
|   This function is for interactive use only.
|
| [back]
`----

Or figuring out where a particular command is and how to get at it:

,----[ C-h w fill-paragraph RET ]
| fill-paragraph is on fill-paragraph (M-q)
`----

While I seldom have use for this package these days (mainly because I don't write on Usenet or in mailing lists any more) I did keep carrying it around (always pulling it down from melpa) and had all the various commands bound to some key combination.

(use-package boxquote
  :ensure t
  :bind
  ("<f12> b i"   . boxquote-insert-file)
  ("<f12> b M-w" . boxquote-kill-ring-save)
  ("<f12> b y"   . boxquote-yank)
  ("<f12> b b"   . boxquote-region)
  ("<f12> b t"   . boxquote-title)
  ("<f12> b h f" . boxquote-describe-function)
  ("<f12> b h v" . boxquote-describe-variable)
  ("<f12> b h k" . boxquote-describe-key)
  ("<f12> b h w" . boxquote-where-is)
  ("<f12> b !"   . boxquote-shell-command))

Recently, with the creation of blogmore.el, I moved the boxquote commands off the b prefix (because I wanted that for blogging) and onto an x prefix. Even then... that's a lot of commands bound to a lot of keys that I almost never use but still can't let go of.

Then I got to thinking: I'd made good use of transient in blogmore.el, why not use it here too? So now boxquote.el has acquired a boxquote command which uses transient.

Now I can have:

(use-package boxquote
  :ensure t
  :bind
  ("C-c b" . boxquote))

and all the commands are still easy to get to and easy to (re)discover. I've also done my best to make them context-sensitive too, so only applicable commands should be usable at any given time.

OmniOutliner Pro 6

Product: OmniOutliner Pro 6
Price: $99 for new users and $50 for upgrade price. They have a $49.99/year subscription price.

Rationale or the Lack of One

There was no good reason to buy OmniOutliner Pro 6.

I don’t need this program. I have the outlining abilities of Org-mode in Emacs. And dedicated outlining programs in Opal, Zavala and TaskPaper.

They had a good upgrade price and I hadn’t tried out any new software in a while. I know that is not a good reason to spend $50. It was my birthday, and I love outlining programs.

I had used the Pro version in version 3 and had bought the Essentials edition for OmniOutliner 5. A lot of what I see in version 6 is new to me.

Themes

Customizing Themes

OmniOutliner Pro 6 comes with themes. I wanted to make my own or customize the existing ones. It is easy to do. Didn’t do much. Changed the line spacing and the font. The themes it ships with are nice. I am using the blank one and Solarized.

Writing Environment

Writing in OOP

The best thing about OmniOutliner Pro 6 is the writing environment it provides. There are touches around the program which make it a pleasure to write in. Two of them which stick out to me are:

1. Typewriter scrolling. I have no idea why more programs don’t give you this feature. I use it all the time. Looking at the bottom of the document is boring and it hurts my neck.
2. Full screen focus. This is well implemented and another feature which helps me concentrate on the document I am in.

Linking Documents

Linking

You can link to a document or to a block in the document. Clicking on the space left of the Heading gives you a drop-down menu. Choose the Copy Omni Link and paste it to where you want the link to appear. Useful in linking documents or sections when you have a block of outlines which relate to each other in some way.

Keyboard Commands

keyboard commands

Keyboard commands are what make an outlining program. OmniOutliner Pro 6 comes with the ability to customize and change every keyboard command that is in the program. It makes the learning curve smoother when you can use the commands you are used to for every task you perform in an outliner. I love this ability to make the outliner my own.

Using OmniOutliner Pro 6

This is the best outliner in the macOS space. OmniOutliner Pro 6 cements that position. It is a pleasure to use. It does everything you need from an outliner and does it with style. It does more than you need. Columns? I have never found the need for columns in an outliner. Other users love this feature. I am not interested. Maybe I am missing something, or I don’t use outlines which need columns. In spite of my lack of enthusiasm for columns, this is the best outlining program available on the macOS.

Comparison with Org-mode

I use Emacs and within it Org-mode. I write in outlines in Emacs all the time.

Org-mode is a strange mix of OmniOutliner and OmniFocus. It does outlines and does task management. All in one application. In plain text. The only problem? You have to deal with the complexity of Emacs. It is a steep learning curve which gives you benefits over the long term but there is pain in the short term. Let’s be honest, there is a ton of pain in the short term. OmniOutliner on the other hand, is easy to pick up and use. You are going to be competent in the program with little effort. The learning curve is minimal. The program is usable and useful. Doesn’t do most of the things Org-mode does, but it is not designed for that. They have a product called OmniFocus to sell you, for that.

Conclusion

If you are looking for an outlining program, you cannot go wrong with OmniOutliner Pro 6. It is fantastic to live in and work with. It gives you a great writing environment. I love writing in it.

There are two things which give me pause when it comes to OmniOutliner Pro 6. The first is the price. I think $99 for an outlining program is steep. That is a function of my retired-person price sensitivity. You might have a different view. The second is the incomplete documentation. They are working on it, slowly. If I am paying for the most expensive outlining program in the marketplace, I want the documentation to be complete and readily available on sale of the product. Not something I have been waiting a few months for. That is negligent.

If you are looking at outlining programs there are competitors in the marketplace. Zavala is a competitive product which is free. Opal is another product which is free and although it doesn’t have all the features of OmniOutliner, is a competent outliner. Or, you can always learn how to use Emacs and adopt Org-mode as the main driver of all your writing.

OmniOutliner Pro 6 is recommended with some reservations.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie.

I wrote org-static-blog-emfed, a little Emacs package that extends org-static-blog with the ability to embed a Mastodon thread in a blog post to serve as comments. The root of the Mastodon thread also serves as an announcement of the blog post to your followers. It’s based on Adrian Sampson’s Emfed, and of course Bastian Bechtold’s org-static-blog.

I had shared it before, but alas, after changing Mastodon instances the comments from old posts were lost, so I disabled them on this blog. Just over the past few days I’ve found time to get it all working again.

It also seems, at least in #Emacs on Mastodon, that org-static-blog has gained in popularity recently.

Prompted as I was to make a few improvements, I thought I would update the README and share it again. Hope it’s useful for someone!

I have been slowly chipping away at my Emacs-DIYer project, which is basically my ongoing experiment in rebuilding popular Emacs packages using only what ships with Emacs itself, no external dependencies, no MELPA, just the built-in pieces bolted together in a literate README.org that tangles to init.el. The latest addition is a DIY version of dired-collapse from the dired-hacks family, which is one of those packages I did not realise I leaned on until I started browsing a deeply-nested Java project and felt the absence immediately.

If you have ever opened a dired buffer on something like a Maven project, or node_modules, or a freshly generated resource bundle, you will know the pain, src/ contains a single main/ which contains a single java/ which contains a single com/ which contains a single example/, and you are pressing RET four times just to get to anything interesting. The dired-collapse minor mode from dired-hacks solves this beautifully, it squashes that whole single-child chain into one dired line so src/main/java/com/example/ shows up as a single row and one RET drops you straight into the deepest directory.

So, as always with the Emacs-DIYer project, I wondered, can I implement this in a few elisp defuns?

Right, so what is the plan?, dired already draws a nice listing with permissions, sizes, dates and filenames, all I really need to do is walk each line, look at the directory, figure out the deepest single-child descendant, and then rewrite the filename column in place with the collapsed path. The trick, and this is the bit that took me a minute to convince myself of, is that dired uses a dired-filename text property to know where the filename lives on the line, and dired-get-filename happily accepts relative paths containing slashes. So if I can rewrite the text and reapply the property, everything else, RET, marking, copying, should just work without me having to touch the rest of dired at all!

First function, my/dired-collapse--deepest, which just walks the directory chain as long as each directory contains exactly one accessible child directory. I added a 100-iteration guard so a pathological symlink cycle cannot wedge the whole thing, which, you know, future me might thank present me for:

(defun my/dired-collapse--deepest (dir)
"Return the deepest single-child descendant directory of DIR.
Walks the directory chain as long as each directory contains exactly
one entry which is itself an accessible directory. Stops after 100
iterations to guard against symlink cycles."
(let ((current dir)
(depth 0))
(catch 'done
(while (< depth 100)
(let ((entries (condition-case nil
(directory-files current t
directory-files-no-dot-files-regexp
t)
(error nil))))
(if (and entries
(null (cdr entries))
(file-directory-p (car entries))
(file-accessible-directory-p (car entries)))
(setq current (car entries)
depth (1+ depth))
(throw 'done current)))))
current))

directory-files-no-dot-files-regexp is one of those lovely little built-in constants I keep forgetting exists, it filters out . and .. but keeps dotfiles, which is exactly what you want if you are deciding whether a directory is truly single-child.

Second function does the actual buffer surgery, my/dired-collapse iterates each dired line, grabs the filename with dired-get-filename, asks the walker how deep the chain goes, and if there is anything to collapse it replaces the displayed filename with the collapsed relative path:

(defun my/dired-collapse ()
"Collapse single-child directory chains in the current dired buffer.
A DIY replacement for `dired-collapse-mode' from the dired-hacks
package. Rewrites the filename portion of each line in place and
reapplies the `dired-filename' text property so that standard dired
navigation still resolves to the deepest directory."
(when (derived-mode-p 'dired-mode)
(let ((inhibit-read-only t))
(save-excursion
(goto-char (point-min))
(while (not (eobp))
(condition-case nil
(let ((file (dired-get-filename nil t)))
(when (and file
(file-directory-p file)
(not (member (file-name-nondirectory
(directory-file-name file))
'("." "..")))
(file-accessible-directory-p file))
(let ((deepest (my/dired-collapse--deepest file)))
(unless (string= deepest file)
(when (dired-move-to-filename)
(let* ((start (point))
(end (dired-move-to-end-of-filename t))
(displayed (buffer-substring-no-properties
start end))
(suffix (substring deepest
(1+ (length file))))
(new (concat displayed "/" suffix)))
(delete-region start end)
(goto-char start)
(insert (propertize new
'face 'dired-directory
'mouse-face 'highlight
'dired-filename t))))))))
(error nil))
(forward-line))))))

The key bit is the propertize call at the end, the new filename text has to carry dired-filename t so that dired-get-filename picks it up, and dired-directory on face keeps the collapsed entry looking the same as a normal directory line. Because dired-get-filename will happily glue a relative path like main/java/com/example onto the dired buffer’s directory, pressing RET on a collapsed line takes you straight to src/main/java/com/example with no extra work from me.

A while back I added a little unicode icon overlay thing to dired (my/dired-add-icons, which puts a little symbol in front of each filename via a zero-length overlay), and I did not want the collapse to fight with it. The icons hook into dired-after-readin-hook as well, so I just gave collapse a negative depth when attaching its hook:

(add-hook 'dired-after-readin-hook #'my/dired-collapse -50)

Lower depth runs earlier, so collapse rewrites the line first, then the icon overlay attaches to the final collapsed filename position. Without this, the icons would happily sit in front of a stub directory that was about to be rewritten, which is, well, fine I suppose, but it felt tidier to have them anchor on the post-collapse text.

Before, a typical Maven project root might look something like this:

drwxr-xr-x 3 jdyer users 4096 Apr 9 08:12 ▶ src
drwxr-xr-x 2 jdyer users 4096 Apr 9 08:11 ▶ target
-rw-r--r-- 1 jdyer users 812 Apr 9 08:10 ◦ pom.xml

After collapse kicks in:

drwxr-xr-x 3 jdyer users 4096 Apr 9 08:12 ▶ src/main/java/com/example
drwxr-xr-x 2 jdyer users 4096 Apr 9 08:11 ▶ target
-rw-r--r-- 1 jdyer users 812 Apr 9 08:10 ◦ pom.xml

One RET and you are in com/example, which is where all the actual code lives anyway. Marking, copying, deleting, renaming, all of it still behaves because the dired-filename text property points at the real deepest path.

One thing that initially bit me, is navigating out of a collapsed chain. If I hit RET on a collapsed src/main/java/com/example line I land in the deepest directory, which is great, but then pressing my usual M-e to go back up was doing the wrong thing. M-e in my config has always been bound to dired-jump, and dired-jump called from inside a dired buffer does a “pop up a level” thing that ended up spawning a fresh dired for com/, bypassing the collapsed view entirely and leaving me staring at a directory I never wanted to see.

My first attempt at fixing this was to put some around-advice on dired-jump so that if an existing dired buffer already had a collapsed line covering the jump target, it would switch to that buffer and land on the collapsed line instead of splicing in a duplicate subdir. It worked, sort of, but dired-jump in general felt a bit janky inside dired, it does a lot of “refresh the buffer and try again” under the hood and the in-dired pop-up-a-level path was always the weak link. So I stepped back and split the two cases apart with a tiny dispatch wrapper:

(defun my/dired-jump-or-up ()
"If in Dired, go up a directory; otherwise dired-jump for current buffer."
(interactive)
(if (derived-mode-p 'dired-mode)
(dired-up-directory)
(dired-jump)))
(global-set-key (kbd "M-e") #'my/dired-jump-or-up)

From a file buffer, dired-jump is still exactly the right thing as you want the directory the file is in of course. From inside a dired buffer, dired-up-directory is just a much cleaner operation, it walks up one real level, no refresh, no splicing, nothing weird. But on its own that would lose the collapsed round-trip, so I gave dired-up-directory its own bit of advice that looks for a collapsed-ancestor buffer before falling through to the default behaviour.

(defun my/dired-collapse--find-hit (target-dir)
"Return (BUFFER . POS) of a dired buffer with a collapsed line covering TARGET-DIR."
(let ((target (file-name-as-directory (expand-file-name target-dir)))
hit)
(dolist (buf (buffer-list))
(unless hit
(with-current-buffer buf
(when (and (derived-mode-p 'dired-mode)
(stringp default-directory))
(let ((buf-dir (file-name-as-directory
(expand-file-name default-directory))))
(when (and (string-prefix-p buf-dir target)
(not (string= buf-dir target)))
(save-excursion
(goto-char (point-min))
(catch 'found
(while (not (eobp))
(let ((line-file (ignore-errors
(dired-get-filename nil t))))
(when (and line-file
(file-directory-p line-file))
(let ((line-dir (file-name-as-directory
(expand-file-name line-file))))
(when (string-prefix-p target line-dir)
(setq hit (cons buf (point)))
(throw 'found nil)))))
(forward-line))))))))))
hit))

The dired-up-directory only fires when the literal parent is not already open as a dired buffer, which keeps normal upward navigation completely unchanged:

(defun my/dired-collapse--up-advice (orig-fn &optional other-window)
"Around-advice for `dired-up-directory' restoring collapsed round-trip."
(let* ((dir (and (derived-mode-p 'dired-mode)
(stringp default-directory)
(expand-file-name default-directory)))
(up (and dir (file-name-directory (directory-file-name dir))))
(parent-buf (and up (dired-find-buffer-nocreate up)))
(hit (and dir (null parent-buf)
(my/dired-collapse--find-hit dir))))
(if hit
(let ((buf (car hit))
(pos (cdr hit)))
(if other-window
(switch-to-buffer-other-window buf)
(pop-to-buffer-same-window buf))
(goto-char pos)
(dired-move-to-filename))
(funcall orig-fn other-window))))
(advice-add 'dired-up-directory :around #'my/dired-collapse--up-advice)

If /proj/src/main/java/com/ happens to already exist as a dired buffer, dired-up-directory does its usual thing and just goes there, the up-advice never fires. It is only when the literal parent is absent that the advice kicks in and hands you back to the collapsed ancestor, which I think is the right tradeoff, the advice never surprises you when you were going to get the standard behaviour anyway, it only steps in when the standard behaviour would throw away context you clearly still had in a buffer somewhere.

End result, RET into a collapsed chain drops me deep, M-e walks me back out to the original collapsed line, and none of it requires doing anything clever with dired-jump’s “pop up a level” path, which I am increasingly convinced I should not have been using in the first place.

Everything lives in the Emacs-DIYer project on GitHub, in the literate README.org. If you just want the snippet to drop into your own init file, the two functions and the add-hook line above are the whole thing, no require, no use-package, no MELPA, just built-in dired and a bit of buffer shenanigans, and thats it!, phew, and breathe!

Yet another older Emacs Lisp package that has had a tidy up. This one is slstats.el, a wee package that can be used to look up various statistics about the Second Life grid. It's mainly a wrapper around the API provided by the Second Life grid survey.

When slstats is run, you get an overview of all of the information available.

There are also various commands for viewing individual details about the grid in the echo area:

• slstats-signups - Display the Second Life sign-up count
• slstats-exchange-rate - Display the L$ -> $ exchange rate
• slstats-inworld - Display how many avatars are in-world in Second Life
• slstats-concurrency - Display the latest-known concurrency stats for Second Life
• slstats-grid-size - Display the grid size data for Second Life

There is also slstats-region-info which will show information and the object and terrain maps for a specific region.

As with a good few of my older packages: it's probably not that useful, but at the same time it was educational to write it to start with, and it can be an amusement from time to time.

Just a quickie today. Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a very nice little post on using Tab with Dired. By default, Tab isn’t defined in Dired but mbork suggests an excellent use for it and provides the code to implement his suggestion.

If there are two Dired windows open, the default destination for Dired commands is “the other window”. That’s a handy thing that not every Emacs user knows. Mbork’s idea is to use Tab to switch between Dired windows.

It’s a small thing, of course, but it’s a nice example of reducing friction in your Emacs workflow. As Mbork says, it’s yet another example of how easy it is to make small optimizations like this in Emacs.

Update [2026-04-16 Thu 11:06]: Added link to mbork’s post.

Although TRAMP allows access to files on remote servers using the local Emacs instance I usually prefer to open Emacs using a running daemon session on the remote server.

The issue with Emacs in the terminal is that kill and yank (aka copy and paste) don't work the same way as with the GUI. Using WezTerm I have found that it is

local wezterm = require 'wezterm'

local config = wezterm.config_builder()

config.keys = {
    -- Paste in Emacs using regular key bindings
    {
      key = "y",
      mods = "CTRL",
      action = wezterm.action.PasteFrom "Clipboard",
    },
}

return config

(defun tjkl/xclip-method ()
  (cond
   ((eq system-type 'darwin) 'pbpaste)
   ((getenv "WAYLAND_DISPLAY") 'wl-copy)
   ((getenv "DISPLAY") 'xsel)
   ((getenv "WSLENV") 'powershell)
   (t nil)))

(use-package xclip
  :if (and (not (display-graphic-p))
           (not (getenv "SSH_CONNECTION"))
           (tjkl/xclip-method))
  :custom
  (xclip-method (tjkl/xclip-method))
  :config
  (xclip-mode 1))

(unless (display-graphic-p)
  (defun tjkl/osc52-kill (text)
    (when (and text (stringp text))
      (send-string-to-terminal
       (format "\e]52;c;%s\a"
               (base64-encode-string text t)))))
  (setq interprogram-cut-function #'tjkl/osc52-kill))

I want to get back into the swing of doing Emacs Chats again, which means scheduling, which means timezones. Let's see first if anyone happens to match up with the Thursday timeslots (10:30 or 12:45) that I'd like to use for Emacs-y video things, but I might be able to shuffle things around if needed.

I want something that can translate times into people's local timezones. I use Org Mode timestamps a lot because they're so easy to insert with C-u C-c ! (org-timestamp-inactive), which inserts a timestamp like this:

[2026-04-16 Thu 10:30]

By default, the Org HTML export for it does not include the timezone offset. That's easily fixed by adding %z to the time specifier, like this:

(setq org-html-datetime-formats '("%F" . "%FT%T%z"))

Now a little bit of Javascript code makes it clickable and lets us toggle a translated time. I put the time afterwards so that people can verify it visually. I never quite trust myself when it comes to timezone translations.

function translateTime(event) {
  if (event.target.getAttribute('datetime')?.match(/[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]$/)) {
    if (event.target.querySelector('.translated')) {
      event.target.querySelectorAll('.translated').forEach((o) => o.remove());
    } else {
      const span = document.createElement('span');
      span.classList.add('translated');
      span.textContent = ' → ' + (new Date(event.target.getAttribute('datetime'))).toLocaleString(undefined, {
        month: 'short',  
        day: 'numeric',  
        hour: 'numeric', 
        minute: '2-digit',
        timeZoneName: 'short'
      });
      event.target.appendChild(span);
    }
  }
}
function clickForLocalTime() {
  document.querySelectorAll('time').forEach((o) => {
    if (o.getAttribute('datetime')?.match(/[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]$/)) {
      o.addEventListener('click', translateTime);
      o.classList.add('clickable');
    }
  });
}

And some CSS to make it more obvious that it's now clickable:

.clickable {
    cursor: pointer;
    text-decoration: underline dotted;
}

Let's see if this is useful.

Someday, it would probably be handy to have a button that translates all the timestamps in a table, but this is a good starting point.

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

Today while I was going through my feed, I saw this this post from macosxguru over at Bicycle For Your Mind. It’s about his system for using snippets on his system. The TL;DR is that he has settled on Typinator and likes it a lot.

I use snippets a lot but use several systems—YASnippet, abbrev mode, and the macOS text expansion facility—but none of them work everywhere I need them to so I have to negotiate three different systems. YASnippet is different from the other two in that its snippets can accept input instead of just making a text substation like the others.

In his post, macosxguru mentions that his previous system for text substitutions was based on the Alfred snippet functions. I’ve been using Alfred for a long time and love it. A one time purchase of the power pack makes your Mac much more powerful. Still, even though I was vaguely aware of it, I’d never used Alfred’s snippet function.

After seeing it mentioned on macosxguru’s post I decided to try it out. It’s easy to specify text substitutions. I couldn’t immediately figure out how to trigger the substitutions manually so I just set them to trigger automatically. I usually don’t like that but so far it’s working out well.

Up til now, I haven’t found anywhere that the substitutions don’t work. That can’t be said of any of the other systems I was using. It’s particularly hard to find one that works with both Emacs and other macOS applications.

If you’re using Emacs on macOS, you should definitely look into Alfred. It plays very nicely with Emacs and my newfound snippets ability makes the combination even better.

I think I'm mostly caught up with the collection of Emacs Lisp packages that need updating and tidying, which means yesterday evening's clean-up should be one of the last (although I would like to revisit a couple and actually improve and extend them at some point).

As for what I cleaned up yesterday: wordcloud.el. This is a package that, when run in a buffer, will count the frequency of words in that buffer and show the results in a fresh window, complete with the "word cloud" differing-font-size effect.

This package is about 10 years old at this point, and I'm struggling to remember why I wrote it now. I know I was doing something -- either writing something or reviewing it -- and the frequency of some words was important. I also remember this doing the job just fine and solving the problem I needed to solve.

Since then it's just sat around in my personal library of stuff I've written in Emacs Lisp, not really used. I imagine that's where it's going back to, but at least it's cleaned up and should be functional for a long time to come.

An Emacser recently posted about popterm, which can use posframe to toggle a terminal visible and invisible in Emacs. I tried it out, and ran into problems with it, so abandoned it for now.

However, this got me thinking about other things that can use posframe, which pops up a frame at point. I’ve seen other Emacsers use posframe when they show off their configurations in meetups. I thought about what I use often that might benefit from a posframe.

• magit
• vertico
• which-key
• company
• flymake

Which of these has something I can use to enable posframes?

Of course, there are plenty of other packages that have add-on packages to enable posframes.

Magit

magit doesn’t have anything directly, but it makes heavy use of transient. And there’s a package transient-posframe that can enable posframes for transients. When I use magit’s transients, the transient pops up as a frame in the middle of my Emacs frame.

vertico

Install vertico-posframe to use posframes with vertico.

which-key

Yep, there’s which-key-posframe.

company

See company-posframe.

flymake

I needed a bit of web searching to find this. flymake-popon can use a posframe in the GUI and popon in a terminal.

Bozhidar Batsov has an excellent post that collects several configuration hacks from a variety of people and distributions. It’s a long list and rather than list them all, I’m going to mention just a few that appeal to me. Some of them I’m already using. Other’s I didn’t know about but will probably adopt.

• Save the clipboard before killing: I’ve been using this for years. What it does is to make sure that the contents of the system clipboard aren’t lost if you do a kill in Emacs. This is much more useful than it sounds, especially if, like me, your do a lot of cutting and pasting from other applications.
• Save the kill ring across sessions: I’m not sure I’ll adopt this but it’s easy to see how it could be useful.
• Auto-Chmod spripts: Every time I see this one I resolve to add it to my config but always forget. What it does is automatically make scripts (files beginning with #!) executable when they’re saved.
• Proportional window resizing: When a window is split, this causes all the windows in the frame to resize proportionally.
• Faster mark popping. It’s sort of like repeat mode for popping the mark ring. After the first Ctrl+u Ctrl+Space you can continue popping the ring with a simple Ctrl+Space
• Auto-select Help window: This is my favorite.When I invoke help, I almost always want to interact with the Help buffer if only to quit and delete it with a q. Unfortunately, the Help buffer doesn’t get focus so I have to do a change window to it. This simple configuration gives the Help buffer focus when you open it.

Everybody’s needs and preferences are different, of course, so be sure to take a look at Bastov’s post to see which ones might be helpful to you.

Lots of little improvements in this one! I'm looking forward to borrowing the config tweaks that bbatsov highlighted and also trying out popterm for quick-access shells. Also, the Emacs Carnival for April has a temporary home at Newbies/starter kits - feel free to write and share your thoughts!

• Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
  • London Emacs (in person): Emacs London meetup https://www.meetup.com/london-emacs-hacking/events/313909207/ Tue Apr 14 1800 Europe/London
  • Emacs Berlin: In-Person-Only Emacs-Berlin Stammtisch https://emacs-berlin.org/ Tue Apr 14 1900 Europe/Berlin
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed Apr 15 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore
  • EmacsSF (in person): coffee.el in SF https://www.meetup.com/emacs-sf/events/314166900/ Sat Apr 18 1100 America/Los_Angeles
  • Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat Apr 25 0130 America/Vancouver - 0330 America/Chicago - 0430 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/GMT - 1030 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore
• Beginner:
  • What is the absolute minimum to cover in first emacs session
  • Cómo aprender Emacs gráficamente gracias a Sacha Chua (@maxxcan@mastodon.social)
• Emacs configuration:
  • video demo of anju 1.1.0 - enhance mouse interactions (@kickingvegas@sfba.social)
  • Stealing from the Best Emacs Configs (Reddit, HN, lobste.rs)
  • YE13: Working on modularizing my config (01:23:26)
• Emacs Lisp:
  • Dave Pearson: expando.el v1.5 - macroexpand and pretty-print
  • Charles Choi: Computing Days Until with Emacs (Reddit, Irreal)
  • Listful Andrew: Counting Words V: More solutions in Emacs Lisp
  • Listful Andrew: Phones-to-Words Challenge V: Clojure-inspired Emacs Lisp
  • collect-alist-from-tree
  • Emacs Redux: The Many Faces of flet: cl-flet, cl-labels, and cl-letf
• Appearance:
  • Dave Pearson: quiz.el v1.7 - how to use :extend t to make a face extend to the edge
  • Ember for Emacs - A warm, nearly monochrome Doom Emacs theme. (Reddit)
  • I've now created a theme for Emacs, inspired by the Yotsuba B theme from 4chan. (Reddit)
  • Dave Pearson: fasta.el v1.1 - bioinformatics: font-locking sequences
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs modus-themes live stream (YouTube 02:44:36)
• Navigation:
  • Emacs Redux: Live Regexp Feedback with minibuffer-regexp-mode
  • ediff config tips
  • Tip about closing multiple Emacs buffers
  • easysession.el 1.2.1 (Reddit) - frame names, bugfixes, elpaca, daemon mode
  • vincentjgoh/avy-dashboard: avy keys for emacs dashboard · GitHub (Reddit)
• Dired:
  • Charles Choi: Calming Mouse Interaction in Dired
• Writing:
  • Tip about using Emacs to enter Unicode
  • Dave Pearson: blogmore.el v4.0 more public utility functions
  • overleaf.el 1.1.5 3-way conflict resolution
• Denote:
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs live stream for writing Denote tests and more (YouTube, 03:06:26)
• Org Mode:
  • Org Mode requests: [RFC] Should org-forward/backward-sentense respect element boundaries?
  • Org-Better-Agenda (Reddit)
  • [EMACS LAB] #3: Introduction to Org Mode (01:57:55)
  • Sacha Chua: Org Mode: Tangle Emacs config snippets to different files and add boilerplate
  • org-mindmap — simple inline mind maps for Org (r/emacs, r/orgmode)
  • Org ediff config tips
  • The issues with issue trackers — Bastien Guerry (@ThierryStoehr@framapiaf.org) - Bark is what Org Mode uses
  • Emacs 31.x Orgmode version mismatch - Blog In Isolation (@andyc@mastodon.me.uk)
  • [EMACS LAB] #4: "literate" programming (org-babel) (01:38:44)
  • I built a Things 3-inspired web frontend for org-agenda (looking for feedback) (Reddit)
  • Tutorial para blogear como Notxor (@hispaemacs@fosstodon.org)
  • GitHub - steve-downey/surround: Surround Source Code for org-transclusion (Reddit)
  • Tip about org-babel-remote-temporary-directory
  • Embark Org shortcut for displaying difference between timestamp and today
  • Org development:
    • ox-icalendar: Add export blocks and keywords
    • ox-html.el: support line numbers as a :before element in code blocks
    • org-support-shift-select: Allow forcing shift-select-mode on timestamps
• Coding:
  • djgoku/compilation-history: Automatic compilation history tracking for Emacs with searchable SQLite-backed storage. · GitHub (Reddit)
  • James Dyer: Wiring Flymake Diagnostics into a Follow Mode
  • Jeremias-A-Queiroz/flymake-kubeconform: real-time validation of Kubernetes manifests using kubeconform (Reddit)
  • Git fixup is magic (and Magit is too) (lobste.rs)
  • Stop Jujutsu from auto-committing everything (03:34)
  • Making a major mode - ocaml (Reddit)
• Math:
  • ESR v1.0.0: An R tree sitter mode (Reddit)
• Shells:
  • Tip about shell-command-on-region
  • [Ann] New package Popterm [posframe+terminal]​ (Reddit)
  • Show: How I added a list of other vterm buffers in the modeline
  • kitty-graphics.el v0.4.0: Sixel support, text sizing protocol, agent-shell integration (Reddit)
• Web:
  • EWW! A Web in My Editor! « Here's The Beef (@BeefGriller@dice.camp)
• Mail, news, and chat:
  • mastodon.el 2.0.16 - featured tags (@mousebot@todon.nl)
• Evil mode:
  • evim — multiple cursors for evil-mode, inspired by vim-visual-multi (now on MELPA) (r/emacs, r/DoomEmacs)
  • evil-matchit 4.1.0 is published (Reddit) - Julia, skip lines that match regex
• Multimedia:
  • [21] Working on Canvas Patch (Contd..) - 4/6/2026, 3:33:42 PM - Dyne.org TV and 5:51:25 PM
  • laNotte excerpt (08:18)
• EXWM:
  • EXWM on termux! (Reddit)
• Fun:
  • tamagotchi on emacs! (Reddit)
  • Server play support in nethack-el (Reddit)
• AI:
  • ann new packages: agent-shell-dispatch and agent-shell-ediff
  • bajsicki/gptel-got: Tooling for LLM interactions with org-mode
  • Emacs Codex IDE integration (Reddit)
  • I forced Claude to play Tetris in Emacs. (Reddit, HN)
• Community:
  • Fortnightly Tips, Tricks, and Questions — 2026-04-07 / week 14
  • Raising a few $thousand to keep version control magical (Reddit, Irreal) - support tarsius
  • Sacha Chua: YE12: Categorizing Emacs News, epwgraph, languages
• Other:
  • Chris Maiorana: The Emacs Way: Deleting Files
  • Erik L. Arneson: Emacs as the Freelancer's Command Center
  • senchawizard/emacs-polydiceware: generate passwords with dice (@senchawizard@gotosocial.social)
  • I built an Emacs auth-source backend for 1Password (tested on macOS) (Reddit)
  • Few tips for faster Emacs install with MSYS2
• Emacs development:
  • emacs-devel:
    • Re: On keybindings and the slow erosion of help's utility - Jonas Bernoulli - it would be great to get where-is to work with transient suffixes
    • Terminology changes from a long time ago: window, pane; frame, window
  • ; New function 'ns-process-is-accessibility-trusted', no message (bug#80624)
  • Support 24-bit TrueColor on MS-Windows console
• New packages:
  • agitjo: Manage Forgejo PRs with AGit-Flow (MELPA)
  • ben: Asynchronous buffer-local environments via `direnv' (MELPA)
  • popterm: Posframe terminal toggler with smart backends (MELPA)
  • struct-completion: Keyword slot completion for cl-defstruct constructors (MELPA)
  • taskjuggler-mode: Major mode for TaskJuggler project files (MELPA)
  • tokyo-night: Shared infrastructure for Tokyo Night themes (MELPA)
  • trust-manager: Convenient trust management (MELPA)

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

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

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVTqn9IgBN4

UPDATE 2026-04-13 18:00 +0300: I wrote the package during the stream: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes-exporter.

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

Today, the 13th of April 2026, at 15:00 Europe/Athens I will do a live stream in which I will develop the new modus-themes-exporter package for Emacs.

The idea for this package is based on an old experiment of mine: to get the palette of a Modus theme and “export” it to another file format for use in supported terminal emulators or, potentially, other applications.

My focus today will be on writing the core functionality and testing it with at least one target application.

Prior work of mine from my pre-Emacs days is the tempus-themes-generator, which was written in Bash: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/tempus-themes-generator.

Charles Choi recently saw a Mastodon post showing the days until the next election and started wondering how one would compute that with Emacs. He looked into it and, of course, the answer turned out to be simple. Org mode has a function, org-time-stamp-to-now that does exactly that. It takes a date string and calculates the number of days until that date.

Choi wrote an internal function that takes a date string and outputs a string specifying the number of days until that date. The default is x days until <date string> but you can specify a different output string if you like. That function, cc/--days-until, serves as a base for other functions.

Choi shows two such functions. One that allows you to specify a date from a date picker and computes the number of days until that date. The other—following the original question—computers the number of days until the next midterm and general elections in the U.S. for 2006. It’s a simple matter to change it for other election years. Nobody but the terminally politically obsessed would care about that but it’s a nice example of how easy it is to use cc/--days-until to find the number of days until some event.

Finally, in the comments to Choi’s reddit announcement ggxx-sdf notes that you can also use calc-eval for these sorts of calculations.

As Choi says, it’s a human characteristic to want to know how long something is going to take. If you have some event that you want a countdown clock for, take a look at Choi’s post.

Typinator

Product: Typinator
Price: $49.99 (one time for macOS only) or $29.99/yearly (for macOS and iOS version)

I was a TextExpander user and switched from it to aText when TextExpander went to a subscription model. Been using Alfred for snippet expansions for well over… Actually I have no idea how long. Every since Alfred added that feature I suppose. There are expansions which require input, and those are handled by Keyboard Maestro. I wanted to see what was available in this space. There was no good reason for the change, I was perfectly happy with the setup. But I saw that Typinator 10 had been released and I got curious. Approached the developer and they were kind enough to provide me with a license. So, this is the review.

What Does a Text Expansion Program Do?

A text expansion program makes it easy to type content you use regularly. For instance, I have an expansion where I type ,bfym and [Bicycle For Your Mind](http://bicycleforyourmind.com) is pasted into the text. It lessens your typing load, stops you from making mistakes and makes typing easy. Expansions include corrections of common mistakes that you or other people make while typing. It includes emojis and symbols. It can be simple or complex depending on your needs.

macOS has a built in mode for text expansions, but it is limited and like a lot of things macOS does, they include it without giving it much attention or developer love. It is lacking in features or finesse. If you are serious about making your writing comfortable and easy, you need to consider third party solutions. The macOS marketplace has a fair number of programs which tackle this task. The two main products are TextExpander and Typinator. Both Alfred and Keyboard Maestro have this feature built into the program.

Typinator 1

iOS

The main feature in this version of Typinator is the iOS integration. I am not interested in that, I am not going to talk about that. As far as I know, TextExpander was the only other product which had that integration. Typinator is now matching them. For some people, this is a crucial feature. Going by my experience with this developer, I am sure Typinator works as well on iOS.

Surprises

Typinator lets me use regex to define expansions. One of the ones which gets used all the time lets me type a period and then the first letter of the next sentence gets capitalized automatically. You have no idea how much I like that. Apple has that as a setting but it is temperamental. Not Typinator. Works like a charm. Thanks to its regex support it does interesting things with dates. I love that feature although I haven’t used it enough to make it super useful. I see the potential there.

Observations

Converting my Alfred snippets to Typinator was easy. Save the snippets in Alfred as a CSV file and then import those into Typinator.

Typinator keeps a record of the number of times you use a particular expansion and the last time you used it. Gives me the ability to monitor the usage of the expansions. Alfred doesn’t do that. I use abbrev.mode in Emacs, and that keeps a running count too. I love that feature.

Typinator 2

Typinator is easy to interact with. It has a menu-bar icon which you can click on to get the main window or you can assign a system wide keyboard command to bring the window up. You have the ability to highlight something in any editor you are using and press a keyboard command to bring up a dialog box to set up an expansion based on the content you have highlighted. Easy. I find myself using this to increase the number of expansions I have available.

Typinator gives you minute control over the expansions. You have the ability to trigger the expansions immediately upon matching the expansion trigger or after a word break. In other words, you can expand as soon as you match or expand after you type a space or any punctuation after your match. This setting is available on every individual snippet. Every individual snippet can be set for ignoring case or expand on exact match. Another level of fine control which is useful.

This is a mature program. It has been available for a long while now. It is a full-featured expansion program. They have been at it for a while and they are good at it.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a text expansion program, you cannot go wrong with Typinator. It is great at what it does and is full of features which will make you smile. I love it.

I recommend Typinator with enthusiasm.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie.

Just about everyone agrees that the two Emacs packages considered “killer apps” by those considering adopting the editor are Org mode and Magit. I’ve seen several people say they use Emacs mainly for one or the other.

Their development models are completely different. Org has a development team with a lead developer in much the same way that Emacs does. Magit is basically a one man show, although there are plenty of contributors offering pull requests and even fixing bugs. That one man is Jonas Bernoulli (tarsius) who develops Magit full time and earns his living from doing so.

Like most nerds, he hates marketing and would rather be writing code than seeking funding. Still, that thing about earning a living from Magit means that he must occasionally worry about raising money. Now is one such time. Some of his funding pledges have expired and the weakening U.S. dollar is also contributing to his dwindling income.

Virtually every Emacs user is also a Magit user and many of us depend on it so now would be a propitious moment to chip in some money to keep the good times rolling. The best thing, of course, is to get your employer to make a more robust contribution than would be feasible for an individual developer but even if every developer chips in a few dollars (or whatever) we can support tarsius and allow him to continue working on Magit and its associated packages.

His support page is here. Please consider contributing a few dollars. Tarsius certainly deserves it and we’ll be getting our money’s worth.

I want to organize the functions in my Emacs configuration so that they are easier for me to test and so that other people can load them from my repository. Instead of copying multiple code blogs from my blog posts or my exported Emacs configuration, it would be great if people could just include a file from the repository. I don't think people copy that much from my config, but it might still be worth making it easier for people to borrow interesting functions. It would be great to have libraries of functions that people can evaluate without worrying about side effects, and then they can copy or write a shorter piece of code to use those functions.

In Prot's configuration (The custom libraries of my configuration), he includes each library as in full, in a single code block, with the boilerplate description, keywords, and (provide '...) that make them more like other libraries in Emacs.

I'm not quite sure my little functions are at that point yet. For now, I like the way that the functions are embedded in the blog posts and notes that explain them, and the org-babel :comments argument can insert links back to the sections of my configuration that I can open with org-open-at-point-global or org-babel-tangle-jump-to-org.

Org tangles blocks in order, so if I want boilerplate or if I want to add require statements, I need to have a section near the beginning of my config that sets those up for each file. Noweb references might help me with common text like the license. Likewise, if I want a (provide ...) line at the end of each file, I need a section near the end of the file.

If I want to specify things out of sequence, I could use Noweb. By setting :noweb-ref some-id :tangle no on the blocks I want to collect later, I can then tangle them in the middle of the boilerplate. Here's a brief demo:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :noweb yes :tangle lisp/sacha-eshell.el :comments no
;; -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-
<<sacha-eshell>>
(provide 'sacha-eshell)
#+end_src

However, I'll lose the comment links that let me jump back to the part of the Org file with the original source block. This means that if I use find-function to jump to the definition of a function and then I want to find the outline section related to it, I have to use a function that checks if this might be my custom code and then looks in my config for "defun …". It's a little less generic.

I wonder if I can combine multiple targets with some code that knows what it's being tangled to, so it can write slightly different text. org-babel-tangle-single-block currently calculates the result once and then adds it to the list for each filename, so that doesn't seem likely.

Alternatively, maybe I can use noweb or my own tangling function and add the link comments from org-babel-tangle-comments.

Aha, I can fiddle with org-babel-post-tangle-hook to insert the boilerplate after the blocks have been written. Then I can add the lexical-binding: t cookie and the structure that makes it look more like the other libraries people define and use. It's always nice when I can get away with a small change that uses an existing hook. For good measure, let's even include a list of links to the sections of my config that affect that file.

(defvar sacha-dotemacs-url "https://sachachua.com/dotemacs/")

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-dotemacs-link-for-section-at-point (&optional combined)
  "Return the link for the current section."
  (let* ((custom-id (org-entry-get-with-inheritance "CUSTOM_ID"))
         (title (org-entry-get (point) "ITEM"))
         (url (if custom-id
                  (concat "dotemacs:" custom-id)
                (concat sacha-dotemacs-url ":-:text=" (url-hexify-string title)))))
    (if combined
        (org-link-make-string
         url
         title)
      (cons url title))))

(eval-and-compile
  (require 'org-core nil t)
  (require 'org-macs nil t)
  (require 'org-src nil t))
(declare-function 'org-babel-tangle--compute-targets "ob-tangle")
(defun sacha-org-collect-links-for-tangled-files ()
  "Return a list of ((filename (link link link link)) ...)."
  (let* ((file (buffer-file-name))
         results)
    (org-babel-map-src-blocks (buffer-file-name)
      (let* ((info (org-babel-get-src-block-info))
             (link (sacha-dotemacs-link-for-section-at-point)))
        (mapc
         (lambda (target)
           (let ((list (assoc target results #'string=)))
             (if list
                 (cl-pushnew link (cdr list) :test 'equal)
               (push (list target link) results))))
         (org-babel-tangle--compute-targets file info))))
    ;; Put it back in source order
    (nreverse
     (mapcar (lambda (o)
               (cons (car o)
                     (nreverse (cdr o))))
             results))))
(defvar sacha-emacs-config-module-links nil "Cache for links from tangled files.")

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-emacs-config-update-module-info ()
  "Update the list of links."
  (interactive)
  (setq sacha-emacs-config-module-links
        (seq-filter
         (lambda (o)
           (string-match "sacha-" (car o)))
         (sacha-org-collect-links-for-tangled-files)))
  (setq sacha-emacs-config-modules-info
        (mapcar (lambda (group)
                  `(,(file-name-base (car group))
                    (commentary
                     .
                     ,(replace-regexp-in-string
                       "^"
                       ";; "
                       (concat
                        "Related Emacs config sections:\n\n"
                        (org-export-string-as
                         (mapconcat
                          (lambda (link)
                            (concat "- " (cdr link) "\\\\\n  " (org-link-make-string (car link)) "\n"))
                          (cdr group)
                          "\n")
                         'ascii
                         t))))))
                sacha-emacs-config-module-links)))

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-emacs-config-prepare-to-tangle ()
  "Update module info if tangling my config."
  (when (string-match "Sacha.org" (buffer-file-name))
    (sacha-emacs-config-update-module-info)))

Let's set up the functions for tangling the boilerplate.

(defvar sacha-emacs-config-modules-dir "~/sync/emacs/lisp/")
(defvar sacha-emacs-config-modules-info nil "Alist of module info.")
(defvar sacha-emacs-config-url "https://sachachua.com/dotemacs")

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-org-babel-post-tangle-insert-boilerplate-for-sacha-lisp ()
  (when (file-in-directory-p (buffer-file-name) sacha-emacs-config-modules-dir)
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (let ((base (file-name-base (buffer-file-name))))
      (insert (format ";;; %s.el --- %s -*- lexical-binding: t -*-

;; Author: %s <%s>
;; URL: %s

;;; License:
;;
;; This file is not part of GNU Emacs.
;;
;; This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
;; it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
;; the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option)
;; any later version.
;;
;; This is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
;; but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
;; MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
;; GNU General Public License for more details.
;;
;; You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
;; along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING.  If not, write to the
;; Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
;; Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

;;; Commentary:
;;
%s
;;; Code:

\n\n"
                      base
                      (or
                       (assoc-default 'description
                                      (assoc-default base sacha-emacs-config-modules-info #'string=))
                       "")
                      user-full-name
                      user-mail-address
                      sacha-emacs-config-url
                      (or
                       (assoc-default 'commentary
                                      (assoc-default base sacha-emacs-config-modules-info #'string=))
                       "")))
      (goto-char (point-max))
      (insert (format "\n(provide '%s)\n;;; %s.el ends here\n"
                      base
                      base))
      (save-buffer))))

(setq sacha-emacs-config-url "https://sachachua.com/dotemacs")
(with-eval-after-load 'org
  (add-hook 'org-babel-pre-tangle-hook #'sacha-emacs-config-prepare-to-tangle)
  (add-hook 'org-babel-post-tangle-hook #'sacha-org-babel-post-tangle-insert-boilerplate-for-sacha-lisp))

You can see the results at .emacs.d/lisp. For example, the function definitions in this post are at lisp/sacha-emacs.el.

You can view 2 comments or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Freelancing for small businesses and organizations leads to a position where you are juggling a number of projects for multiple clients. You need to keep track of a number of tasks ranging from software development to sending emails to project management. This is a lot easier when you have a system that can do a bunch of the work for you, which is why I use Emacs as my freelancer command center.

I would like to share some of the tools and workflows I use in Emacs to help me keep on top of multiple clients’ needs and expectations.

Organization with org-mode

It should be no surprise that at the center of my Emacs command center is org-mode. I have already written about it a lot. Every org-mode user seems to have their own way of keeping track of things, so please don’t take my organizational scheme as some kind of gospel. A couple of years ago, I wrote about how I handle to-do lists in org-mode, and I am still using that method for to-do keywords. However, file structure is also important. I have a number of core files.

Freelance.org

This top-level file contains all of my ongoing business tasks, such as tracking potential new clients, recurring tasks like website maintenance and checking my MainWP dashboard. I also have recurring tasks for invoicing, tracking expenses, and other important business things.

This file is also where I have my primary time tracking and reporting. Org-mode already supports this pretty nicely, I just use the built-in clocktable feature.

Clients/*.org

Clients that have large projects or ongoing business get their own file. This makes organization a lot easier. All tasks associated with a client and their various projects end up in these individual files. The important part is making sure that these files are included in the time-tracking clock table and your org-mode agenda, so you can see what is going on every week.

References and Linking

I have C-c l bound to org-store-link and use it all the time to link to various files, directories, URLs, and even emails. I can then use those links in my client notes, various tasks in my to-do list, and so on. This helps me keep my agenda organized even when my filesystem and browser bookmarks are a bit of a mess.

Email with mu4e

I have been reading and managing my email in Emacs for over 25 years. There have been a few breaks here and there where I have tried out other software or even web mail clients, but it has always been a headache. I return to Emacs! Long ago, I used VM (which seems to have taken on new life!), but currently I use mu4e.

This gives me a ton of power and flexibility when dealing with email. I have custom functions to help me compose and organize my email, and I can use org-store-link to keep track of individual emails from clients as they relate to agenda items. I even have a function to convert emails that I have written in Markdown into HTML email, and one that searches for questions in a client email to make sure I haven’t missed anything.

The ability to write custom code to both process and create email is extremely powerful and a great time saver.

Writing Code

I don’t know what else to say about this, I use Emacs for doing all of my software development. I make sure to use Eglot whenever there is a language server available, and I try to leverage all the fancy features offered by Emacs whenever possible. The vast majority of projects for clients are PHP (thanks WordPress), Go, JavaScript, and TypeScript.

Writing Words

Previously, I have shared quite a bit about writing in Emacs. I like to start everything in org-mode, but I also write quite a bit in Markdown. Emacs has become a powerful tool for writing. I use the Harper language server along with Eglot to check grammar and spelling.

Track All Changes with Magit

Version control is essential, a lesson I have learned over 30+ years of software development. While Git is not part of Emacs, the software I use to interface with Git is. Magit is a Git user interface that runs entirely in Emacs. I use it to track my writing, my source code, and even all of my org-mode files. Using version control is so essential that I have a weekly repeating agenda task reminding me to check all of my everyday files to make sure I have checked-in my changes for the week.

Thinking Music with EMMS

I like to have some soothing background music when I am programming, writing, or otherwise working on my computer. However, if that background music has lyrics, it can be really distracting. It is easy to make a playlist for various suitable SomaFM channels to load into EMMS (the Emacs Multimedia System) using the command M-x emms-play-playlist.

Try saving the following into playlist.el somewhere, and using it the next time you are writing:

 ;;; This is an EMMS playlist file Play it with M-x emms-play-playlist
 ((*track* (type . url) (name . "https://somafm.com/synphaera.pls"))
  (*track* (type . url) (name . "https://somafm.com/gsclassic.pls"))
  (*track* (type . url) (name . "https://somafm.com/sonicuniverse.pls"))
  (*track* (type . url) (name . "https://somafm.com/groovesalad.pls")))

And make sure to check out SomaFM’s selection to find some good background music that suits your tastes!

And the tools I have missed

There are undoubtedly Emacs tools that I have missed in this brief overview. I have been wracking my brain as I write, trying to see what I have forgotten or overlooked. Frankly, Emacs has become such a central part of the organization for my freelancing that there are probably many tools, packages, and processes that I use every day without thinking about it too much.

Emacs makes it possible for me to freelance for multiple clients and small businesses without losing my mind with organization and task management. The tools it provides allow me to stay on top of multiple projects, handle client relationships, and keep track of years worth of tasks, communications, and projects. Without it, I’d be sunk!

What Emacs tools are you using to manage your freelance business? I am always looking for ways to improve or streamline my process.

The featured image for this post comes from Agostino Ramelli’s Le diverse et artificiose machine (1588). Read more about it on the Public Domain Review.

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFQDYTCS1os

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

At 14:00 Europe/Athens I will hold a live stream about Emacs. Specifically, I will work on my modus-themes package.

The idea is to write more tests and refine the relevant functions along the way.

I am announcing this -45 minutes before I go live. I will keep the chat open in case there are any questions.

Flymake has been quietly sitting in my config for years doing exactly what it says on the tin, squiggly lines under things that are wrong, and I mostly left it alone. But recently I noticed I was doing the same little dance over and over: spot a warning, squint at the modeline counter, run `M-x flymake-show-buffer-diagnostics`, scroll through the list to find the thing I was actually looking at, then flip back. Two windows, zero connection between them.

So I wired it up properly, and while I was in there I gave it a set of keybindings that feel right to my muscle memory.

The obvious bindings for stepping through errors are `M-n` and `M-p`, and most people using flymake bind exactly those. The problem is that in my config `M-n` and `M-p` are already taken, they step through simply-annotate annotations (which is itself a very handy thing and I am not giving it up!). So I shifted a key up and went with the shifted variants: `M-N` for next, `M-P` for previous, and `M-M` to toggle the diagnostics buffer.

 (setq flymake-show-diagnostics-at-end-of-line nil)
(with-eval-after-load 'flymake
(define-key flymake-mode-map (kbd "M-N") #'flymake-goto-next-error)
(define-key flymake-mode-map (kbd "M-P") #'flymake-goto-prev-error))

With M-M I wanted it to be a bit smarter than just “open the buffer”. If it is already visible I want it gone, if it is not I want it up. The standard toggle pattern:

 (defun my/flymake--diag-buffer ()
"Return the visible flymake diagnostics buffer, or nil."
(seq-some (lambda (b)
(and (with-current-buffer b
(derived-mode-p 'flymake-diagnostics-buffer-mode))
(get-buffer-window b)
b))
(buffer-list)))
(defun my/flymake-toggle-diagnostics ()
"Toggle the flymake diagnostics buffer."
(interactive)
(let ((buf (my/flymake--diag-buffer)))
(if buf
(quit-window nil (get-buffer-window buf))
(flymake-show-buffer-diagnostics)
(my/flymake-sync-diagnostics))))

Now the interesting bit. What I really wanted was a follow mode, something like how the compilation buffer tracks position or how Occur highlights the current hit. When my point lands on an error in the source buffer, the corresponding row in the diagnostics buffer should light up. That way the diagnostics window becomes a live index of where I am rather than a static dump and think in general this is how a lot of other IDEs work.

I tried the lazy route first, turning on hl-line-mode in the diagnostics buffer and calling hl-line-highlight from a post-command-hook in the source buffer. The line lit up once and then refused to move. Nothing I did would shift it. This is because hl-line-highlight is really only designed to be driven from the window whose line is being highlighted, and I was firing it from afar.

Ok, so why not just manage my own overlay:

 (defvar my/flymake--sync-overlay nil
"Overlay used to highlight the current entry in the diagnostics buffer.")
(defun my/flymake-sync-diagnostics ()
"Highlight the diagnostics buffer entry matching the error at point."
(when-let* ((buf (my/flymake--diag-buffer))
(win (get-buffer-window buf))
(diag (or (car (flymake-diagnostics (point)))
(car (flymake-diagnostics (line-beginning-position)
(line-end-position))))))
(with-current-buffer buf
(save-excursion
(goto-char (point-min))
(let ((found nil))
(while (and (not found) (not (eobp)))
(let ((id (tabulated-list-get-id)))
(if (and (listp id) (eq (plist-get id :diagnostic) diag))
(setq found (point))
(forward-line 1))))
(when found
(unless (overlayp my/flymake--sync-overlay)
(setq my/flymake--sync-overlay (make-overlay 1 1))
(overlay-put my/flymake--sync-overlay 'face 'highlight)
(overlay-put my/flymake--sync-overlay 'priority 100))
(move-overlay my/flymake--sync-overlay
found
(min (point-max) (1+ (line-end-position)))
buf)
(set-window-point win found)))))))

My first pass at the walk through the tabulated list did not work. I was comparing (tabulated-list-get-id) directly against the diagnostic returned by flymake-diagnostics using eq, and it was always false, which meant found stayed nil forever and the overlay never moved. A dive into flymake.el revealed why. Each row in the diagnostics buffer stores its ID as a plist, not as the diagnostic itself:

 (list :diagnostic diag
:line line
:severity ...)

So I need to pluck out :diagnostic before comparing. Obvious in hindsight, as these things always are. With plist-get in place the comparison lines up and the overlay moves exactly where I want it, tracking every navigation command.

The fallback lookup using line-beginning-position and line-end-position is there because flymake-diagnostics (point) only returns something if point is strictly inside the diagnostic span. When I land between errors or on the same line as an error but a few columns off, I still want the diagnostics buffer to track, so I widen the search to the whole line.

Finally, wrap the hook in a minor mode so I can toggle it per buffer and enable it automatically whenever flymake comes up:

 (define-minor-mode my/flymake-follow-mode
"Sync the diagnostics buffer to the error at point."
:lighter nil
(if my/flymake-follow-mode
(add-hook 'post-command-hook #'my/flymake-sync-diagnostics nil t)
(remove-hook 'post-command-hook #'my/flymake-sync-diagnostics t)))
(add-hook 'flymake-mode-hook #'my/flymake-follow-mode)
(define-key flymake-mode-map (kbd "M-M") #'my/flymake-toggle-diagnostics)

The end result is nice. M-M pops the diagnostics buffer, M-N and M-P walk through the errors, and as I navigate the source the matching row in the diagnostics buffer highlights in step with me. If I close the buffer with another M-M everything goes quiet, and I can still step through with M-N/M-P on their own.

Three little keybindings and twenty lines of elisp, but they turn flymake from a static reporter into something that actually feels connected to where I am in the buffer.

A recent Mastodon post showing the days until the next U.S. election got me to wonder, “how can I compute that in Emacs?” Turns out, this is trivial with the Org mode function org-time-stamp-to-now doing the timestamp computation for you.

We can wrap org-time-stamp-to-now in an internal function cc/--days-until that generates a formatted string of the days until a target date.

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(defun cc/--days-until (target &optional template)
  "Formatted string of days until TARGET.

- TARGET: date string that conforms to `parse-time-string'.
- TEMPLATE : format string that includes ‘%d’ specifier.

If TEMPLATE is nil, then a predefined format string will be
used."
  (let* ((template (if template
                       template
                     (concat "%d days until " target)))
         (days (org-time-stamp-to-now target))
         (msg (format template days)))
    msg))

From there we can then start defining commands that use cc/--days-until. The command cc/days-until shown below will prompt you with a date picker to enter a date. Note that you can enter a date value (e.g. “Dec 25, 2026”) in the mini-buffer prompt for org-read-date.

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(defun cc/days-until (arg)
  "Prompt user for date and show days until in the mini-buffer.

Use `org-read-date' to compute days until to display in the mini-buffer.

If prefix ARG is non-nil, then the computed result is stored in the
 `kill-ring'."
  (interactive "P")
  (let* ((target (org-read-date))
         (msg (cc/--days-until target)))
    (if arg
        (kill-new msg))
    (message msg)))

Going back to the original motivator for this post, here’s an implementation of days until the next two major U.S. election dates with the command cc/days-until-voting.

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(defun cc/days-until-voting (arg)
  "Days until U.S. elections in 2026 and 2028.

If prefix ARG is non-nil, then the computed result is stored in the
 `kill-ring'."
  (interactive "P")
  (let* ((midterms (cc/--days-until "2026-11-03" "%d days until 2026 midterms"))
         (election (cc/--days-until "2028-11-07" "%d days until 2028 presidential election"))
         (msg (format "%s, %s" midterms election)))
    (if arg
        (kill-new msg))
    (message msg)))

The result of M-x cc/days-until-voting as of 8 April 2026 is:

209 days until 2026 midterms, 944 days until 2028 presidential election

It’s so human to want to know how long it’s going to take. Feel free to build your own countdown clocks using the code above. May your journey to whatever you plan be a happy one!

I wondered yesterday:

...those question headers are displaying differently, with the background colour no longer spanning the width of the window. I'd like to understand why.

Turns out it was pretty straightforward:

diff --git a/quiz.el b/quiz.el
index 2dbe45d..c1ba255 100644
--- a/quiz.el
+++ b/quiz.el
@@ -40,7 +40,8 @@
 (defface quiz-question-number-face
   '((t :height 1.3
        :background "black"
-       :foreground "white"))
+       :foreground "white"
+       :extend t))
   "Face for the question number."
   :group 'quiz)

and so v1.7 has happened.

It looks like, perhaps, at some point in the past, :extend was t by default, but it no longer is? Either way, explicitly setting it to t has done the trick.

Floofcode over that the Emacs subreddit asks a question that resonates with me. He notes that he often has a repetitive task and wonders whether it would be worthwhile writing some Elisp to automate it. Usually, he has to repeat the task several times before he gets fed up and fixes it for good. He wonders how other people deal with this. Do they have to repeat the task a certain number of times before automating it or is the criterion more subjective.

I can relate. This happens to me all the time. I keep doing the same task over and over until one day I realize that I’m being stupid and spend a few minutes dashing off a bit of Elisp that solves the problem once and for all. Every time, I tell myself, “Well, I won’t that mistake again. Next time I’m going to get this type of task automated right away.” Of course, the next time the same thing happens.

As to floofcode’s question, I would guess that it depends on the person. For me, it’s a subjective matter. The amount of time I’ll spend repeating the same boring task over and over varies but it always ends in a fit of anger when I ask myself why I’m still doing things manually. The thing is, when I’m repeatedly doing the task manually, I’m not wondering whether I should automate it. That happens at the end when I realize I’ve been stupid.

I guess the answer is something of the sort that after you’ve repeated the task twice, just automate it. Sure sometimes you’ll lose and waste time but in my experience it will most often be a win. I wish I could learn this.

Today's Emacs Lisp package tidy-up is of a package I first wrote a couple of employers ago. While working on code I often found myself viewing FASTA files in an Emacs buffer and so I thought it would be fun to use this as a reason to knock up a simple mode for highlighting them.

fasta.el was the result.

While I doubt it was or is of much use to others, it helped me better understand simple font-locking in Emacs Lisp, and also made some buffers look a little less boring when I was messing with test data.

As for this update: it's the usual stuff of cleaning up deprecated uses of setf, mostly.

If bioinformatics-related Emacs Lisp code written by a non-bioinformatician is your thing, you might also find 2bit.el of interest too. Much like fasta.el it too probably doesn't have a practical use, but it sure was fun to write and taught me a few things along the way; it also sort of goes hand-in-hand with fasta.el too.

Conventional file managers have conditioned me to expect that a single left-button mouse click (<mouse-1>) will select a file (or directory) and double-click will open it. This is not the default behavior of Dired, where a single click is an open action. I find this far too twitchy for my taste.

This post shows how to make Dired mouse interaction align with a conventional file manager where:

• Single-click on a file or directory will move the point to it, making it the implicit target for any subsequent Dired command.

• Left double-click on file or directory will open it.

• Selecting multiple files is emulated using Dired marking, in this case using the binding M-<mouse-1> to toggle marking a file.

The first two points above can be addressed with the global variable mouse-1-click-follows-link. Dired uses this variable to control its mouse behavior, but we don’t want to change it everywhere, just for Dired buffers. This can be implemented by setting mouse-1-click-follows-link locally as a hook to dired-mode-hook:

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(add-hook
 'dired-mode-hook
 (lambda ()
   (setq-local mouse-1-click-follows-link 'double)))

To address multiple file selection, we can define a function cc/dired-mouse-toggle-mark and bind it to M-<mouse-1>.

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(defun cc/dired-mouse-toggle-mark ()
  "Toggle mark of a Dired item via mouse."
  (interactive)
  (unless (use-region-p)
    (mouse-set-point last-input-event)
    (if (char-equal (char-after (line-beginning-position)) dired-marker-char)
        (call-interactively #'dired-unmark)
      (call-interactively #'dired-mark))))

(keymap-set dired-mode-map "M-<mouse-1>" #'cc/dired-mouse-toggle-mark)

Coupled with Anju support for a Dired specific context menu and many basic file manager operations can be done in Dired via mouse with minimal fuss.

The other day, I wrote about repeat mode. My take was that it was a way repeating certain commands without having to retype their, possibly, complex prefixes. All of that is true but as Karthik informed me in a comment, there is much, much more to repeat mode than simply repeating commands.

It is a way, he says, of grouping a set of related commands together into a sort of mode. Thus, there is more to Ctrl+x } than simply repeating the enlarge window command. Once you type Ctrl+x you can type any of {, }, ^, v to resize the window in any direction. The Ctrl+x enables a keymap with those four single keys to resize the current window, defining, in effect, a “resize window mode”.

Four years ago, Karthik wrote a long post that explains all this and, at least on an intuitive level, how it works. My first thought was to add an update to my post that pointed to Karthik’s and I did that but then I thought that his post was so good that I should devote a new post to it so that anyone who missed it the first time would see it.

Repeat mode really is an excellent facility—Karthik says it’s a cornerstone of his Emacs usage—and every Emacser should be familiar with it. If nothing else, it’s worth enabling repeat mode so that you can use the built in repeat maps. You can see what they are by running the command describe-repeat-maps.

A quick little refresh of one of my old packages, this time quiz.el. This is a nice little distraction when you're working in Emacs, letting you spin up a quick trivia quiz in a buffer.

It's backed by the Open Trivia Database, so there's a good few subjects, questions, and levels of difficulty to play with.

The only changes I've made to it in this release are the usual clean-ups of the deprecated uses of setf, plus I've added q as a binding to the quiz window to quickly quit the quiz.

I might have to come back and revisit it soon, as it looks like the default face choices could probably do with a rethink, and I can see at the moment that the attempt at a window-wide "header" for each question isn't working any longer. For comparison, here's how the package looked when running back when I first wrote it back in 2017:

Leaving aside the fact that I was still running a very light Emacs then, those question headers are displaying differently, with the background colour no longer spanning the width of the window. I'd like to understand why.

Good artists borrow, great artists steal.

– Pablo Picasso

After spending the past couple of weeks updating Prelude and my personal Emacs config, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to see what the competition has been up to. I hadn’t done a proper survey of other people’s configs in years, and the Emacs landscape has changed quite a bit since the last time I looked.

So I went through Doom Emacs, Purcell’s emacs.d, Centaur Emacs, Prot’s dotfiles, and a handful of others. Here are some of the most interesting things I found – settings and tricks that I either didn’t know about or had forgotten about entirely.

Performance Tweaks

Disable Bidirectional Text Scanning (Doom Emacs)

If you don’t edit right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.), Emacs is doing a bunch of work on every redisplay cycle for nothing. These settings tell Emacs to assume left-to-right text everywhere and skip the bidirectional parenthesis algorithm:

(setq-default bidi-display-reordering 'left-to-right
              bidi-paragraph-direction 'left-to-right)
(setq bidi-inhibit-bpa t)

The difference is hard to measure in small buffers, but in large files (think multi-thousand-line JSON or log files) it adds up. Doom enables this unconditionally and I’ve never seen anyone complain about it.

Skip Fontification During Input (Doom Emacs)

Emacs normally fontifies (syntax-highlights) text even while you’re actively typing. This can cause micro-stutters, especially in tree-sitter modes or large buffers. One setting fixes it:

(setq redisplay-skip-fontification-on-input t)

Emacs will defer fontification until you stop typing. In practice you never notice the delay – the highlighting catches up instantly – but scrolling and typing may feel smoother.

Increase Process Output Buffer for LSP (Doom, Purcell, Centaur)

The default read-process-output-max is 64KB, which is still quite conservative. Modern LSP servers like rust-analyzer or clangd routinely send multi-megabyte responses. Bumping this reduces the number of read calls Emacs has to make:

(setq read-process-output-max (* 4 1024 1024)) ; 4MB

If you use eglot (or lsp-mode), this is basically free performance. Three of the most popular configs out there all set it – that should tell you something.

Note: I’m really surprised I didn’t discover this one sooner. Probably that’s because I rarely work on big projects these days.

Don’t Render Cursors in Non-Focused Windows (Doom Emacs)

If you have several windows visible, Emacs draws a cursor in each of them – even the ones you’re not working in. It also highlights selections in non-focused windows. Two settings to stop that:

(setq-default cursor-in-non-selected-windows nil)
(setq highlight-nonselected-windows nil)

This is mostly a visual preference (I don’t mind the phantom cursors but I know some people find them distracting), but it also reduces rendering work.

All four of these performance settings are safe to add unconditionally – they have no downsides for the vast majority of users.

Kill Ring (Emacs’s Clipboard History) and Clipboard

Save the Clipboard Before Killing (Purcell, Prot, Centaur)

Here’s a scenario: you copy a URL from your browser, switch to Emacs, kill a line with C-k, and then try to yank the URL you copied earlier with C-y. Gone. The kill replaced it on the clipboard.

This setting makes Emacs save the existing clipboard content into the kill ring before overwriting it:

(setq save-interprogram-paste-before-kill t)

Now C-y gets the kill, and M-y gets you back to the URL. Such a small thing, but it eliminates a genuinely annoying problem.

No Duplicates in the Kill Ring (Doom, Prot)

Kill the same line three times and you get three identical entries in the kill ring, wasting slots. This deduplicates them:

(setq kill-do-not-save-duplicates t)

Persist the Kill Ring Across Sessions (Doom, Prot)

Most configs that use savehist-mode only persist search rings. But savehist can save any variable – including the kill ring. Add it and you get clipboard history that survives restarts:

(setq savehist-additional-variables
      '(search-ring regexp-search-ring kill-ring))

One thing to watch out for: the kill ring can accumulate text properties (fonts, overlays, etc.) that bloat the savehist file. Doom strips them before saving:

(add-hook 'savehist-save-hook
          (lambda ()
            (setq kill-ring
                  (mapcar #'substring-no-properties
                          (cl-remove-if-not #'stringp kill-ring)))))

Probably overkill for most people, but it’s good to be aware of if your savehist file starts growing suspiciously large.

Editing

Auto-Chmod Scripts on Save (Multiple Configs)

If you create a file that starts with #! (a shebang line), it should be executable. But you always forget to chmod +x it, run the script, get “Permission denied”, curse, go back, chmod, try again. This hook does it automatically:

(add-hook 'after-save-hook
          #'executable-make-buffer-file-executable-if-script-p)

Save a file with a shebang, and Emacs chmod +xes it for you. One of those things that should arguably be a default.

Note: Okay, I have to admit I’ve always known this one, but seeing it in so many configs made me want to include it here.

Sane Syntax in re-builder (Multiple Configs)

re-builder (M-x re-builder) is an interactive tool for developing regexps – you type a pattern and see matches highlighted live in the target buffer. The problem is the default syntax: read. In read syntax, you have to double-escape everything, so a word boundary is \\< and a group is \\(...\\). It’s the regexp equivalent of trying to type with oven mitts on.

Switch to string syntax and things look like normal Emacs regexps:

(setq reb-re-syntax 'string)

Now \< is \< and \(foo\) is \(foo\). Much less painful.

See also: If you want live feedback on the regexp structure as you type it (color-coded groups, character classes, etc.), check out minibuffer-regexp-mode – a new built-in mode in Emacs 30.

Prevent ffap from Pinging Hostnames (Centaur Emacs)

Ever had Emacs freeze for a few seconds when you ran find-file-at-point (or a command that uses it internally)? If the text under point looks like a hostname – say, something.com in a comment – ffap tries to ping it to check if it’s reachable. On a slow or firewalled network, that’s a multi-second hang.

(setq ffap-machine-p-known 'reject)

This tells ffap to never try network lookups. If you actually want to open a remote file, you can type the path explicitly.

Windows

Proportional Window Resizing (Purcell, Prot)

When you split a window with C-x 2 or C-x 3, Emacs halves the current window. If you already have a multi-window layout, this can produce one awkwardly tiny window while others stay large. With this setting, all windows in the frame resize proportionally:

(setq window-combination-resize t)

The difference is subtle but makes multi-window layouts feel more balanced without manual resizing.

Reversible C-x 1 (Purcell)

C-x 1 (delete-other-windows) is the nuclear option – it nukes your entire window layout to focus on one buffer. Then you spend the next minute recreating the layout you just destroyed.

With winner-mode and a small wrapper, you can make C-x 1 toggle: press it once to go single-window, press it again to restore the previous layout:

(winner-mode +1)

(defun toggle-delete-other-windows ()
  "Delete other windows in frame if any, or restore previous window config."
  (interactive)
  (if (and winner-mode
           (equal (selected-window) (next-window)))
      (winner-undo)
    (delete-other-windows)))

(global-set-key (kbd "C-x 1") #'toggle-delete-other-windows)

Just drop this into your config as-is – it’s self-contained. This is one of those tricks where once you have it, you can’t imagine going back.

Misc

Faster Mark Popping (Purcell, Centaur, Prot)

The mark ring is one of Emacs’s most underused navigation features. Every time you jump somewhere – isearch, M-<, M->, goto-line, imenu, and many more – Emacs pushes your old position onto the mark ring. C-u C-SPC pops it, jumping you back.

The annoyance: you need C-u C-SPC every single time. With this setting, after the first C-u C-SPC you can keep pressing just C-SPC to continue popping:

(setq set-mark-command-repeat-pop t)

This pairs beautifully with repeat-mode if you have it enabled (and you should – see my earlier post on repeat-mode).

Recenter After save-place Restores Position (Doom Emacs)

save-place-mode is great – it remembers where you were in each file and jumps back there when you reopen it. The problem is that it can leave your cursor on the last visible line of the window, which is disorienting. This advice recenters the view after the jump:

(advice-add 'save-place-find-file-hook :after
            (lambda (&rest _)
              (when buffer-file-name (ignore-errors (recenter)))))

Small thing, but it makes reopening files feel much more natural.

Auto-Select Help Windows (Prot)

When you press C-h f or C-h v, Emacs opens the help buffer but leaves your cursor in the original window. You almost always want to read the help right away, so you end up pressing C-x o every single time. This fixes it:

(setq help-window-select t)

Bonus: Many of the configs I surveyed also use built-in lazy isearch counting (showing “match N of M” in the minibuffer) instead of third-party packages like anzu. I recently wrote about that in a dedicated post.

The funny thing about all of this is how much overlap there is between configs. Half of these tricks appear in three or four of the configs I surveyed. At this point I’m convinced there are about 200 essential Emacs settings floating around in the collective unconscious, and every serious config independently converges on roughly the same subset. Picasso was right – we all steal from each other, and the kill ring makes it embarrassingly easy. M-w and move on.

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

While I have been doing a lot of hacking on blogmore.el, I haven't forgotten my plan to revisit and refresh some of my older personal packages. This evening I've paid some attention to expando.el.

This started life a long time ago, as part of my grab-bag of handy functions that got carried around and copied from machine to machine, until I did a big tidy-up of everything back in 2017 and turned various things into packages that I managed via a self-hosted (well, GitHub pages hosted) package index.

It's a pretty simple but very useful bit of code that lets me quickly macroexpand a sexp at point and pretty print it into a display window. I've often found it indispensable when it came to writing my own macros.

This release simply adds a lexical-binding header to the file, and also adds a q key binding to the resulting view window so that it can be quickly and easily closed.

Also, as with all my other personal packages, I've swapped away from using delpa to simply using :vc to pull it in.

(use-package expando
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/davep/expando.el" :rev :newest)
  :bind
  ("C-c e" . expando-macro))

Or perhaps I should say...

(progn
  (use-package-vc-install
   '(expando (:url "https://github.com/davep/expando.el") nil) nil)
  (defvar use-package--warning69
    #'(lambda (keyword err)
        (let
            ((msg
              (format "%s/%s: %s" 'expando keyword
                      (error-message-string err))))
          (display-warning 'use-package msg :error))))
  (condition-case err
      (progn
        (if (fboundp 'expando-macro) nil
          (autoload #'expando-macro "expando" nil t))
        (let*
            ((name "C-c e") (key [3 101])
             (kmap
              (or (if (and nil (symbolp nil)) (symbol-value nil) nil)
                  global-map))
             (kdesc
              (cons (if (stringp name) name (key-description name))
                    (if (symbolp nil) nil 'nil)))
             (binding (lookup-key kmap key)))
          (require 'bind-key)
          (let
              ((entry (assoc kdesc personal-keybindings))
               (details
                (list #'expando-macro (if (numberp binding) nil binding))))
            (if entry (setcdr entry details)
              (add-to-list 'personal-keybindings (cons kdesc details))))
          (define-key kmap key #'expando-macro)))
    ((debug error) (funcall use-package--warning69 :catch err))))

Despite having bumped it from 2.x to 3.x yesterday, I'm calling v4.0 on blogmore.el today. There's a good reason for this though. While tinkering with some of the configuration yesterday, and also answering a configuration question last night, I realised that it made sense to make some of the internals into public utility functions.

Now, sure, Emacs Lisp doesn't really have internals in the private function sense, but I've always liked the approach that a package-- prefix communicates "internal, might go away" vs package- which tells me "this is a stable part of the API of this package". With this in mind I've always tried to write my code using this convention. I did this with blogmore.el too and a lot of the code had the blogmore-- prefix.

There's plenty of code in there that someone might want to make use of, if they wanted to add their own commands, or do fun things with the configuration. So with this in mind I've "promoted" a bunch of code to being "public" and, in that case, I feel this deserves another major version bump¹.

Things that are now part of the "public" interface include:

• blogmore-clean-time-string
• blogmore-get-frontmatter
• blogmore-remove-frontmatter
• blogmore-set-frontmatter
• blogmore-slug
• blogmore-toggle-frontmatter
• blogmore-with-post

Each one is documented via its docstring (just a quick Ctrl+h f function-name RET away) and hopefully is pretty self-explanatory.

blogmore-with-post is especially handy as it provides a quick and easy way of pulling information from a post file. So something like this:

(blogmore-with-post "~/write/davep.github.com/content/posts/2026/04/2026-04-05-blogmore-el-v3-1.md"
  (list
   (blogmore-get-frontmatter "title")
   (blogmore-get-frontmatter "date")))

resulting in:

("blogmore.el v3.1" "2026-04-05 20:04:44+0100")

Meaning that this snippet from yesterday's post:

(with-temp-buffer
  (insert-file-contents-literally file)
  (parse-iso8601-time-string
   (blogmore--clean-time-string (blogmore--get-frontmatter-property "date"))))

becomes:

(blogmore-with-post file
  (parse-iso8601-time-string
   (blogmore-clean-time-string (blogmore-get-frontmatter "date"))))

Not massively different, but it reads better and now all the calls are to the "public API" of the package.

Not all the changes are "promoted internals". I've also added a blogmore-remove-tag command (and also added it to the transient menu).

I've also changed the way that blogmore-add-tag works so that, now, if it's called from the transient, it immediately goes back to the tag input prompt, allowing for another tag to be immediately selected (you can quit out of this with Ctrl+g). Removal of a tag works in a similar way, making things a lot quicker.

I've also added some extra tests too, which makes it even easier for me to make future changes with confidence. The more I work with it the more I appreciate that ERT is available.

I know it’s scary, but sometimes you have to delete files, and once they’re gone—they’re gone. I guess that was why GUI systems invented the trash folder. The trash is a safe place to store files you want to delete, just in case you made a mistake.

In the UNIXy and Emacs worlds, once you delete that file, it’s gone, so you better have your story straight.

rm file.txt
rm -rf directory/

rm -rf /*

The post The Emacs Way: Deleting Files appeared first on Chris Maiorana.

View in the Internet Archive, watch or comment on YouTube, or email me.

Chapters:

• 00:41:21 epwgraph
• 00:54:56 learning languages

Thanks for your patience with the audio issues! At some point, I need to work out the contention between all the different processes that I want to be listening to the audio from my mic. =)

In this livestream, I categorize Emacs News for 2026-04-06, show epwgraph for managing Pipewire connections from Emacs, and share some of my language learning workflows.

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

Bozhidar Batsov has a post that mentions how M-x shows a lot of commands many of which make no sense in the current context. This has never bothered me because after inputting a few (fuzzy) letters, the display converges on the command I’m looking for. Others, are not so sanguine and find the long list annoying.

It turns out that there’s an easy fix for this: read-extended-command-predicate. As of Emacs 28, You can set this variable to one of 3 values—or nil​—to control the filtering of commands in the candidate list. These are:

command-completion-default-include-p

Exclude on those commands tagged for a different mode.

command-completion-using-modes-and-keymaps-p

Include only commands tagged for the current buffer and those commands that have a keybinding active in the current buffer.

command-completion-using-modes-p

Show only commands tagged for the current mode.

The first option is the most conservative and general and is what Batsov recommends for everyday use.

Batsov also explains how functions can declare what mode or modes they’re appropriate for. That’s simply a matter of listing them in the interactive declaration. There are a lot more details in Batsov’s post so be sure to take a look. The read-extended-command-predicate mechanism is similar to the execute-extended-command-for-buffer mechanism that I wrote about previously.

As I said, the long list doesn’t bother me but if it annoys you, this may be the answer.

Update [2026-04-07 Tue 12:05]: prefix → predicate

Way back in 2013 I wrote about the deprecation of flet and how noflet could fill the gap. Thirteen years later, it’s probably time for a proper overview of what replaced flet in cl-lib and when to use each option.

Emacs Lisp doesn’t have a built-in way to define local functions (the way let defines local variables), so cl-lib provides several macros for this. If you’ve ever been confused by cl-flet, cl-labels, and cl-letf – you’re not alone. The naming doesn’t make the distinctions obvious, and the documentation is a bit dry. Let’s try to fix that.

A Bit of History

The original flet (from the old cl package) let you temporarily override a function’s definition. It worked by swapping out the function’s symbol-function cell and restoring it when the body finished – essentially a dynamic let for functions:

;; Old-style flet (deprecated since Emacs 24.3)
(flet ((some-function () "overridden result"))
  ;; Everything here, including called functions, sees the override
  (some-function))

This was very handy for testing (stubbing impure functions), but it conflated two different things into one macro:

1. Defining local helper functions (a lexical concept)
2. Temporarily overriding a global function (a dynamic concept)

When cl was reorganized into cl-lib in Emacs 24.3, flet was split into separate macros for each use case. This also brought the lexical variants in line with Common Lisp semantics, where flet and labels are lexically scoped.

The Three Replacements

cl-flet: Local Functions (No Recursion)

cl-flet binds function names lexically within its body. The key thing to understand is that the binding is only visible in the body forms – not inside the function’s own definition, and not to any functions you call:

(cl-flet ((double (n) (* n 2)))
  (double 21)) ; => 42

Because it’s lexical, cl-flet cannot override functions seen by other code:

(defun my-helper () (+ 1 2))
(defun my-caller () (my-helper))

(cl-flet ((my-helper () 999))
  (my-caller))  ; => 3, NOT 999!

my-caller still sees the original my-helper. This is the fundamental difference from the old flet.

There’s also cl-flet*, which is to cl-flet what let* is to let – each binding can reference the ones before it.

Use cl-flet when you just need a simple local helper and don’t need recursion. Think of it as let for functions.

cl-labels: Local Functions (With Recursion)

cl-labels is like cl-flet, but the function is visible inside its own body and inside the bodies of sibling bindings. This makes recursion and mutual recursion possible:

(cl-labels ((factorial (n)
              (if (<= n 1) 1
                (* n (factorial (- n 1))))))
  (factorial 10)) ; => 3628800

This would blow up with cl-flet because factorial wouldn’t be defined inside its own body.

Mutual recursion works too:

(cl-labels ((my-even-p (n) (if (= n 0) t (my-odd-p (- n 1))))
            (my-odd-p (n) (if (= n 0) nil (my-even-p (- n 1)))))
  (list (my-even-p 4) (my-odd-p 3))) ; => (t t)

Use cl-labels when your local functions need to call themselves or each other.

Note: cl-labels requires lexical-binding to be t in the file (which it really should be for any modern Emacs Lisp code).

cl-letf: Temporary Global Override

This is the one that actually replaces the old flet’s dynamic behavior. cl-letf temporarily rebinds a generalized place (anything setf can handle) and restores it on exit:

(defun my-helper () (+ 1 2))
(defun my-caller () (my-helper))

(cl-letf (((symbol-function 'my-helper) (lambda () 999)))
  (my-caller))  ; => 999

Now my-caller does see the override, because cl-letf modifies the actual symbol-function cell of my-helper – just like the old flet did. The original definition is restored when the body exits, even on error.

The syntax is a bit verbose because cl-letf isn’t specific to functions – it’s a general-purpose temporary binding macro for any setf-able place. (symbol-function 'name) is a “generalized variable” that refers to the function stored in a symbol’s function cell – it’s just one of many places cl-letf can bind. For example:

;; Temporarily silence messages
(cl-letf (((symbol-function 'message) #'ignore))
  (do-something-noisy))

Use cl-letf when you need the old dynamic flet behavior – typically for testing (stubbing functions) or temporarily suppressing/redirecting behavior.

Quick Reference

In other words:

• Default to cl-flet for local helpers. It’s the simplest and most predictable.
• Reach for cl-labels when you need recursion or mutual recursion in local functions.
• Use cl-letf only when you genuinely need dynamic override – mainly in tests. Modifying global function cells is a sharp tool and it’s not thread-safe, so keep it contained.

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

This is the third article in a small series inspired by my recent cleanup of Prelude and my personal Emacs configuration, following the ones on repeat-mode and read-extended-command-predicate. I’ve been going through the Emacs 28-30 changelogs for features I had ignored so far, and this one from Emacs 30 immediately caught my eye.

Writing Emacs regexps has always been a bit of a dark art. Between the double-escaped backslashes and the various group syntaxes (\(...\), \(?:...\), \(?N:...\)), it’s easy to lose track of what you’re actually matching. You type something into query-replace-regexp, press RET, and hope for the best.

Emacs 30 added minibuffer-regexp-mode, a minor mode that gives you live visual feedback as you compose a regexp in the minibuffer:

(minibuffer-regexp-mode 1)

When active, the mode highlights the structure of your regexp as you type it in the minibuffer. Capture groups, character classes, and other constructs get color-coded so you can see at a glance whether your grouping is right.

I find this particularly useful when building a regexp with multiple groups for query-replace-regexp, where you need to get the group numbering right for the replacement string (e.g., \1, \2). The visual feedback makes it obvious which group is which.

How Does This Compare to re-builder?

You might be wondering how this compares to re-builder (M-x re-builder). They’re complementary, really. re-builder shows matches in the buffer as you type a regexp in a dedicated editing window – great for developing complex patterns against actual text. minibuffer-regexp-mode, on the other hand, highlights the regexp itself in the minibuffer. It kicks in automatically whenever you’re prompted for a regexp (e.g., isearch-forward-regexp, query-replace-regexp, keep-lines, etc.).

One helps you see what your regexp matches; the other helps you see what your regexp says. I’d suggest using both.

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

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vunpn7ovEOc

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

Tonight I will work on my denote package. There is a feature branch I implemented this morning and am now ready to continue refining the code. The immediate goals:

• Update unit tests that are still calling deprecated functions.
• Write new tests, starting with the denote-dired command and all its ancillary functions.
• Review all the commands that filter the query buffers (which are produced by commands such as denote-grep, denote-backlinks, denote-query-contents-link).
• Edit the manual accordingly.

I expect the stream to go on for 2-3 hours, but we will see.

I will keep the chat open in case there are any comments. I am happy to respond to them.