Jacob Boxerman has a nice video and related blog post about his approach to configuring Emacs in a declarative and reproducible way. By “reproducible” he means that if he installs his init.el on a new system, he gets the exact same Emacs environment. That doesn’t mean just things like colors and key bindings but also that the same versions of the same packages are loaded and available.

By “declarative” he means, essentially, that he uses use-package and straight.el to specify and configure his packages in a declarative way. The goal is that the order of the declarations doesn’t matter and if one declaration s deleted, no other package is affected.

The video is a tour through a sample configuration based on Boxerman’s that shows how he accomplishes these things. The declarative part is mostly handled by use-package while the reproducible part depends mostly on straight’s ability to lock a file to a specific version. Take a look at the video and associated blog post for the details.

If, like me, you don’t have multiple machines that you require to provide exactly the same Emacs environment, you can probably omit straight.el but the idea of putting all your configuration in use-package blocks is a good one. It goes a long way towards ensuring that changes in one area won’t affect things in another.

Boxerman describes an excellent way of keeping your Emacs configuration under control and avoiding problems when—inevitably—you have to make changes. The video is only 8 minutes, 23 seconds so it’s easy to find time for it. If you find his ideas useful, take a look at his post, which explores them in a bit more detail.

Just a quickie today. Jack Baty has a short post on how he enables Org capture from anywhere on his system. He does pretty much what I do except that I use yequake instead of his custom script.

Yequake probably handles the edge cases but either way you simply evoke Emacs and ask it to run a bit of custom Elisp. If you aren’t doing something like this, you should take a look at Baty’s post or Alphapappa’s yequake. No matter where you are, you can bring up your capture menu and bring notes or a browser link into Emacs. I use it many times a day, especially for capturing items that I might want to write about in Irreal.

This is just another example of how Emacs can ease your workflow. You simply pop up an Emacs frame, capture you note, and deal with it later. It’s about as easy a way of capturing a quick note without breaking you out of the flow as you can get. If Emacs is at the center of your workflow, you should definitely check out Baty’s post or Alphapappa’s yequake.

Contributing to Git Projects with Magit: PRs, Patches & Agit workflow

Quick video guide on contributing to git projects using Magit. Showing an overview of the 3 most commonly used workflows

• Pull Requests

• Agit Workflow

• Git patches

  Video notes:

Introduction

I’m creating this as a tutorial video on how to contribute to bebliotheca, a digital recreation of the Library of Constantinople to host texts that would have been found there during the Greco-Roman Empire.

The steps demonstrated here are applicable to any project.

This is a video guide on contributing to git projects, using Emacs and Magit (the magical Git client). Magit provides the best experience out of the box for a text based interface to git, which makes magit an emacs’ killer feature.

In this video we will start from an example Emacs configuration, adding a theme and installing Magit. Afterwards we will see how to contribute to git projects in 3 ways:

• Pull Requests
• Agit Workflow Pull Requests
  • Supported in forgejo instances, such as codeberg
• Git Patches

I personally use vc, a built-in module. But that’s because I enjoy tinkering and writing my own scripts for it. Magit does by default a lot more that even my ~300 line vc config can do.

Requirements

You will need the following software installed:

• git
• GNU Emacs (version >=29.2)

Additionally, ensure you have a pair of SSH keys already generated and set up for your forge.

Emacs Configuration I will be using

Example init.el file that I will be using:

• Defaults locations for init.el, depending on your system:
  • GNU/Linux: ~/.emacs.d/init.el
  • Windows: C:\Users\<YourUsername>\.emacs.d\init.el

;; Init packages
(package-initialize)

;;;; Do not install keycast as well, I'm only using it to share my
;;;; keystrokes for the video.
;; (use-package keycast
;;  :ensure t)



;; Set and load custom.el
(setf custom-file (locate-user-emacs-file "custom.el"))
(load custom-file 'noerror)

;; Completions
(fido-vertical-mode 1)
(electric-pair-mode 1)

;;; Theming ;;;

(column-number-mode)
(global-display-line-numbers-mode 1)
(tool-bar-mode -1)
(tooltip-mode -1)
(menu-bar-mode -1)
(blink-cursor-mode -1)
(scroll-bar-mode -1)
(set-fringe-mode -1)

;; Add transparency
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(alpha-background . 85))

;; ef-themes package provides a great theme collection, made by Protesilaos.
(use-package ef-themes
  :ensure t)

(defun thanos/load-theme (&optional theme)
  "Disable current theme and load a new THEME.
Emacs can load multiple themes at once.  With this function we make sure we only load one at a time"
  (interactive)
  (let ((theme (or theme (intern (completing-read "Theme: " (custom-available-themes))))))
    (disable-theme (car custom-enabled-themes))
    (load-theme theme t)))

(thanos/load-theme 'ef-dark)


(use-package magit
  :bind ("C-x g" . magit)
  ;; Hook flyspell for autocorrect during commit messages.
  :hook (git-commit-mode . flyspell-mode))

;; Agitjo extends Magit with a new menu for AGit-Flow operations.
(use-package agitjo
  :vc (:url "https://codeberg.org/halvin/agitjo")
  :ensure t)

Pull Requests

• Require an account creation for the forge the project is hosted at. e.g Github or Codeberg.
• Steps to submit a PR
  • Fork repository, through a Web UI.
  • Clone your fork
  • Commit changes, often in a new branch.
  • Push your changes to your fork
  • Submit a Pull Request, through a Web UI.

If you’d rather not use a Web UI, but have to use Pull Requests, consider using forge.

Agit workflow

Note that the agit workflow is not supported by GitHub at the time of making this video. To use agit workflow, you will need to utilize a forgejo instance such as Codeberg.

• Clone repo, using ssh
• Commit changes
• Push
  • From the Magit status buffer, press #
  • Specify a title using -t
    • You can use the same title to push changes to the PR.

Git patches

• Clone repo.
• Commit changes.
• Format patches.

$ git format-patch -{NUM} # where NUM the number of commits.

• Send patches as attachments via email, by pressing C-x C-m.

Denote includes the option of adding different directories, so this now makes sense:

(setq denote-directory
      (if (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)          ; If I'm using Linux, include the private folder.
          (list (expand-file-name "~/Sync/Notes")
                (expand-file-name "~/Documents/private"))
        (list (expand-file-name "~/Sync/Notes")))) ; If I'm using anything else (macOS) just Notes.

(setq denote-excluded-directories-regexp "data") ; the data folder (with attachments) is excluded.

I have a private folder for Denote notes on Linux only. I used to only sync my Sync/Notes folder, which includes my informational notes and blog posts, but that means I’m missing out on Denote’s abilities in my private folder, which is slowly increasing in size. This solves this problem.

There’s no need to list the data folder (which includes my attachments, mostly in file formats that are not Denote’s format), so that’s why the exclusion is there.

I should be taking more photos. One roll of film for the entire month of January is embarrassing. I have a new Leica Q2 to play with, and I’ve taken maybe 20 images with it so far. What’s up with that?

I’m bored with all the performative quitting going on. What do you want, a medal?

Later: I don’t think Dave cared for my comment about being bored. Fair enough. Sorry, Dave, you’re excluded of course :). I wasn’t “sub-posting” you or anyone else in particular. And I’m not bored with people quitting things that don’t line up with their ethics or anything else. That’s excellent. I’m bored with people talking about it in that particularly smug tone that social media brings out in people. Frankly, I’m so angry about just about everything happening righ now I can hardly think. I’ll exercise my privilege by being bored by the tiresome discourse around so much of it.

Come to think of it, I’m bored by just about everything. I seem to have only two reactions to everything: anger or boredom.

Took the M3 loaded with a roll of HP5 over to my grandson’s this morning. Shot the roll at ISO1600. Nothing very good to show for it, but at least I did something.

I like being able to create new Org mode tasks from anywhere, via a simple keyboard shortcut. This probably doesn’t justify a whole post, but here’s how I did it.

Create a script at ~/.local/bin/orgcapture.sh

Here’s the script:

#!/bin/bash
emacsclient -c -F '((name . "capture") (width . 80) (height . 34))' -e '(progn (org-capture) (delete-other-windows))'

In my Emacs config, I have a hook that tidies up the new frame:

(defun my/org-capture-finalize-hook ()
  "Close frame after org-capture if it was opened for capture."
  (when (and (> (length (frame-list)) 1)  ; More than one frame
             (frame-parameter nil 'client)) ; Frame created by emacsclient
    (delete-frame)))

(add-hook 'org-capture-after-finalize-hook 'my/org-capture-finalize-hook)

In KDE’s Settings, I added a new command in the Shortcuts settings that point to that script. I assigned it to F3.

Now I hit F3 any time and a small capture buffer pops up in a new frame. That’s it. If there’s a better method for doing this, let me know.

I have added two new themes to my minimalist doric-themes package. The collection is growing to cover styles that range from austere to playful.

doric-jade is a light theme with an emphais on green. doric-copper is a dark theme with mostly orange accents and hints of patina. Both themes retain the Doric quality of using few colours while relying on typography to establish rhythm and structure.

Below are their samples.

[ Or just check all the pictures: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/doric-themes-pictures. ]

doric-jade

doric-copper

Coming in doric-themes version 0.7.0

Both doric-jade and doric-copper are in-development. I have already worked on their finer point, but may still make some tweaks before publishing them as part of the next stable version of the doric-themes.

About the Doric themes

The Doric themes use few colours and will appear monochromatic in many contexts. They are my most minimalist themes. Styles involve the careful use of typographic features and subtleties in colour gradients to establish a consistent rhythm. Legibility is still high.

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

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

I’ve had a little free time recently (figuring out this baby stuff!) and thought I would spend time revisiting and refining my AI assistant ollama-buddy

I’ve been playing around with agentic coding and keeping up-to-date on the rapid development of the Emacs AI package landscape and I think I have refined in my own mind my idea of what I would like to see in an Emacs AI assistant.

The headline change regarding the latest release of ollama-buddy is GitHub Copilot integration; the rest of the work is about smoothing the UI and simplifying day-to-day use.

What’s new - the Copilot addition (v1.2)

• GitHub Copilot Chat API support via a new file, ollama-buddy-copilot.el, so Copilot models can be used alongside your existing providers.
• Authentication uses GitHub’s device flow (OAuth). No API key required: M-x ollama-buddy-copilot-login opens a browser and guides you through secure authentication.
• Copilot models are identified with a “p:” prefix (for example, p:gpt-4o). The header line shows a “p” indicator when the Copilot provider is loaded so you always know it’s available.
• Copilot access exposes a broad set of models from multiple vendors through the Copilot interface: OpenAI (gpt-4o, gpt-5), Anthropic (claude-sonnet-4, claude-opus-4.5), Google (gemini-2.5-pro), and xAI models.
• Quick usage notes:
  1. Ensure you have an active GitHub Copilot subscription.
  2. Run M-x ollama-buddy-copilot-login.
  3. Enter the device code in your browser at github.com/login/device when prompted.
  4. Select a Copilot model with C-c m (e.g., p:gpt-4o).
• Example config to load Copilot support:

(use-package ollama-buddy
:bind
("C-c o" . ollama-buddy-menu)
("C-c O" . ollama-buddy-transient-menu-wrapper)
:config
(require 'ollama-buddy-copilot nil t))

Other notable updates in this release series

• v1.2.1 (2026-02-02)
  • Attachment count indicator on the header line so you get a constant visual reminder that the session has attachments.
• v1.1.5 (2026-01-31)
  • Global system prompt feature (enabled by default): sets a baseline set of instructions (for example, to prefer plain prose and avoid markdown tables) that is prepended to session-specific system prompts. This helps keep responses consistent across providers and things like malformed markdown tables for example, which seems to be common. There’s a toggle (ollama-buddy-global-system-prompt-enabled) and a quick command to flip it (ollama-buddy-toggle-global-system-prompt), plus a transient-menu entry.
  • Consolidated model management: streamlined into a single model management buffer (C-c W) and the welcome screen now points to that buffer for model tasks.
• v1.1.4 (2026-01-31)
  • Header-line and keybinding cleanup: C-c RET to send prompts (matches gptel, as I feel this seems intuitive), removed a redundant backend indicator, shortened the markdown indicator to “MD”, and fixed markdown → org heading conversion to keep structure sane.
• v1.1.3 (2026-01-31)
  • Chat UX improvements and simplification: added ollama-buddy-auto-scroll (default nil — don’t auto-scroll so you can read while streaming) and ollama-buddy-pulse-response (flashes the response on completion, taking from gptel again, as if there is no autoscrolling it is useful to visually see when the response has completed). Removed the model name coloring feature and related toggles to simplify code and improve org-mode performance.
• v1.1.2 (2026-01-30)
  • Streamlined welcome screen and model selection, clearer provider indicators in the header line and an improved list of enabled online LLM providers.

beframe enables a frame-oriented Emacs workflow where each frame has access only to the list of buffers visited therein. In the interest of brevity, we call buffers that belong to frames “beframed”.

• Package name (GNU ELPA): beframe
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/beframe
• Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/beframe-changelog
• Git repositories:
  • GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/beframe
  • GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/beframe
• Video demo: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2023-02-28-emacs-beframe-demo/
• Backronym: Buffers Encapsulated in Frames Realise Advanced Management of Emacs.

Below are the release notes

Version 1.5.0 on 2026-02-04

This version fixes two bugs and makes other minor tweaks.

The first bug pertains to the performance of the command beframe-switch-buffer or the command switch-to-buffer when beframe-mode is enabled: they were really slow when the list of buffers was long. Now they are always fast. Thanks to Alexandre Rousseau for reporting the problem in issue 17: https://github.com/protesilaos/beframe/issues/17.

The second bug is more subtle. It is about persisting the completion metadata category value in all prompts that read a buffer, when beframe-mode is enabled. This change means that users who configure the user option completion-category-overrides will not get the expected results in buffer prompts affected by Beframe.

Thanks to Stefan Monnier for commenting on the initial implementation, specifically telling me that let binding the metadata can affect nested minibuffers, which we do not want. This was done on the emacs-devel mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2025-12/msg00264.html.

My laptop has been running Fedora’s KDE spin. I first tried the stock Fedora with Gnome, but since my desktop was running KDE, I figured I should standardize on that.

Standardization is boring. :)

I installed Fedora Workstation this morning. I’d taken notes from the last time, and those helped speed things along. Still, it was 2 hours from installer to a fully functional system. I’m typing this post in Emacs and will deploy using Hugo shortly.

For the record, here are my raw notes from the installation. I need to work on the order in which I do things, but this wasn’t bad.

Installing Gnome on the Framework 2026-02-03

- sudo dnf install syncthing
- Settings
    - Trackpad -> Disable tap to click
- Install Gnome Tweaks
    - set caps lock to control
    - Emacs Input on
- sudo dnf install -y stow just fzf zoxide ripgrep
- Install Extension Manager (Flatpak)
- Installed Dash to Dock extension (via Extension Manager)
- Installed Clipboard Indicator extension (via Extension Manager)
- Installed starship curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh
- stow bash
- stow pandoc
- sudo dnf install pandoc
- sudo dnf install texlive-scheme-full
- sudo dnf install neovim
- sudo dnf install rust cargo # (for eza, since eza is no longer in fedora repos)
- Build and install eza
    git clone https://github.com/eza-community/eza.git
    cd eza/
    cargo install --path .
- Add berkely-mono to ~/.local/share/fonts/berkeley-mono
- sudo dnf copr enable dejan/lazygit
- sudo dnf install lazygit
- Install Signal (Flatpak)
- stow auth
- stow git
- stow gnupg
- stow jrnl
- stow pass
- stow ssh
- stow aerc
- sudo dnf install aerc
- sudo dnf install emacs
- Configure emacs
    - git clone https://github.com/jamescherti/minimal-emacs.d.git ~/.config/emacs
    - git clone [my dotemacs repo] to ~/.config/emacs-mine
    - cp ~/.config/emacs-mine/pre-early-init.el ~/.config/emacs/
    - ln -s ~/Sync/emacs/manual-packages ~/.config/emacs-mine/
- sudo dnf install fastfetch
- Add "Start Syncthing" to Startup Applications in Gnome Tweaks app
- Install FireCode Nerd Font
- ...a nearly infinite number of little tweaks that I didn't record.

Since the laptop is meant to be a sort of satellite computer orbiting my desktop Mac Mini, I don’t need everything installed. The above covers just the basics.

One day I should write a script that takes care of this for me.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Punchagan over at NOETIC NOUGHT started saving his Elfeed database after he lost it in a system crash. At the time, Punchagan didn’t know exactly what happened, only that the system crashed and he lost his Elfeed database. He wasn’t even sure that the two events were related, only that they occurred at the same time. His solution to the problem was to set up periodic saving of his Elfeed data to git.

A little later he had some time to troubleshoot the problem and discovered what happened. The Elfeed database is basically a hash table and saving it is simply a matter of dumping the binary to a file. This happens inside a with-temp-file macro, which is much like the more familiar with-temp-buffer macro except that it saves the results to a file at the end. The saving is done with write-region, which first truncates any existing file.

What happened, apparently, is that the system crashed between the truncation of the old file and writing the new file. Sadly there’s not much that can be done at the user level other than saving the file periodically.

I liked this post because it shows how easy it is to simply follow the code—which is, of course, available whenever you’re running Emacs—to see what’s happening. Emacs, to be sure, has more sophisticated tools for debugging but often simply looking at the code will reveal what’s going on. Punchagan’s post reminds me of Sacha Chua’s post on figuring out how to edit an SVG file and its source at the same time. She figured out how to do this the same way as Punchagan solved his problem: by reading the source code to see where the undesirable behavior was happening.

• Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
  • Emacs: un editor del pasado para el futuro (in person) https://gpul.org/eventos/2026/emacs/ Thu Feb 5 1200 America/Toronto
  • EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/312922157/ Thu Feb 5 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto – Fri Feb 6 0000 Etc/GMT - 0100 Europe/Berlin - 0530 Asia/Kolkata - 0800 Asia/Singapore
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Feb 6 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Sat Feb 7 0000 Asia/Singapore
  • OrgMeetup (virtual) https://orgmode.org/worg/orgmeetup.html Wed Feb 11 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Feb 12 0000 Asia/Singapore
  • Atelier Emacs Montpellier (in person) https://lebib.org/date/atelier-emacs Fri Feb 13 1800 Europe/Paris
• Beginner:
  • Essential Tips and Tricks for Efficiency – Emacsfr (@unixbhaskar@mastodon.social)
• Emacs configuration:
  • Post your favorite DWIM commands, packages, or own hacks
  • Using Minimal Emacs with Nix (@totherme@tech.lgbt)
  • Kickstart.emacs: Got a huge update. (Reddit)
  • Startup Changes in Emacs 31.1 The "user-lisp" Directory
• Emacs Lisp:
  • Use Batch Mode to Test Your Dot Emacs File (02:36)
  • Listful Andrew: ISO week dates in Emacs Lisp and Bash
  • Trevoke/elk: project management tool for emacs lisp - Codeberg.org (Reddit)
  • duckdb-query.el - DuckDB SQL/Elisp: query parquet, CSV, org-tables, alists in the same SQL statement seamlessly (Reddit, Reddit)
  • [17] Emacs Reader: Cursors, PALE, Canvas API and More! - 2/2/2026, 2:33:39 PM - Dyne.org TV
  • [17] Emacs Reader: Cursors, PALE, Canvas API and More! - 2/2/2026, 2:26:28 PM - Dyne.org TV
  • #80281 - 31.0.50; FR: Canvas object as display property - GNU bug report logs (@tusharhero@mathstodon.xyz)
  • pale: Picture and animation library for Emacs (@divyaranjan@mathstodon.xyz)
• Appearance:
  • halych/sans-mono: Configure proportional fonts for editing text in emacs - Codeberg.org (@halych@mastodon.sdf.org)
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: ef-themes version 2.1.0
• Navigation:
  • Irreal: When Should You Use Visual-line-mode?
  • Tip about using hs-minor-mode for code folding
  • Recursion and Quitting in Emacs (07:06)
• Writing:
  • Sacha Chua: Emacs and French: Focus flycheck-grammalecte on the narrowed part of the buffer
• Denote:
  • TAONAW - Emacs and Org Mode: Why I use Denote?
• Org Mode:
  • Stefan van der Walt: org-mode Day Planning with Time Blocks
  • Irreal: Starting A Journal
  • James Dyer: Auto-Populating Weekly Dates in Org-Mode Tables
  • 我是如何构建这个站点的
  • TAONAW - Emacs and Org Mode: Org files to beautiful docx files with Pandoc (Irreal)
    • dwim-shell-command-pandoc-org-to-docx
  • PSA searching org mode notes for tags even with org roam? use 'org-match-sparse-tree' instead of 'org-roam-node-find'
  • bradmont/org-roam-tree: organize backlinks in the org-roam buffer as a tree (Reddit)
  • Org development:
    • New option (org-latex-use-sans): Control using Sans as default font
    • Update all the links to savannah to use nongnu.org
    • ox-man: Add support for footer-inside and header-middle
    • org-lint: Add check for priorities
    • speed-commands: Adapt priority commands to user options
• Completion:
  • Snippy.el: VSCode/LSP snippet support for Emacs with Yasnippet. (Reddit)
  • James Cherti: ultisnips-mode.el (*.snippets files) (Github, Reddit) mode for editing Vim-compatible snippets (can be translated to Yasnippet for use with Emacs)
  • Sacha Chua: Emacs Carnival February 2026: Completion
• Coding:
  • Paxedit - a complement to Paredit (Reddit)
  • Heads-up for CIDER users: Elisp sources are now under lisp/ (@bbatsov@hachyderm.io)
  • Magnus: More on the switch to eglot
  • Marcin Borkowski: git-link
  • Mike Olson: First Week with Jujutsu VCS
• Math:
  • Lars Ingebrigtsen: Some Minor eplot Tweaks for CSV Files
  • Automatically Export Emacs SES Files to TSV - Lemmy.World
• Shells:
  • Charles Choi: Getting Eshell nth History to Work
• Web:
  • Converting Mozilla Firefox bookmarks to Org Mode (@totherme@tech.lgbt)
  • Linkding: Add URLs from Emacs, open bookmark in preferred browser (@mmk2410@fosstodon.org) integration with linkding self-hosted bookmarking service
  • Vibe Coding an Emacs-Style Hugo Theme | Arthur's blog (Github, HN)
• Mail, news, and chat:
  • punchagan: Why my Elfeed index was 0 bytes (Irreal)
• Multimedia:
  • Sacha Chua: Queuing multiple transcriptions with whisper.el speech recognition
  • Sacha Chua: Using Silero voice activity detection to automatically queue multiple transcriptions with natrys/whisper.el
  • Rendering 30FPS Video Inside Emacs Text Buffer (Reddit)
• Fun:
  • All codes lead to Home (Reddit)
  • minad/doom-on-emacs: DOOM on Emacs (Reddit, HN)
  • lichess.el: Watch Lichess games and play against Stockfish (HN)
  • Script for getting Emacs, Emacspeak, and Elmud running on Termux (@pixelate@tweesecake.social)
• AI:
  • Evan Moses: Yak Power-Shears: LLMs are pretty good at Emacs
  • Alternative transient documentation - also discussion about using AI to generate documentation
  • James Dyer: Ollama buddy now supports cloud models! (YouTube 01:04, Reddit)
  • ECA: AI pair programming in your editor - Dallo (32:33)
  • alvarmaciel/amp-emacs: Deep integration of Sourcegraph Amp with Emacs, inspired by amp.nvim. (Reddit)
  • I tested Claude Code today - And it built a proper agent package in emacs for me. (Reddit)
  • Stefan van der Walt: Using Gemini for Code Patches in Emacs
  • So, I "vibe-coded" features missing in Backpack Emacs, yet another GNU Emacs distribution (Reddit)
  • Short HN discussion about agent-shell
• Community:
  • Fortnightly Tips, Tricks, and Questions — 2026-01-27 / week 04
  • TAONAW - Emacs and Org Mode: Reflection on my Emacs experience
  • Amy's story behind Org Real and the boxy layout system
  • Michal Sapka: RTE - Return to Emacs (Irreal)
  • Christian Tietze: Emacs Carnival 2026-01: “This Year, I’ll …”
    • Zimblo: Emacs Carnival Jan 26: “This Year, I’ll de-obfuscate” | zimblog
    • George Jones: This Year I'll… · Curious Musings
    • Arjen Wiersma: This year, I'll…..
    • Sacha Chua: Emacs: This year, I will… / Cette année, je vais…
    • John Rakestraw | Emacs Carnival: This year, I'll …
    • Neil Mather: Emacs Carnival: This year I'll…
    • Kana: This year, I will write a shitty GUI for my Emacs clone
    • Sebastian Larsen Prehn: This Year, I'll …
    • Christian Cleberg: Emacs Carnival: “This Year, I Will…”
    • Lio Novelli: This year I'll …
• Other:
  • Sorting Lines by Fields in Emacs (02:57)
  • Protesilaos Stavrou: Emacs: tmr version 1.3.0
  • Irreal: Gruber On File Saving Ease
  • Irreal: Emacs Performance on macOS
  • teamtype/teamtype at emacs-plugin (@teamtype@fosstodon.org)
• Emacs development:
  • emacs-devel:
    • Some notes on stylistic sets and how shaping works
    • Trying to split feature/igc into smaller pieces
  • display-time: Add option to customize help-echo format
  • Add new input method for Tuscarora
  • New function 'truncate-string-pixelwise' (bug#80244)
  • Make diff-hunk-kill respect an active region
  • Bind 's' to diff-split-hunk in read-only diff-mode
  • New function 'checkdoc-batch' (bug#80199)
  • New key 'M-j' for 'icomplete-mode' (bug#62108)
  • New C-x v T l and C-x v T L commands (vc-log-outgoing-base, vc-root-log-outgoing-base) show corresponding revision logs
  • (minibuffer-message): Do not block while displaying message.
  • Move outstanding changes commands from 'o' to 'T'
  • Add 'select-frame-by-id' and 'undelete-frame-by-id' (Bug#80192)
  • Support cons cell for 'line-spacing'
  • New bindings for vc-revert
  • Flymake support for yaml-ts-mode.
  • Add JSON path utility command to json-ts-mode
  • (garbage-collect-heapsize): New function
  • * lisp/tab-bar.el (tab-bar-split-tab): New command.
• New packages:
  • dialog-mode: Major mode for editing Dialog files (MELPA)
  • duckdb-query: DuckDB query results as native Elisp data structures (MELPA)
  • eldc: Emacs Lisp Dictionary Converter (MELPA)
  • lazy: Lazy evaluation library (MELPA)
  • magit-pre-commit: Magit integration for pre-commit (MELPA)
  • org-window-habit: Time window based habits (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.

JR over at The Art Of Not Asking Why has a useful post on exporting an Org document to Docx. I’ve written about this before [1, 2, 3] and you might wonder why. After all, you can simply export directly from Org to ODT and get a Word compatible document.

The problem occurs when you’re working in an environment that requires a specific style implemented with a Word style sheet. The native Org exporter doesn’t support this so the usual solution is to use Pandoc, which does support a Word style sheet.

JTR’s post has a step-by-step recipe for making the conversion and setting up a Word style sheet using a reference document with the desired settings. He even covers the difficult areas of images and tables, which, of course, require further machinations.

None of this would be necessary if Word and its siblings would use plain text instead of an arcane, opaque file structure to store the document. After all, it’s certainly possible as Org—or, if you require even more complicated output, TeX/LaTeX—show. But, of course, that would stand in the way of editor lock in.

Regardless, if you have to produce Word documents but prefer to write in Org, take a look at JTR’s post. He shows you how to produce a good looking Word document from an easy to write Org file. He even shows how to automate the process using Álvaro Ramírez’s dwim-shell-command.

When it comes to sharing written documents with my co-workers, I usually need to use Word or PDFs. Org-mode includes an export option to odt files, which does the job in a pinch, but it’s a bit harder to customize, especially if I want to preserve certain formatting elements. In the past, I used to create ODT files, import them into Word, make whatever changes I needed, and save them in a docx file. The problem there, besides the manual work, is consistency. If I want to make sure I use the same style for fonts, header sizes, and table formats, things get annoying fast.

About a year ago, I discovered that Pandoc can use an external Word document (docx) as a style template. As long as I have this file accessible, every org file I convert to docx will automatically (and beautifully, I may add) retain the exact style changes I need. This, of course, can be automated later inside Emacs, so the export process is basically seamless.

The problem lies in the fact that you need to work with Word and understand how its styles. Readers of this blog know I love to complain about Microsoft’s UI and its lack of consistency, and the instructions here are one fine example in my opinion. Be it as it may, I will try to keep the snarky comments in check.

Creating the default style sheet

The first thing to do is get Pandoc to create its default style reference document as a .docx. This can be done with pandoc -o custom-reference.docx --print-default-data-file reference.docx.

What you’re telling Pandoc here is to output (-o) a file named custom-reference.docx (you can call it whatever you’d like, as long as it’s a docx, since you want to work with Word). What to output goes into this file? The default reference document.

Once you do that, you will have a custom-reference.docx in the folder you ran the command from.

Now it’s time to work inside Word.

Modifying the styles

What you will see is a rather plain file listing a bunch of styles and their name. First, you will see “Title,” and it will be nice and big because it’s using the Title style in Word. Heading 1 will use the Heading 1 style, Body Text (further down) will use the Body Text style, and so on.

What you want to do is to access these styles in Word. You will be modifying them to fit to your liking.

To do that, search for the Styles Pane. In my case, Office 365 for macOS, I can find it in the ribbon under Home, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a little different if you’re using Windows, or a different version of Word.

With the Style Pane open, you will see a long list of the available styles. You can navigate this way, but I find it’s easier to just look for them in the document to the left and select them; it will then show under Current style: to the right.

Now that you have a style selected, select the name of that style from the Style Pane and choose Modify Style…¹. You will see the options available to you, such as the font name, text color, alignment, etc.

Make sure that you do not change the Name: of the style! You’re modifying existing default styles that Pandoc recognizes; if you create a new one (by giving it a new name), Pandoc will not know what to do with it and will ignore it. Remember, you are modifying a reference sheet of existing styles, not creating new styles. Likewise, this means that you have no reason to change anything in the document itself (the content) - Pandoc doesn’t care about that and will ignore it. You’re only touching the options in the Modify Style… window.

That’s basically all there is to it. As you will see soon, some items can get a bit more complicated as they are not available in the same way. Save the files when you’re done modifying the styles. You will probably keep going back to this document as you export docx files, tweaking things until you like them.

Using Pandoc to export from org-mode to a docx file

The next step is to tell Pandoc to convert an existing org file to a docx file using the reference sheet we just worked on. To do that, use the following command:

pandoc -s <input_file.org> -o <output_file.docx> --reference-doc custom-reference.docx.

The idea is the same as before, but we use a stationary option, -s (the reason for that is that we’re telling Pandoc to use a “full” version of a document, needed with the reference doc option, otherwise it can’t use our reference document).

Then, we’re pointing Pandoc to our org file and using the output, -o, as the doc file we want, then finally using the reference-doc option by utilizing our reference file, custom-reference.docx (unless you change the name to something else). That’s it, Pandoc will create the file in the folder you are in.

Images and Tables

For me, things get a bit more complicated. My technical documents often include screenshots, and I need those embedded in the resulting Word docx file.

The above command will embed images in the Word document, as long as org-mode can find and display your images (using the inlineimages option in org-mode). My org-mode technical notes are all written with Denote these days, which keeps everything organized, including the images, which are inside the default data subfolder. If your workflow is different, be mindful of your path to the images; you’d probably want to use an absolute path in org-mode (use C-u C-u C-c C-l when linking an image instead of the usual C-u C-c C-l for this). There’s also the option to extract media in Pandoc (see the –extract-media option). In my opinion, it’s simpler and cleaner to dedicate a folder for your org documents, completed with a subfolder for attachments.

Another issue that stumbled me was the tables.

Pandoc’s default style for tables is minimal - without borders. This might look nice if you want to hide your tables, but if you need a table with borders and perhaps some shading, you’ll run into issues.

The problem is with Word. The style for the table is not included in the Style Pane. In order to change the style for your table in the reference doc, you need to locate Table Design in your ribbon. Notice that if you work on a small screen (like in my recording), you might have to expand your options to find it. Then, you will have to extend the pane further and locate the Modify Table Style below. Once again, this is true for my case, Office 365 on macOS. If you’re using a different Office version or on Windows, this menu might be located elsewhere.

Once you have Modify Table Style open, you can change the borders and shading to your heart’s content, but as before, make sure the style name remains Table. If you create a new style, Pandoc will ignore it.

A few tricks I picked up

Under the name of the style, in the Modify Style or Modify Table Style window, you will see the Style based on option. You can change this option and browse through different colors and fonts to find something you like, and then customize further instead of starting from scratch. As long as you don’t change the name of the style, you’re OK. I found this useful when working with tables, as I was looking for a table with shading on every other row.

Speaking of tables, the border button is the little square icon in the middle. I spent a few moments trying to find it.

Bonus: use dwim-shell-command for quick export

If you’re an Emacs user, you like shortcuts, and you like to use shell commands from within Emacs. If you haven’t yet, check out dwim-shell-command.

Here’s how I have it set up. All I have to do is mark the org file(s) I want to convert to a docx, and that’s it. It doesn’t matter if I want to export only one file or fifty; it’s the same ease of use.

(defun jtr/dwim-shell-command-pandoc-org-to-docx ()
  "uses pandoc to convert an org file to docx using a template docx file. The docx template file is stored in my Notes sync folder"
  (interactive)
  (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files
   "converting from org to docx"
   "pandoc -s '<<f>>' -o '<<fne>>.docx' --reference-doc ~/Sync/Notes/Info/custom-reference.docx"
   :utils "pandoc"))

Footnotes

¹ : Or, another way to work is to use to select the text you want to modify, then go to Format and select Style from there; you will need to then choose Modify in the window that shows.

Welcome to 2026, and a new year of Emacs Blog Carnival post!

To start the Gregorian calendar year fresh, the blogging/writing/thinking prompt of this month is:

This year, I’ll …

What will you do differently in Emacs this year? Or will you just get started? Why?

What are you excited about to explore and tinker with? What do you want to perfect?

Are there any large projects in front of you that you’ll emacs¹ with confidence?

What’s a Blog Carnival, Again?

A blog carnival is a fun way to tie together a community with shared writing prompts, and marvel at all the creative interpretations of the topic of the month. I’ve provided a couple of interpretations above, but you may think of something else entirely. That’s amazing, roll with it, that’s what makes this fun!

For future Carnivals, check out the “Carnival” page on EmacsWiki . It includes instructions, and is our community space to coordinate participants and topic ideas.

Submissions

Comment below or DM/email me with your submission! I’ll collect submissions up to, and including, February 1st (Central European Time), so that every time zone has had a chance to meet the January 31st deadline.

Ordered by submission date:

• Zimblo: This Year, I’ll de-obfuscate

• George Jones: This Year, I’ll – comes with a handy Emacs verb definition:

  Emacso, -are, -avi, -atus (verb, 1st conjugation)

  emacso, emacsas, emacsat, emacsamus, emacsatis, emacsant

  • Cotidie, cum discipulis meis, emacso ad software melius discendum. (Every day, with my students, I emacs to learn better software.)

• Arjen Wiersma: This Year, I’ll … (“… be taking control of the technologies I use”)
• Sacha Chua: Emacs: This year, I will… / Cette année, je vais…
• John Rakestraw: Emacs Carnival: This year, I’ll …
• Neil Mather: Emacs Carnival: This year I’ll… try, use, improve, …
• Kana: This year, I will write a shitty GUI for my Emacs clone
• Sebastian Larsen Prehn: This year, I’ll move more of my workflows to Emacs
• Lio Novelli: This year I’ll “not reach Emacs/OrgMode Nirvana yet”
• Christian Cleberg: Emacs Carnival: “This Year, I Will…”

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After learning about French spellcheck and grammar checking from Emacs expliqué à mes enfants, I added flycheck-grammalecte to my config. Nudged by @lann@mastodon.zaclys.com, I finally got around to figuring out why my setup sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. When I checked flycheck-verify-setup, I noticed that grammalecte kept getting disabled. A little digging around showed me that it was getting disabled because of too many errors. That was because it was trying to work on my whole file instead of just the portion that I narrowed to with org-narrow-to-subtree (ooh, just noticed an org-toggle-narrow-to-subtree command). I like having all of my French journal entries in one file because I can use consult-line (which I've bound to M-g l) to quickly look up examples of where else I've used a word. So I needed to define a checker that runs only on the narrowed part of the buffer.

(defun my-flycheck-grammalecte-buffer (checker callback)
  (let* ((temp-file-name (make-temp-file "grammalecte"))
         (output-buffer (get-buffer-create temp-file-name))
         (buffer (current-buffer))
         (cmdline (delq nil `("python3"
                              ,(expand-file-name "flycheck_grammalecte.py"
                                                 grammalecte--site-directory)
                              ,(unless flycheck-grammalecte-report-spellcheck "-S")
                              ,(unless flycheck-grammalecte-report-grammar "-G")
                              ,(unless flycheck-grammalecte-report-apos "-A")
                              ,(unless flycheck-grammalecte-report-nbsp "-N")
                              ,(unless flycheck-grammalecte-report-esp "-W")
                              ,(unless flycheck-grammalecte-report-typo "-T")
                              (option-list "-f" flycheck-grammalecte-filters)
                              (eval (flycheck-grammalecte--prepare-arg-list
                                     "-f" flycheck-grammalecte-filters-by-mode))
                              (eval (flycheck-grammalecte--prepare-arg-list
                                     "-b" flycheck-grammalecte-borders-by-mode))
                              ,temp-file-name)))
         (args (mapcan (lambda (arg) (flycheck-substitute-argument arg checker)) cmdline))
         (command (flycheck--wrap-command (car args) (cdr args))))
    (write-region (buffer-string) nil temp-file-name)
    (make-process :name "grammalecte"
                  :buffer output-buffer
                  :command command
                  :sentinel
                  (lambda (process status)
                    (let ((errors (with-current-buffer (process-buffer process)
                                    (message "%s" (buffer-string))
                                    (flycheck-parse-with-patterns
                                     (buffer-string)
                                     checker
                                     (current-buffer)))))
                      (delete-file temp-file-name)
                      (kill-buffer output-buffer)
                      ;; offset
                      (funcall
                       callback
                       'finished
                       (let ((offset (save-excursion (goto-char (point-min))
                                                     (line-number-at-pos nil t))))
                         (mapcar
                          (lambda (err)
                            (let ((new-err (copy-flycheck-error err)))
                              (setf (cl-struct-slot-value 'flycheck-error 'buffer new-err)
                                    buffer)
                              (setf (cl-struct-slot-value 'flycheck-error 'line new-err)
                                    (+ (flycheck-error-line new-err)
                                       offset -1))
                              (setf (cl-struct-slot-value 'flycheck-error '-end-line new-err)
                                    (+ (flycheck-error-end-line new-err)
                                       offset -1))
                              new-err))
                          errors))))))))

(defun my-flycheck-grammalecte-setup ()
  "Build the flycheck checker, matching your taste."
  (interactive)
  (unless (grammalecte--version)
    (advice-add 'grammalecte-download-grammalecte :after-while
                #'flycheck-grammalecte--retry-setup))
  (grammalecte--augment-pythonpath-if-needed)
  (flycheck-define-generic-checker 'my-grammalecte-narrowed
    "Report Grammalecte errors, but only for the narrowed section."
    :start #'my-flycheck-grammalecte-buffer
    :modes flycheck-grammalecte-enabled-modes
    :predicate (lambda ()
                 (if (functionp flycheck-grammalecte-predicate)
                     (funcall flycheck-grammalecte-predicate)
                   t))
    :enabled #'grammalecte--version
    :verify #'flycheck-grammalecte--verify-setup)
  (setf (flycheck-checker-get 'my-grammalecte-narrowed 'error-patterns)
        (seq-map (lambda (p)
                   (cons (flycheck-rx-to-string `(and ,@(cdr p))
                                                'no-group)
                         (car p)))
                 flycheck-grammalecte--error-patterns))
  (add-to-list 'flycheck-checkers 'my-grammalecte-narrowed)
  (flycheck-grammalecte--patch-flycheck-mode-map))

After I use my-flycheck-grammalecte-setup, I can use flycheck-select-checker to select my-grammalecte-narrowed and then use flycheck-buffer to run it. Then it will underline all the number/gender agreement issues I usually have. It's nice that I can practise editing my text with this script before I run the text through an LLM (also via flycheck) for feedback on wording.

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

A bit of a teaser:

This bit of dwim-shell-command magic works nicely:

  (defun jtr/dwim-shell-command-pandoc-org-to-docx ()
    "uses pandoc to convert an org file to docx using a template docx file. The docx template file is stored in my synced notes folder"
    (interactive)
    (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files
     "converting from org to docx"
     "pandoc -s '<<f>>' -o '<<fne>>.docx' --reference-doc ~/Sync/Notes/custom-reference.docx"
     :utils "pandoc"))

For the Emacs Carnival theme for February, let's learn more about completion together. There are all sorts of cheesy puns one can make about completion and Emacs and Valentine's Day, like "You complete me," but beyond the jokes, it's actually a really good topic to help us work with Emacs more efficiently.

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

As you all know, I am always writing about how much I like and use Journelly. One of the things that I always say is that since Journelly saves it data as an Org mode file—or, if you prefer, as a Markdown file—the file is essentially a database that can be queried and processed to produce other files.

Álvaro Ramírez has a very interesting post that describes one such workflow. Much like I might do, Ramírez adds an entry in his Journelly when he comes across some data about a movie he might want to watch. It may be an IMDB entry, a Reddit post, or even just something someone told him so that all he has is the movie or director name. The common denominator is that he adds a tag such as #film or #watch to mark those entries having to do with movies he should watch. Journelly can, of course, search on the tags but Ramírez has a better way.

First he extracts all the entries having an appropriate tag into a watchlist.org file. That gives him a file with all the movies he might want to watch. He uses this and the Claude Code agent to look up each entry in IMDB and to retrieve all the metadata for each movie from IMDB and put it in a db.org file. Finally, he uses the db.org file to generate HTML so that he has a browsable file showing each movie along with its poster.

Take a look at his post for the details and to see the final results. As Ramírez says,

At the center of all it all my beloved org syntax. Thanks to plain text formats, we can easily peek at them, query them, poke at them, tweak them, and bend til our heart’s content. It’s just so versatile and now we can throw them at LLMs, too.

Almost none of this is something you’d expect a text editor to do but the Combination of Emacs and Journelly provides a way of moving from free form capture entries to a polished, browsable file.

My Linux machine crashed, while I was in the middle of a video call. I restarted quickly, and continued the discussion. Later, when I was trying to sync Elfeed updates onto the Elfeed Offline app on my phone, I found it acting weird. All the bazillion things needed to get it working were in place, but it was still complaining about the Emacs Elfeed server not being accessible. I tried opening Elfeed inside Emacs and failed! The index file in Elfeed’s DB was empty! Gone! Poof!

Frustrating, but I didn’t have time to look into what happened. I would’ve been furious if I had been using Elfeed for longer and had a lot more metadata saved. But, it was only a few weeks of lost metadata - posts I read, starred, etc. I quickly setup a Git based backup to prevent future losses and moved on.

Later, I found time to dig into what might have happened…

The breadcrumbs

Elfeed stores all the metadata for all the posts in an index file with a content addressed store of the contents of each of the posts. The index file is simply a dump of the hash-table containing the metadata for the subscribed feeds, their entries and metadata like tags, read/unread status, etc.

The DB save happens in elfeed-db-save, which simply dumps the hash-table to disk inside a call to the with-temp-file macro.

(defun elfeed-db-save ()
  ; <snip>
  (with-temp-file (expand-file-name "index" elfeed-db-directory)
    ; ...
    (princ (format ";;; Elfeed Database Index (version %s)\n\n"
                       elfeed-db-version))
    ; ...
    (prin1 elfeed-db)
    ;...
    ))

with-temp-file, as its documentation says, lets you create a new buffer, evaluate the body there, and write the buffer to file. For a moment, I thought there was some temporary file involved, but nope! I guess the name comes as an extension from with-temp-buffer which does create a temporary buffer where the body of the macro gets evaluated. Stripped to its core, this function is:

`(let ((,temp-file ,file)
       (,temp-buffer (generate-new-buffer " *temp file*" t)))
   (prog1
       (with-current-buffer ,temp-buffer
         ,@body)
     (with-current-buffer ,temp-buffer
       (write-region nil nil ,temp-file nil 0))))

write-region and O_TRUNC

So, write-region is the workhorse which writes the contents of the temporary buffer to disk. It’s a roughly 300 line long C function that essentially opens the file with the flags O_WRONLY | O_CREAT | O_TRUNC (in this case) and then does something to write the contents to the file, etc. Honestly, I didn’t look at anything else too carefully after I spotted the O_TRUNC.

The man page of open explains O_TRUNC as follows:

O_TRUNC :: If the file already exists and is a regular file and the access mode allows writing (i.e., is O_RDWR or O_WRONLY) it will be truncated to length 0.

Voilà!

The write is not atomic. The file first gets truncated to length 0, and then we hope that the new contents get correctly written before something goes wrong.

It now makes sense why the file got truncated to 0 bytes. The crash happened after the open, but before the write. Somehow the crash happened in this short window, and poof!

Emacs has backup files, doesn’t it?

Temporary files with ~ in their file extensions have definitely annoyed me in the past when Emacs created them where I didn’t want them. So, I do know that Emacs has back-up mechanisms out of the box. But, it turns out that the backups occur in code paths that are more interactive, like save-buffer, write-file, etc. And not via the programmatic APIs like write-region or the higher level with-temp-file. save-buffer calls backup-buffer before writing, but write-region is much more low-level and doesn’t deal with backups.

The fix

My “fix” for this is to backup the Elfeed data in a git repository to be able to recover from any such corruptions of data, which I already wrote about here.

I know that any code that uses with-temp-file (or write-region) could be affected by this, and the right fix for this may be to write to a temporary file and rename it. Maybe next time I lose data I’ll actually fix it properly.

I can queue multiple transcriptions with whisper.el so that they get processed sequentially with backup audio. It catches up when I pause to think. Now I want to use Silero voice activity detection to do that kind of segmentation for me automatically.

First, I need a Python server that can print out events when it notices the start or stop of a speech segment. If I print out the timestamps, I might be able to cross-reference it someday with interestingthings. For now, even just paying attention to the end of a segment is enough for what I want to do.

import sounddevice as sd
import numpy as np
import torch
import sys
from datetime import datetime, timedelta

SILENCE_DURATION = 500
SAMPLING_RATE = 16000
CHUNK_SIZE = 512
model, utils = torch.hub.load(repo_or_dir='snakers4/silero-vad',
                              model='silero_vad',
                              force_reload=False)

(get_speech_timestamps, save_audio, read_audio, VADIterator, collect_chunks) = utils
vad_iterator = VADIterator(model, threshold=0.5, min_silence_duration_ms=SILENCE_DURATION)

stream_start_time = None

def format_iso_with_offset(offset_seconds):
    if stream_start_time is None:
        return "PENDING"
    event_time = stream_start_time + timedelta(seconds=offset_seconds)
    return event_time.astimezone().isoformat(timespec='milliseconds')

def audio_callback(indata, frames, time, status):
    global stream_start_time
    if status:
        print(status, file=sys.stderr)
    if stream_start_time is None:
        stream_start_time = datetime.now()
    tensor_input = torch.from_numpy(indata.copy()).flatten()
    speech_dict = vad_iterator(tensor_input, return_seconds=True)
    if speech_dict:
        if "start" in speech_dict:
            print(f"START {format_iso_with_offset(speech_dict['start'])}", flush=True)
        if "end" in speech_dict:
            print(f"END {format_iso_with_offset(speech_dict['end'])}", flush=True)
try:
    with sd.InputStream(samplerate=SAMPLING_RATE,
                        channels=1,
                        callback=audio_callback,
                        blocksize=CHUNK_SIZE):
        while True:
            pass
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    print("\nStopping...")

Then I can start this process from Emacs:

(defvar my-vad-events-process nil)
(defvar my-vad-events-dir "~/proj/speech/")
(defvar my-vad-events-command `(,(expand-file-name ".venv/bin/python" my-vad-events-dir)
                                "vad-events.py"))

(defun my-vad-events-filter (proc string)
  (when (and (string-match "^END" string)
             (process-live-p whisper--recording-process))
    (message "Noticed speech turn: %s" string)
    (my-whisper-continue)))

(defun my-vad-events-ensure ()
  "Start the process if it's not already running."
  (interactive)
  (unless (process-live-p my-vad-events-process)
    (let ((default-directory my-vad-events-dir)
          (process-environment
           (cons
            (format
             "PULSE_PROP=node.description='%s' media.name='%s' node.name='%s'"
             "vad" "vad" "vad")
            process-environment)))
      (setq my-vad-events-process
            (make-process
             :name "vad-events"
             :command my-vad-events-command
             :buffer (get-buffer-create "*vad-events*")
             :stderr (get-buffer-create "*vad-events-err*")
             :filter #'my-vad-events-filter)))))

Because I added Pulse properties to the process environment, I can easily use epwgraph to rewire the input so that it gets the input from my VirtualMicSink instead of the default system audio device. (Someday I'll figure out how to specify that as the input automatically.)

Now I can press my shortcut for my-whisper-continue to start the process. As I keep talking, it will continue to record. When I pause for more than a second between sentences, then it will send that chunk to the server for transcription without me having to press another button, while still listening for more speech.

How is this different from the streaming approach that many real-time speech recognition services offer? I think this gives me a bit more visibility into and control of the process. For my personal use, I don't need to have everything processed as quickly as possible, and I'm not trying to replicate live captions. I just want to be able to look back over the last five minutes to try to remember what I was talking about. I usually have a lot of quiet time as I think through my next steps, and it's fine to have it catch up then. I also like that I can save time-stamped audio files for later processing, divided according to the speech segments. Those might be a little bit easier to work with when I get around to compositing them into a video.

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

Well, not really prodigal, but the return—nonetheless—of a son assumed lost. Michał Sapka has a blog post about his return to Emacs. A while ago, Sapka left Emacs for Vim and the shell. He liked them but realized that Emacs really is different.

The way it’s different is telling. Although you can do anything in Vim and shell, Emacs is different. As Sapka puts it,

It’s not that nothing stops you from connecting Mastodon.el, Magit and Mu4e, it’s that it’s natural.

Because all of Emacs is exposed to the user, it’s easy to modify it to fit your workflow and string together disparate applications in ways that their authors never intended. Sapka makes the same point that Irreal and others have made: it’s not that Emacs has an extension language, it’s that Emacs’ source code is modifiable on the fly from within the application itself at run time. It’s a whole different thing.

Sapka admits that there are problems but says that they are solvable. Depending on your work environment, solving them may be more or less difficult but they remain solvable.

In any event, Sapka has returned to Emacs because, in the end, nothing else provides the same power and flexibility. He ends his post by noting that he’s—sort of—combined the power of Emacs and Vim by adopting Evil mode.

I've been somewhat chaotically "bookmarking" things to watch for some time. The info typically goes straight to an Emacs org file primarily via Journelly.

I'm fairly forgiving in my input form. I often link to Reddit discussions, IMDB/Letterboxd links, or at times simply write movie or director names. The only real requirement is to sprinkle some hashtags (#film or #series or #watch) for retrieval.

While this flexibility is important (makes it more likely for me to actually write), it's not super practical to browse through this mixed structure when looking for something to watch. Yesterday, I finally did something about that.

Here's what my save-to-Journelly flow may look like for a Reddit link:

All entries are saved to Journelly.org, a plain text org file (Markdown is supported too), so I first extracted all relevant entries (containing #film or #series or #watch). A matching entry looks a little something like this:

* [2026-01-29 Thu 09:52] @ Home
:PROPERTIES:
:LATITUDE: 51.5007
:LONGITUDE: -0.1246
:WEATHER_TEMPERATURE: 4.2°C
:WEATHER_CONDITION: Cloudy
:WEATHER_SYMBOL: cloud
:END:
#film #hongkong #watch

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1j85b52/just_rewatched_kung_fu_hustle_still_felt_great

Having extracted non-personal items from Journelly.org, I created a git repo with just one file: watchlist.org including entries like the one above.

With personal/private details out of the way, I decided to let the LLM robots loose. That is, hand watchlist.org over to a Claude Code agent, via Emacs agent-sell to organize my chaos.

First I asked to normalize data by extracting all film/tv info from each entry, visiting Reddit/IMDB/Letterboxd links if needed, which yielded normalized.org:

Kung Fu Hustle
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373074

Next I asked to generate metadata for me (using the fields I wanted from IMDB), stored in org drawers, saved to db.org:

* Kung Fu Hustle
:PROPERTIES:
:TYPE: film
:YEAR: 2004
:IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373074/
:IMDB_RATING: 7.7
:COUNTRY: Hong Kong
:DIRECTOR: Stephen Chow
:GENRE: action, comedy, fantasy
:RUNTIME: 99
:ADDED: [2026-01-28]
:THUMBNAIL: file:thumbnails/tt0373074.png
:IMDB_THUMBNAIL: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNGU2OWVlM2ItZGZlOC00Yzk2LWE1NzEtMDYwMzE4YTE5MzQ2XkEyXkFqcGc@._V1_FMjpg_UY1024_.jpg
:END:

Finally, I asked to generate HTML from db.org so I can render and easily browse.

<div>
  <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373074/"><img src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNGU2OWVlM2ItZGZlOC00Yzk2LWE1NzEtMDYwMzE4YTE5MzQ2XkEyXkFqcGc@._V1_FMjpg_UY1024_.jpg" alt="Kung Fu Hustle" width="150" height="225"></a>
  <p><strong>Kung Fu Hustle (2004)</strong></p>
  <p>action · comedy · fantasy</p>
  <p>Hong Kong · Stephen Chow</p>
</div>

For each transformation, Claude Code generated a python script. I've yet to decide what to do with all the resulting source code. Do I clean it up? Rewrite it?

For now, I'm happy with the results of the experiment. I managed to organize some of my chaos! In some ways, this isn't too different from me writing a quick/hacky/ugly script, when it's acceptable to do so.

At the center of it all, is my beloved org syntax. Thanks to plain text formats, we can easily peek at them, query them, poke at them, tweak them, and bend til our heart's content. It's just so versatile, and now we can throw them at LLMs too.

Oh, and if you're curious about that watch list, here you go. Do you have some movie/show suggestions for me?

12 Monkeys (2015)

tv · adventure · drama · mystery

United States

2149: The Aftermath (2021)

sci-fi

Canada · Benjamin Duffield

3 Body Problem (2024)

tv · adventure · drama · fantasy

United Kingdom

964 Pinocchio (1991)

horror · sci-fi

Japan · Shozin Fukui

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

animation · comedy · crime

United States · Richard Linklater

A Separation (2011)

drama

Iran · Asghar Farhadi

A Small Light (2023)

tv · biography · drama · history

United States

A Taxing Woman (1987)

comedy · crime

Japan · Jûzô Itami

Absentia (2017)

tv · crime · drama · mystery

Israel

Across the Furious Sea (2023)

crime · drama · mystery

China · Baoping Cao

Akira (1988)

animation · action · drama

Japan · Katsuhiro Ôtomo

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

action · adventure · sci-fi

United States · Robert Rodriguez

All About My Mother (1999)

comedy · drama · romance

Spain · Pedro Almodóvar

Altered Carbon (2018)

tv · action · adventure · drama

United States

Altered Hours (2016)

sci-fi · thriller

United States · Bruce Wemple

Amelie (2001)

comedy · romance

France · Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Amores Perros (2000)

drama · thriller

Mexico · Alejandro G. Iñárritu

An Elephant Sitting Still (2018)

crime · drama

China · Bo Hu

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

crime · drama · mystery

France · Justine Triet

Arcane (2021)

tv · animation · action · adventure

United States

Archive 81 (2022)

tv · drama · horror · mystery

United States

As Tears Go By (1988)

crime · drama · romance

Hong Kong · Wong Kar-Wai

Asakusa Kid (2021)

biography · drama

Japan · Gekidan Hitori

Ash Is Purest White (2018)

crime · drama · romance

China · Jia Zhang-ke

Asura (2023)

tv · comedy · drama

Indonesia

Band of Brothers (2001)

tv · action · drama · history

United Kingdom

Banshee (2013)

tv · action · crime · drama

United States

Barry (2018)

tv · action · comedy · crime

United States

Battlestar Galactica (2004)

tv · action · adventure · drama

United States

Being Human (UK) (2008)

tv · comedy · drama · fantasy

United Kingdom

Big Man Japan (2007)

action · comedy · sci-fi

Japan · Hitoshi Matsumoto

Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014)

crime · drama · mystery

China · Yi'nan Diao

Black Sails (2014)

tv · action · adventure · drama

South Africa

Blackadder (1983)

tv · comedy

United Kingdom

BlackBerry (2023)

biography · comedy · drama

Canada · Matt Johnson

Blade Runner (1982)

action · drama · sci-fi

United States · Ridley Scott

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

action · drama · mystery

United States · Denis Villeneuve

Blade Runner: Black Lotus (2021)

tv · animation · action · drama

United States

Bloody Hell (2020)

comedy · horror · mystery

Australia · Alister Grierson

Boardwalk Empire (2010)

tv · crime · drama

United States

Bojack Horseman (2014)

tv · animation · comedy · drama

United States

Brand New Cherry Flavor (2021)

tv · drama · horror · mystery

United States

Brazil (1985)

drama · sci-fi · thriller

United Kingdom · Terry Gilliam

Broadchurch (2013)

tv · crime · drama · mystery

United Kingdom

Burn Notice (2007)

tv · action · crime · drama

United States

Burning (2018)

drama · mystery · thriller

South Korea · Lee Chang-dong

Carnivale (2003)

tv · drama · fantasy · mystery

United States

Castlevania (2017)

tv · animation · action · adventure

United States

Chungking Express (1994)

comedy · crime · drama

Hong Kong · Wong Kar-Wai

City Hunter (2024)

action · comedy · crime

Japan · Yûichi Satô

City of God (2002)

crime · drama

Brazil · Kátia Lund

Cloud (2024)

action · crime · drama

Japan · Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Cold Fish (2010)

crime · drama · horror

Japan · Sion Sono

Colony (2016)

tv · action · adventure · drama

United States

Counterpart (2017)

tv · drama · sci-fi · thriller

United States

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000)

action · adventure · drama

Taiwan · Ang Lee

Cure (1997)

crime · horror · mystery

Japan · Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022)

tv · animation · action · adventure

Japan

DaVinci's Demons (2013)

tv · adventure · biography · drama

United States

Days of Being Wild (1990)

crime · drama · romance

Hong Kong · Wong Kar-Wai

Deadwind (2018)

tv · crime · drama · mystery

Finland

Deadwood (2004)

tv · crime · drama · history

United States

Dear Child (2023)

tv · crime · drama · mystery

Germany

Decision to Leave (2022)

crime · drama · mystery

South Korea · Park Chan-wook

Demon City (2024)

action · adventure · crime

Japan · Seiji Tanaka

Derry Girls (2018)

tv · comedy

United Kingdom

Destroyer (2018)

action · crime · drama

United States · Karyn Kusama

Devs (2020)

tv · drama · mystery · sci-fi

United Kingdom

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (2016)

tv · action · adventure · comedy

United States

District 9 (2009)

action · sci-fi · thriller

South Africa · Neill Blomkamp

Doom Patrol (2019)

tv · action · adventure · comedy

United States

Downton Abbey (2010)

tv · drama · romance

United Kingdom

Dredd (2012)

action · crime · sci-fi

United Kingdom · Pete Travis

Drops of God (2023)

tv · drama

France

Dune (2021)

action · adventure · drama

United States · Denis Villeneuve

Dust of Angels (1992)

action · crime · drama

Taiwan · Hsiao-Ming Hsu

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

action · adventure · sci-fi

United States · Doug Liman

Edie (2017)

adventure · drama

United Kingdom · Simon Hunter

Elysium (2013)

action · drama · sci-fi

United States · Neill Blomkamp

Encanto (2021)

animation · comedy · family

United States · Jared Bush

Endeavour (2012)

tv · crime · drama · mystery

United Kingdom

Equilibrium (2002)

action · drama · sci-fi

United States · Kurt Wimmer

Euphoria (2019)

tv · drama

United States

Extreme Job (2019)

action · comedy · crime

South Korea · Lee Byeong-heon

Fair Play (2023)

drama · thriller

United States · Chloe Domont

Fallen Leaves (2023)

comedy · drama · romance

Finland · Aki Kaurismäki

Fallout (2024)

tv · action · adventure · drama

United States

Fargo (2014)

tv · crime · drama · thriller

United States

Firefly (2002)

tv · adventure · drama · sci-fi

United States

Foundation (2021)

tv · drama · sci-fi

Ireland

Foyle's War (2002)

tv · crime · drama · mystery

United Kingdom

Fringe (2008)

tv · drama · mystery · sci-fi

United States

From (2022)

tv · drama · horror · mystery

United States

Funky Forest (2005)

comedy · fantasy

Japan · Katsuhito Ishii

Future Man (2017)

tv · action · adventure · comedy

United States

Gen V (2023)

tv · action · adventure · comedy

United States

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

animation · action · crime

Japan · Mamoru Oshii

Ghostbusters Afterlife (2021)

adventure · comedy · fantasy

United States · Jason Reitman

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

action · adventure · drama

Japan · Takashi Yamazaki

Going By The Book (2007)

action · comedy

South Korea · Hee-chan Ra

Gomorrah (2014)

tv · crime · drama · thriller

Italy

Guns & Talks (2001)

action · drama · comedy

South Korea · Jang Jin

Halt and Catch Fire (2014)

tv · drama

United States

Handmaid's Tale (2017)

tv · drama · sci-fi · thriller

United States

Hanna (2019)

tv · action · crime · drama

United States

Hannibal (2013)

tv · crime · drama · horror

United States

Hausen (2020)

tv · drama · horror · mystery

Germany

Heavy Water War (Kampen om tungtvannet) (2015)

tv · drama · history · war

Norway

Heroes (2006)

tv · crime · drama · fantasy

United States

Hotel Del Luna (2019)

tv · action · comedy · drama

South Korea

Infernal Affairs (2002)

crime · drama · mystery

Hong Kong · Wai Keung Lau

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (2023)

drama

Vietnam · Thien An Pham

Inspector Morse (1987)

tv · crime · drama · mystery

United Kingdom

Ip Man (2008)

action · biography · drama

Hong Kong · Wilson Yip

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

action · drama · sci-fi

Canada · Robert Longo

JSA: Joint Security Area (2000)

action · drama · thriller

South Korea · Park Chan-wook

Jury Duty (2023)

tv · comedy

United States

Justified (2010)

tv · action · crime · drama

United States

Kaili Blues (2015)

drama · mystery

China · Bi Gan

Kalifat (2020)

tv · crime · drama · thriller

Sweden

Katla (2021)

tv · drama · fantasy · mystery

Iceland

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

crime · drama · history

United States · Martin Scorsese

Killzone (SPL) (2005)

action · crime · thriller

Hong Kong · Wilson Yip

Kingdom (2019)

tv · action · drama · horror

South Korea

Kung Fu Dunk (2008)

action · comedy · sport

China · Yen-Ping Chu

Kung Fu Hustle (2004)

action · comedy · fantasy

Hong Kong · Stephen Chow

La Haine (1995)

crime · drama

France · Mathieu Kassovitz

Le Bureau des Legendes (2015)

tv · drama · thriller

France

Left Handed Girl (2024)

drama

Taiwan · Shih-Ching Tsou

Legion (2017)

tv · action · sci-fi · thriller

United States

Les Revenants (2012)

tv · drama · fantasy · horror

France

Little Fires Everywhere (2020)

tv · drama · mystery · thriller

United States

Locked In (2023)

mystery · thriller

United States · David C. Snyder

Lodge 49 (2018)

tv · comedy · drama · mystery

United States

Logan Lucky (2017)

action · comedy · crime

United States · Steven Soderbergh

Loki (2021)

tv · action · adventure · fantasy

United States

Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018)

drama · mystery · romance

China · Bi Gan

Looper (2012)

action · drama · sci-fi

United States · Rian Johnson

Lupin (2021)

tv · action · crime · drama

France

Lust, Caution (2007)

drama · history · romance

Taiwan · Ang Lee

Man in the High Castle (2015)

tv · drama · sci-fi · thriller

United States

Man Standing Next (2020)

thriller

South Korea · Min-ho Woo

Manhunt (2019)

tv · biography · crime · drama

United Kingdom

Manifest (2018)

tv · drama · mystery · sci-fi

United States

Marco Polo (2014)

tv · action · adventure · drama

United States

Marvelous Mrs Maisel (2017)

tv · comedy · drama

United States

Max Headroom (1987)

tv · comedy · sci-fi

United States

May December (2023)

comedy · drama

United States · Todd Haynes

Metropolis (1927)

drama · sci-fi

Germany · Fritz Lang

Midnight Mass (2021)

tv · drama · fantasy · horror

United States

Midsommar (2019)

drama · horror · mystery

United States · Ari Aster

Minority Report (2002)

action · crime · mystery

United States · Steven Spielberg

Misfits (2009)

tv · comedy · drama · fantasy

United Kingdom

Miss King (2024)

tv · drama · thriller

Japan

Mobland (2024)

tv · crime · drama

United Kingdom

Mogura (2024)

tv

Monk (2002)

tv · comedy · crime · drama

United States

Moving (2023)

tv · action · adventure · drama

South Korea

Mr Inbetween (2018)

tv · comedy · crime · drama

Australia

Mr. Robot (2015)

tv · crime · drama · thriller

United States

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)

crime · drama · thriller

South Korea · Park Chan-wook

Mrs. Davis (2023)

tv · comedy · drama · sci-fi

United States

My Name (2021)

tv · action · crime · drama

South Korea

Narcos (2015)

tv · biography · crime · drama

United States

Nine Days (2020)

drama · fantasy

United States · Edson Oda

No Other Choice (2025)

comedy · crime · drama

South Korea · Park Chan-wook

Nobel (2016)

tv · drama · thriller · war

Norway

Northern Exposure (1990)

tv · adventure · comedy · drama

United States

Occupied (Okkupert) (2015)

tv · drama · thriller

Norway

Oldboy (2003)

action · drama · mystery

South Korea · Park Chan-wook

Once Upon a Time in China (1991)

action

Hong Kong · Hark Tsui

One False Move (1992)

crime · drama · thriller

United States · Carl Franklin

Ong Bak (2003)

action · crime · thriller

Thailand · Prachya Pinkaew

Oppenheimer (2023)

biography · drama · history

United States · Christopher Nolan

Orphan Black (2013)

tv · drama · sci-fi · thriller

Canada

Ozark (2017)

tv · crime · drama · thriller

United States

Pacifiction (2022)

drama · thriller

France · Albert Serra

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

drama · fantasy · war

Mexico · Guillermo del Toro

Panchayat (2020)

tv · comedy · drama

India

Pantheon (2022)

tv · animation · action · adventure

United States

Past Lives (2023)

drama · romance

United States · Celine Song

Peacemaker (2022)

tv · action · adventure · comedy

United States

Peaky Blinders (2013)

tv · crime · drama

United Kingdom

PEN15 (2019)

tv · comedy · drama

United States

Penny Dreadful (2014)

tv · drama · fantasy · horror

United Kingdom

Perfect Days (2023)

drama

Japan · Wim Wenders

Persepolis (2007)

animation · biography · drama

France · Vincent Paronnaud

Police Story (1985)

action · comedy · crime

Hong Kong · Jackie Chan

Poor Things (2023)

comedy · drama · romance

Ireland · Yorgos Lanthimos

Preacher (2016)

tv · adventure · comedy · fantasy

United States

Primo (2023)

tv · comedy

United States

Priscilla (2023)

biography · drama · music

Italy · Sofia Coppola

Professor T (2015)

tv · comedy · crime · drama

Belgium

Raise the Red Lantern (1991)

drama · romance

China · Yimou Zhang

Reservation Dogs (2021)

tv · comedy · crime

United States

Riki Oh (1991)

action · comedy · crime

Hong Kong · Ngai Choi Lam

Ripley (2024)

tv · crime · drama · thriller

United States

Robocop (1987)

action · crime · sci-fi

United States · Paul Verhoeven

Rome (2005)

tv · action · drama · romance

United Kingdom

Rurouni Kenshin (2012)

action · adventure · drama

Japan · Keishi Otomo

Russian Doll (2019)

tv · comedy · drama · mystery

United States

Scavengers Reign (2023)

tv · animation · adventure · drama

United States

Scrapper (2023)

comedy · drama

United Kingdom · Charlotte Regan

Secret Level (2024)

tv · animation · action · adventure

United States

See (2019)

tv · action · drama · sci-fi

United States

Sex is Zero (2002)

comedy · drama · romance

South Korea · JK Youn

Shall We Dance (1996)

comedy · drama · music

Japan · Masayuki Suô

Shameless (2011)

tv · comedy · drama

United States

Shantaram (2022)

tv · action · adventure · crime

United States

Shaolin Soccer (2001)

action · comedy · fantasy

Hong Kong · Stephen Chow

Sharp Objects (2018)

tv · crime · drama · mystery

United States

Shin Ultraman (2022)

action · adventure · drama

Japan · Shinji Higuchi

Shinobi No Mono (1962)

action · drama

Japan · Satsuo Yamamoto

Shogun (2024)

tv · action · adventure · drama

United States

Shutter Island (2010)

drama · mystery · thriller

Canada · Martin Scorsese

Signal (2016)

tv · crime · drama · fantasy

South Korea

Silo (2023)

tv · drama · mystery · sci-fi

United States

Six Feet Under (2001)

tv · comedy · drama

United States

Slow Horses (2022)

tv · drama · thriller

United Kingdom

Snowfall (2017)

tv · crime · drama

United States

Snowpiercer (2013)

action · sci-fi · thriller

South Korea · Bong Joon Ho

Somebody Somewhere (2022)

tv · comedy · drama

United States

Sonatine (1993)

action · comedy · crime

Japan · Takeshi Kitano

Spartacus (2010)

tv · action · adventure · biography

United States

Spiral (Engrenage) (2005)

tv · crime · drama · mystery

France

Strange Darling (2023)

horror · thriller

United States · JT Mollner

Strange Days (1995)

crime · drama · sci-fi

United States · Kathryn Bigelow

Strike Back (2010)

tv · action · drama · thriller

United Kingdom

Succession (2018)

tv · comedy · drama

United States

Survive Style 5+ (2004)

comedy · fantasy · horror

Japan · Gen Sekiguchi

Suzhou River (2000)

drama · romance

Germany · Ye Lou

Taegukgi (2004)

action · drama · war

South Korea · Kang Je-kyu

Talk to Her (2002)

drama · mystery · romance

Spain · Pedro Almodóvar

Taxi Driver (2017)

action · drama · history

South Korea · Hun Jang

Ted Lasso (2020)

tv · comedy · drama · sport

United States

Terminal List (2022)

tv · action · drama · thriller

United States

Terminator (1984)

action · adventure · sci-fi

United Kingdom · James Cameron

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)

horror · sci-fi

Japan · Shin'ya Tsukamoto

The 8 Show (2024)

tv · comedy · drama · horror

South Korea

The Americans (2013)

tv · crime · drama · mystery

United States

The Beekeeper (2024)

action · crime · thriller

United Kingdom · David Ayer

The Boys (2019)

tv · action · comedy · crime

United States

The Bridge (Broen/Bron) (2011)

tv · crime · mystery · thriller

Sweden

The Brothers Sun (2024)

tv · action · comedy · drama

United States

The Cabin in the Woods (2011)

horror · mystery · thriller

Canada · Drew Goddard

The Detour (2016)

tv · adventure · comedy

United States

The Electric State (2025)

action · adventure · comedy

United States · Anthony Russo

The Empty Man (2020)

drama · horror · mystery

United States · David Prior

The End of the F***ing World (2017)

tv · adventure · comedy · crime

United Kingdom

The Expanse (2015)

tv · drama · mystery · sci-fi

United States

The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

tv · drama · horror · mystery

United States

The Glory (2022)

tv · drama · mystery · thriller

South Korea

The Good The Bad The Weird (2008)

action · adventure · comedy

South Korea · Kim Jee-woon

The Handmaiden (2016)

drama · romance · thriller

South Korea · Park Chan-wook

The Head (2020)

tv · drama · horror · mystery

Spain

The Holdovers (2023)

comedy · drama

United States · Alexander Payne

The Host (2006)

drama · horror · sci-fi

South Korea · Bong Joon Ho

The Killer (1989)

action · crime · drama

Hong Kong · John Woo

The Killing (2007)

tv · crime · drama · mystery

Denmark

The Last Kingdom (2015)

tv · action · drama · history

United Kingdom

The Last of Us (2023)

tv · action · adventure · drama

Canada

The Lazarus Project (2022)

tv · action · drama · fantasy

United Kingdom

The Leftovers (2014)

tv · drama · fantasy · mystery

United States

The Legend of Vox Machina (2022)

tv · animation · action · adventure

United States

The Letdown (2017)

tv · comedy

Australia

The Man from Nowhere (2010)

action · crime · drama

South Korea · Lee Jeong-beom

The Matrix (1999)

action · sci-fi

United States · Lana Wachowski

The Night Comes for Us (2018)

action · crime · thriller

Indonesia · Timo Tjahjanto

The Other Two (2019)

tv · comedy

United States

The Outsider (2020)

tv · crime · drama · horror

United States

The Pitt (2025)

tv · drama

United States

The Queen's Gambit (2020)

tv · drama

United States

The Raid (2011)

action · crime · thriller

Indonesia · Gareth Evans

The Raid 2 (2014)

action · crime · thriller

Indonesia · Gareth Evans

The Running Man (1987)

action · sci-fi · thriller

United States · Paul Michael Glaser

The Shield (2002)

tv · crime · drama · thriller

United States

The Sopranos (1999)

tv · crime · drama

United States

The Taste of Things (2023)

drama · history · romance

France · Anh Hung Tran

The Tower (2021)

tv · crime · drama · mystery

United Kingdom

The Town (2010)

crime · drama · thriller

United States · Ben Affleck

The Umbrella Academy (2019)

tv · action · adventure · comedy

United States

The Wire (2002)

tv · crime · drama · thriller

United States

The Zone of Interest (2023)

drama · history · war

United Kingdom · Jonathan Glazer

Three Colors: Blue (1993)

drama · music · mystery

France · Krzysztof Kieslowski

Three Colors: Red (1994)

drama · mystery · romance

France · Krzysztof Kieslowski

Three Colors: White (1994)

comedy · drama · romance

France · Krzysztof Kieslowski

Tokyo Vice (2022)

tv · crime · drama · thriller

Japan

Tom Yum Goong (The Protector) (2005)

action · crime · drama

Thailand · Prachya Pinkaew

Total Recall (1990)

action · adventure · sci-fi

United States · Paul Verhoeven

Trapped (2015)

tv · crime · drama · mystery

Iceland

Tron (1982)

action · adventure · sci-fi

United States · Steven Lisberger

Tumbbad (2018)

drama · fantasy · horror

India · Rahi Anil Barve

Upgrade (2018)

action · sci-fi · thriller

United States · Leigh Whannell

Us and Them (2018)

drama · romance

China · Rene Liu

Utopia (2013)

tv · drama · mystery · sci-fi

United Kingdom

Violet Evergarden: The Movie (2020)

animation · drama · fantasy

Japan · Taichi Ishidate

Volver (2006)

comedy · drama

Spain · Pedro Almodóvar

Warped Forest (2011)

comedy · fantasy

Japan · Shunichirô Miki

Warrior (2019)

tv · action · crime · drama

United States

Wayward Pines (2015)

tv · drama · horror · mystery

United States

Weeds (2005)

tv · comedy · crime · drama

United States

Westworld (2016)

tv · drama · mystery · sci-fi

United States

Wild Goose Lake (2019)

crime · drama

China · Yi'nan Diao

Wind River (2017)

crime · drama · mystery

United Kingdom · Taylor Sheridan

Winter's Bone (2010)

crime · drama · mystery

United States · Debra Granik

Yellowjackets (2021)

tv · drama · mystery · thriller

United States

You (2018)

tv · crime · drama · romance

United States

Yu Yu Hakusho (2023)

tv · action · adventure · comedy

Japan

Zero Zero Zero (2020)

tv · crime · drama · thriller

Italy

OK, so (not that) long story short: I'm back inside Emacs. I deeply enjoyed the Vim side-quest, so I can now say that I use both: Vim and Emacs, but it's time to return to the main storyline. See, Emacs is just so different from anything out there, that nothing comes close. Vim may be an outstanding editor, and Shell gives me everything... but it's not the same. The thing with precompiled software is that they are black boxes, and modifying them is a huge pain in the ass. In Emacs, on the other hand, all the interesting parts are there for you to tinker. It's not that nothing stops you from connecting Mastodon.el, Magit and Mu4e, it's that it's natural. After using the standard shell I noticed that I don't care about Emacs, but what is stands for: the way software should have always been.

I want to have my entire computing experience in an open, interconnected system. What I don't want is some pesky product manager telling me how I should use their software, or fighting with my fork. Neither do I want to rent server space to run a glorified web page. Extensions are half-step; the entire program should be available for me to modify.

Now, there are problems - but none unsolvable. I am forced to do Java in day-job really soon, but we're living in the XXI century! Even such legacy language has some some tooling now. LSP works for autocomplete (not yet with our repo, but I'll fix it somehow) and refactorings are supported. Debugging is available via JDB and some Microsoft thingy (none of which work with our repo, but I'll fix it somehow). This means I will most likely not need to wash myself after work just to get the stench of IntelliJ out of me.

There are also pluses. I forced myself to do work notes, just to use org-mode... finally. This already reaps benefits, as it is miles better than a dozen Slack messages, Confluence, Microslop GitHub, and some memory. I am not the most organized person I've known, but I've heard legends of people less organized.

Happy LISPing to me! I'll need to write that html-to-gemtext converter. And yes - I am fully evil-mode now.

Inspired by the Emacs Carnival theme for January, this year, I will:

• take more notes, perhaps with the help of speech recognition
  • Now I can manage my time better since the kiddo can study more independently, but I still have to manage interruptions from my life and from my own brain. If I write or dictate notes while I think or work, I can get back into things more easily. Speech recognition allows me to capture more thoughts, even if the results need a fair bit of reviewing and revising. I'm looking forward to checking out the ideas others have shared, such as configuring more transient.el interfaces and adding more tweaks to my Org Mode publishing.
• stream to think out loud
  • My daily routines are gradually becoming more predictable, so I might be able to schedule streams or jump onto one to share ideas. If I do a live broadcast, I can learn from the questions and comments I get. Fridays at 10:30 AM seems like a good time for that, and when possible, I can also do it spontaneously.
• record videos to share what I learn, and package my functions to make them reusable when possible
  • Like the previous points, sharing my ideas and my work can help others and start conversations. If I improve subed-record.el to combine video and audio recordings with screenshots and subtitles, I might be able to create videos more easily.
• write more in French and improve my environment for this purpose
  • I like the mental stimulation of writing in another language. Lots of other people are learning languages too, so we might be able to help each other. For example, my functions for highlighting new words and grammatical errors could be useful.
• practice speaking by making audio recordings with the help of subed-record and speech synthesis to improve my pronunciation
  • The advantage of implementing this in Emacs is that I can customize my workflow. For example, I want to write my draft and then record the audio sentence by sentence after listening to an example. I also want to see if I can more easily edit a recording of my session with my tutor so that I can keep only my last pronunciation attempts.
• improve processes for EmacsConf and Emacs News
  • I might be able to organize much of it by myself, but other volunteers might also be able to help, which would be even better. I want to create the infrastructure to manage several virtual meetings simultaneously, probably with speech recognition, audio spatialization, and lots of keyboard shortcuts. I also want to improve my subtitling process.

The more I do in Emacs, the more I think of ideas for improvement…

Sur le thème du Carnaval d'Emacs pour janvier - Cette année, je vais :

• prendre plus de notes, peut-être avec l'aide de la reconnaissance vocale
  • Même si je peux mieux gérer mon temps maintenant que ma fille peut étudier de manière plus indépendante, je dois toujours gérer les interruptions de ma vie et de mon propre cerveau. Si j'écris ou dicte des notes pendant que je pense ou que je travaille, je reprendrai le fil de mes pensées plus facilement. La reconnaissance vocale me permet de capter plus de pensées, même si les résultats nécessitent de revoir et de réviser. Je suis enthousiasmée par les idées que d'autres partagent, comme la configuration de l'interface transient.el et l'amélioration de la publication d'Org Mode.
• streamer pour réfléchir à voix haute
  • Mes routines quotidiennes deviennent plus prévisibles petit à petit, je peux donc planifier des événements ou me lancer dans le streaming pour partager des idées. Si je fais une diffusion en direct, je peux profiter des questions et des commentaires que je reçois. Le vendredi à 10h30 semble être un bon moment pour ça, et quand c'est possible, je peux aussi le faire spontanément.
• enregistrer des vidéos pour partager ce que j'apprends, et packager mes fonctions pour les rendre réutilisables quand c'est possible
  • Comme les éléments précédents, partager mes idées et mon travail peut aider d'autres personnes et lancer des conversations. Si j'améliore subed-record.el pour combiner des enregistrements vidéo et audio avec des captures d'écran et des sous-titres, je peux créer des vidéos plus facilement.
• écrire davantage en français et améliorer mon environnement à cet effet
  • J'apprécie la stimulation mentale d'écrire dans une autre langue. Beaucoup de gens apprennent d'autres langues, donc nous pouvons nous aider. Par exemple, mes fonctions pour surligner les nouveaux mots et les erreurs grammaticales pourraient être utiles.
• pratiquer l'expression orale en faisant des enregistrements audio avec l'aide de subed-record et la synthèse vocale pour améliorer ma prononciation
  • L'avantage de l'implémentation dans Emacs est que je peux personnaliser mon flux de travail. Par exemple, je veux écrire mon brouillon, puis enregistrer l'audio phrase par phrase après l'avoir écouté. Je veux aussi modifier un enregistrement de mon rendez-vous avec ma tutrice pour que je garde seulement mes dernières essaies de prononciation.
• améliorer les processus pour EmacsConf et Emacs News
  • Il se peut que je puisse l'organiser en grande partie par moi-même, mais il se peut aussi que d'autres bénévoles m'aident, ce qui serait encore mieux. Je veux créer l'infrastructure pour gérer plusieurs réunions virtuelles simultanément, probablement grâce à la reconnaissance vocale, la spatialisation audio, et de nombreux raccourcis clavier. Je veux aussi améliorer mon processus de sous-titrage.

Plus j'en fais dans Emacs, plus je pense à des idées d'amélioration…

Thanks to Christian Tietze for hosting!

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

Having another look at my AI assistant - ollama-buddy, its been a while and it seems ollama has moved on since I started creating this package last year, so I have developed a new roadmap and the first step is to add ollama cloud models!

Here are some references to the project, including a youtube channel where I upload ollama-buddy demonstrations:

https://melpa.org/#/ollama-buddy

https://github.com/captainflasmr/ollama-buddy

Here is the changelog for the cloud model implementation:

<2026-01-28 Wed> 1.1

Added Ollama Cloud Models support

• Cloud models (running on ollama.com infrastructure) now work seamlessly
• ollama-buddy-cloud-signin to automatically open browser for authentication
• Cloud models are proxied through the local Ollama server which handles authentication
• Use C-u C-c m or transient menu “Model > Cloud” to select cloud models
• Status line shows ☁ indicator when using a cloud model
• Available cloud models include: qwen3-coder:480b-cloud, deepseek-v3.1:671b-cloud, gpt-oss:120b-cloud, minimax-m2.1:cloud, and more

John Gruber, over at Daring Fireball has a post, Untitled Document Syndrome, that makes two points of interest to Irreal readers. The first involves the difficulty of initially saving what he calls “untitled documents”. He’s writing about macOS, of course, but even through I’ve used one Mac or another for almost two decades, I had a hard time figuring out what he was talking about. I guess it’s this: in some Apple text apps you can start typing without specifying a document name or a file path for where it should be saved. That means that when you first save the file you have to negotiate the file save dialog to supply this information.

Since I write everything in Emacs, this never happens to me. Part of starting a new file is executing a find-file which specifies its name and file system location. Even then, I just specify it in the minibuffer; there’s no annoying open dialog to deal with. The first time I save it is like any other time¹: a simple Ctrl+x Ctrl+s.

The point of all this is that the difficulty of the initial save means that people will put it off and therefore suffer disaster when the app or system crashes. They may even lose hours of work. Happily, that first save is easy in Emacs so there’s no reason—not even a weak one like the save dialog—for putting it off.

Even if you do put it off, Emacs, like Gruber’s editor BBEdit, has you covered. It does periodic automatic backups so you never lose more than a little work.

The second point is related and concerns note taking apps. Like most of us—at least us oldtimers—Gruber stated taking notes by creating a file for each one with his editor. As we’ve all discovered, that doesn’t work all that well so he moved to Yojimbo and discovered that he was taking many more notes. As you all know, I solved the same problem with Journelly. I use it as my memo book and typically make about 10 entries per day. People think of Journelly as integrated with Emacs but it can also save its data in Markdown so it’s perfectly usable on any system and editor as long as you’re using an iPhone.

It’s amusing how 40 year old technology is still more convenient and easier to use than “modern” systems with dialog boxes for everything.

As much as I enjoy using Eshell, it is not without its annoyances. In this case, I’m writing about the common shell convention of using !n to recall a previously entered command.

In Eshell, entering the history command will show you all of your previously entered commands alongside a number n.

The problem is in attempting to use !n to recall a specific command in Eshell as one would do in bash or zsh. By default it will not work as described in Info (eshell) History without configuring eshell-expand-input-functions first. (My current configuration is GNU Emacs 30.2.)

To get !n to work requires adding the function eshell-expand-history-references to the customizable variable eshell-expand-input-functions.

The following configuration Elisp will achieve this.

1
2

(add-to-list 'eshell-expand-input-functions
 #'eshell-expand-history-references)

A nice feature of eshell-expand-history-references is that it will expand using the content of an actual command instead of a number reference. So !foo will invoke the last command that you entered the string “foo” in.

It’s not clear to me whether coupling n^th history support to eshell-expand-history-references is intentional or a bug. If the former, then I’d consider this yet another example of staying “on brand” with Emacs’ tendency to ship with questionable defaults. That shade aside, Eshell is still an amazing package that I could not imagine using Emacs without.

Links

• History (Eshell: The Emacs Shell)

I’ve discovered, over the years, that setting a clear intention is closely correlated to a day well spent. I know that, when I decide what I want to do early in the morning—before being overwhelmed by email, Slack, Zulip, Discord, and all the other little attention grabbers—that I have a better chance of doing something I care about.

It seems like, in 2026, slow, intentional work is en vogue, with books like Burkeman’s “Meditations for Mortals” and Cal Newport’s “Slow Productivity” doing the rounds. As my friends know, I am fascinated (and inspired) by the Stoics and enjoy listening to the various teachers on Waking Up, many of whom echo the same idea: that mindful, focused effort is vastly more satisfying than responding to whatever seems urgent.

Time-blocking #

How we set intention is personal, and recommending any specific system feels trite. However, I have found that, for me, planning a rough schedule for the day—often called time-blocking—is a great way to think about what I want to do, how much of it I want to do, and when I want to do it.

Trying to follow such a schedule brings home many realities quickly:

• That the hours go by more quickly than one tends to think. For me, this is a reminder that the day is precious.
• That we often do a poor job at estimating how long work will take. Typically, we imagine we can do much more in a day than is realistic.
• That unscheduled interruptions are common. And others, like breaks for exercise, eating, etc., should be taken into consideration.

Implementation #

I use org-mode to outline my day, and have capture templates for each week and each day. For this year, I have a file 2026.org in which I capture all those entries.

The day planner template is most relevant here:

** %u

- [ ] Scan [[mu4e:query:maildir:/INBOX flag:flagged][pinned emails]] for new tasks (max 10 mins)
- [ ] Scan [[https://github.com/notifications][GitHub]] for new tasks (max 10 mins)

*** Plan
**** 
**** Lunch + walk <%<%Y-%m-%d %a 13:00-13:45>>
**** 
**** Tidy up <%<%Y-%m-%d %a 16:45-17:00>>

*** Notes

It is then hooked up to my org-capture-templates. I use org-indent mode, so all those heading stars collapse.

The part I’d like to discuss in this post is the “Plan” section, where I outline my work for the day.

The time stamps in org-mode are neat: you’ll see the lunch entry goes from 13:00 to 13:45 (and this is how it is stored on disk), but when modifying it in org-mode it is displayed for editing in the minibuffer as 13:00+0:45. This makes it very easy to adjust the duration of an event. Note that the day timestamp (%u) is inactive, whereas the time blocks are active, so that only the latter appear in today’s Agenda view.

Elisp functions #

The above template is sufficient for doing time blocking in org-mode. However, we can reduce some friction in how we use it by adding some utility functions for common activities.

Here are three such functions that help me to craft and modify my daily plan smoothly:

1. Quickly navigate to today’s plan

   This command is invoked inside 2026.org, and navigates to the current week, then day, then to the end of the “Plan” entry.

   (defun stefanv/org-jump-to-today-plan ()
     "Jump to the end of the 'Plan' heading under today's date headline."
     (interactive)
     (let* ((today (regexp-quote (format-time-string (org-time-stamp-format nil t))))
            (today-re (concat "^\\*+ .*?" today)))
       (goto-char (point-min))
       (if (not (re-search-forward today-re nil t))
           (message "Heading matching %s not found." today)
         (org-reveal)
         (save-restriction
           (org-narrow-to-subtree)
           (goto-char (point-min))
           ;; Matches 'Plan' heading and optional trailing tags
           (if (re-search-forward "^\\*+ Plan\\(?:[ \t]*\\(:[[:alnum:]_@:]+:\\)\\)?[ \t]*$" nil t)
             (org-end-of-subtree)
             (widen)
             (message "No exact 'Plan' heading found under today's date."))))))
   

   It specifically searches for a * Plan heading, so if you modify the template be sure to update the regexp accordingly.

2. Add a new planner entry, which follows the previous

   This function takes the end time of the previous entry, and uses it as the start time for a new entry.

   It tries to be somewhat clever at guessing your intention:

   • If you invoke it on a blank line, it searches upward for the previous timestamp, and turns the current line into a heading.
   • If invoked inside a section that already has a timestamp, it turns the next line into a timestamped heading.
   • If invoked on a heading line without a timestamp, it adds the timestamp to the end, preserving cursor position.

   (defun stefanv/org-plan-next ()
     "Create a new day plan entry following on the current or previous lines's active timestamp."
     (interactive)
     (let* ((ts-found (save-excursion
                        (end-of-line)
                        (when (re-search-backward org-ts-regexp0 nil t)
                          (let ((ctx (org-element-context)))
                            (when (eq (org-element-type ctx) 'timestamp) ctx)))))
            (is-blank (string-blank-p (buffer-substring (line-beginning-position) (line-end-position))))
            (is-header (org-at-heading-p))
            ;; Check if the found timestamp is actually on the current line
            (on-current-line (and ts-found
                                  (>= (org-element-property :begin ts-found)
                                      (line-beginning-position)))))
       (if (not ts-found)
           (user-error "No timestamp found above point")
         (cond
          ;; Already has TS OR is plain text -> new heading below
          ((or on-current-line (and (not is-blank) (not is-header)))
           (end-of-line)
           (org-insert-heading)
           (save-excursion (stefanv/insert-formatted-org-ts ts-found)))
   
          ;; Current line is blank -> turn into heading here
          (is-blank
           (org-insert-heading)
           (save-excursion (stefanv/insert-formatted-org-ts ts-found)))
   
          ;; Current line is a header (no TS) -> append TS and return cursor
          (t
           (save-excursion
             (end-of-line)
             (stefanv/insert-formatted-org-ts ts-found)))))))
   
   (defun stefanv/insert-formatted-org-ts (ts)
     "Helper to insert formatted timestamp with exactly one preceding space."
     (just-one-space)
     (insert (format "<%s %02d:%02d>"
                     (org-format-timestamp ts "%Y-%m-%d %a")
                     (or (org-element-property :hour-end ts)
                         (org-element-property :hour-start ts) 0)
                     (or (org-element-property :minute-end ts)
                         (org-element-property :minute-start ts) 0))))
   

   If you use it often, you can bind the function to a key:

   (keymap-set org-mode-map "C-c C-x p" #'stefanv/org-plan-next)
   

3. Move all timestamps in a region forward by N minutes.

   Sometimes, a day runs away from us, or we get carried away and miss the end of a timeblock. At that point, you’d likely want to shift your entire day forward. The following function lets you select several planner items and shift them all by N minutes (positive or negative). If no region is selected, operate on the current line.

   There’s some fancy footwork to ensure that the surrounding org buffer is re-rendered, especially when using org-modern.

   (defun stefanv/org-shift-timestamps-in-region (minutes)
     "Shift all active timestamps in the region (or current line) forward by MINUTES minutes."
     (interactive "nMinutes to shift: ")
     (let* ((region-active (use-region-p))
            (beg (if region-active (region-beginning) (line-beginning-position)))
            (end (copy-marker (if region-active (region-end) (line-end-position))))
            ;; Regex for active timestamps: matches < followed by anything until >
            (active-ts-re "<\\([0-9]\\{4\\}-[0-9]\\{2\\}-[0-9]\\{2\\}.*?\\)>"))
       ;; Allow undoing everything in one step
       (atomic-change-group
         (save-excursion
           (goto-char beg)
           ;; Shift active timestamps
           (while (re-search-forward active-ts-re end t)
             (save-excursion
               (goto-char (match-beginning 0))
               (org-timestamp-change minutes 'minute)
               (when (fboundp 'org-element-cache-refresh)
                 (org-element-cache-refresh (point)))))
   
           ;; Re-align tags for any headlines in the range
           (goto-char beg)
           (while (re-search-forward org-outline-regexp-bol end t)
             (org-align-tags))))
   
       ;; Refresh
       (font-lock-flush beg end)
       (set-marker end nil)
       (message "Shifted active timestamps by %s minutes." minutes)))
   

Conclusion #

I’ve presented three utility functions that help me quickly plan and organize my day. I’d love to hear from you how you plan yours!

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

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

Below are the release notes.

Version 2.1.0 on 2026-01-27

This version introduces two carefully designed, legible and colourful themes: ef-orange (light) and ef-fig (dark). Both draw inspiration from the fruits they are name after.

The convenience commands ef-themes-select-dark and ef-themes-select-light use the minibuffer to select+load an Ef theme that is either dark or light, respectively. The more general command is ef-themes-select.

All screen shots of the themes are updated to reflect their current status: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/ef-themes-pictures.

Remember that since version 2.0.0 the ef-themes are built on top of my modus-themes. This means that most of the changes happen to Modus and are inherited by Ef.

I’ve been an Emacs user for more than 25 years, and I’d say I’ve got a reasonable handle on customizing it. I can writeelisp, and I’ve got a couple decades of accumulated tweaking cruft on display in my dotfilesrepo. I’ve writtenadvice, I bind custom functions to keys, andI’m actually writing this right now with a customized mode for Hugomarkdown that I ginned up when Iwas getting annoyed by the way fill-paragraph worked inside Hugo shortcodes.

The reason Emacs is so attractive to those of us who use it is its infinite customizibility. There’s really not muchyou can’t alter or intercept or rewrite with enough effort, and over time your editor will come to fit you like awell-worn boot.

However, there are plenty of minor annoyances that I just live with. No one’s built the exact package that I want, andlearning enough to do it myself would be shaving just oneyak too many. So I do things by hand,or use the mouse instead of having a shortcut that jumps to whatever-it-is, or I deal with the hard-to-read log outputinstead of nice syntax highlighting.

LLMs: yak power-shears

LLMs, it turns out, are pretty good at elisp. There is a ton of open-source training data and gooddocumentation. So far I’ve successfully had Gemini or Claude build me:

• A tree-sitter grammar and major mode for the Cedar policy language
• A function to extract backtraces from a json-formatted log that my application at work emits, and pretty-print them
• Syntax highlighting for my application’s Go test logs that plays nice with go-test-mode.

Unfortunately my biggest successes have all been for work, done on work machines with AI paid for by work, so I can’tpublish them here (at some point I’ll go through channels and see if I can open source some of it), but here’s someredacted logs that show the pretty formatting I was able to achieve:

And here’s a slightly-mangled version of the code that produces it. Note most of the comments and doc comes straightfrom Gemini:

(defgroup work-log-faces nil "Faces for Work integration test logs.");; Define faces(defface work-log-timestamp  '((t :inherit font-lock-comment-face :foreground "#6c757d"))  "Face for timestamps." :group 'work-log-faces)(defface work-log-level  '((t :inherit font-lock-keyword-face :weight bold))  "Face for log levels (INFO, WARN)." :group 'work-log-faces)(defface work-log-message  '((t :inherit font-lock-string-face :foreground "#e0e0e0"))  "Face for the log message text." :group 'work-log-faces)(defface work-log-json  '((t :inherit font-lock-constant-face :height 0.9))  "Face for the JSON payload." :group 'work-log-faces);; Define the matching rules(defvar work-log-font-lock-keywords  '(("^\\([0-9T:.-]+\\)[ \t]+\\([A-Z]+\\)[ \t]+\\(.*?\\)[ \t]+\\({.*}\\)?$"     (1 'work-log-timestamp t)     (2 'work-log-level)     (3 'work-log-message)     (4 'work-log-json)))  "Regex keywords to highlight structured logs.");; 1. Define the control flag (default to nil)(defvar -work-test-highlighting-active nil  "If non-nil, apply custom log highlighting in go-test-mode.");; 2. Define the function that checks the flag(defun my:work-apply-logs-highlight ()  "Apply highlighting only if the Work test flag is active."  (when -work-test-highlighting-active    (font-lock-add-keywords nil work-log-font-lock-keywords t)));; 3. Add it to the hook;; Note: go-test usually runs in `go-test-mode` or `compilation-mode`(add-hook 'go-test-mode-hook #'my:work-apply-logs-highlight)

Specifics

So far I’ve used two primary interfaces to LLMs: Claude Code, especially Claude-code-ide forEmacs, and the Gemini web interface. For Claude I’ve been using Opus4.5, for Gemini 3 either Thinking or Pro. Keep in mind that most of the time my company is paying for tokens, so I’mnot being particularly cost-conscious (sorry, bean-counters). I haven’t done any serious comparisons of models andinterface because…all the modern models work pretty well for this sort of thing.

For both syntax highlighting and the backtraces, I was able to simply paste in a sample of the input and describe whatI’d like, and it was able to give me some elisp I could drop into my .emacs.d.

The ts grammar and mode needed a bit more back-and-forth and some actual debugging (by both myself and Gemini). I thinkif I had less elisp experience I wouldn’t have been able to vibecode the whole solution, but I’ve never really written ats grammar or a major mode before that was more than a tweak or two, and it got me 80% of what I needed.

Go forth and customize

The code that Gemini wrote for the font-locking wasn’t revolutionary. It ended up just writing a regex, some faces, andcalling font-lock-add-keywords. But I’ve barely messed withfont-lock or face definitions myself before and I didn’t know any of the relevant functions off the top of my head. Icould have figured it out, but it wouldn’t have been worth my time. The LLM shaved most of the yak for me.

So next time you’re annoyed by a missing motion command, or ugly output, or you wish you had a command that worked justa bit differently, ask Claude/Gemini/your favorite LLM to fix it for you. Not only will you fix your problem, but ifyou take just a bit of time to review the output (and you’re not gonna just blindly throw LLM code in your .emacs right?RIGHT?), you may learn about a subsystem you didn’t know before. I’m sure you can do this with Neovim or, to a lesserextent, VSCode or other editors that have reasonable extension points, so go fix them too. Your yaks will thank you come summer.

• Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
  • Emacs Berlin (hybrid, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Jan 28 0930 America/Vancouver - 1130 America/Chicago - 1230 America/Toronto - 1730 Etc/GMT - 1830 Europe/Berlin - 2300 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Jan 29 0130 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs APAC: UPDATED Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/january-2026/ Sat Jan 31 0030 America/Vancouver - 0230 America/Chicago - 0330 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/GMT - 0930 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #2 2026 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/d6225b76-8f80-46c7-bc14-35d21b0c5ef0 Mon Feb 2 1900 CET
  • EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/312922157/ Thu Feb 5 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto – Fri Feb 6 0000 Etc/GMT - 0100 Europe/Berlin - 0530 Asia/Kolkata - 0800 Asia/Singapore
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Feb 6 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Sat Feb 7 0000 Asia/Singapore
• Emacs Lisp:
  • dash.el for nice list operations
  • Trevoke/mock-fs.el: "fake filesystem" for elisp test suites - Codeberg.org (Reddit)
  • duckdb-query.el - Bidirectional DuckDB SQL/Elisp bridge: query parquet, CSV, org-tables, alists IN THE SAME SQL statement SEAMLESSLY (Reddit)
• Appearance:
  • indent-bars is now @v1.0 (Reddit)
• Navigation:
  • Three important distinctions in Emacs: mini buffer and echo, mark and point, window and frame (04:36)
  • You can now merge tabs in emacs (Reddit)
  • scroll-around.el: Scroll the view by paragraph or line while keeping the cursor at the same screen position. (Reddit) see alternatives in the comments
  • Avy-flash: replicating flash.nvim in Emacs (vibe-coded) (Reddit) - note discussion in comments; you can just use avy-flash.el instead of the full fork of avy
• Dired:
  • Why You Don’t Need a File Manager (If You Use Emacs) (13:47)
• Writing:
  • Developing yet another way to do research in Emacs - fool's errand? (13:34) - highlighting EPUBs, taking notes, organizing, doing syntopic reading
  • Emacs tricks DYI: surround src blocks in markdown (07:06)
• Org Mode:
  • Berean Standard Bible in org mode (Reddit)
  • Jack Baty: Blogging with org-mode and ox-hugo again
  • How to Open Obsidian Links in Org Mode – Curtis McHale (YouTube 2:46, @curtismchale)
  • Design Decisions: Building a Modern Technical Blog | Charlie Holland's Blog (Feature demo, Reddit) - org-mode and SvelteKit
  • Org development:
    • ox-man: Add support for footer-inside and header-middle
    • org-lint: Add check for priorities
    • speed-commands: Adapt priority commands to user options
• Completion:
  • Typing emojis with :shortcodes: in Emacs
• Coding:
  • Fast JSON path extraction via Tree-sitter (Reddit) - will be part of Emacs 31
  • Tree-sitter vs Language Servers (Reddit)
• Shells:
  • Writing pipeline commands in Eshell
  • Major mode for Nushell scripts, powered by treesitter (Reddit)
• Web:
  • Announcing Casual EWW (Reddit, Irreal)
• Mail, news, and chat:
  • punchagan: Elfeed DB backup hooks
  • [Package] sign.el: an Emacs interface for Signal via signal-cli JSON-RPC. (Reddit)
• Doom Emacs:
  • (Doom) Emacs Config Bits
• Multimedia:
  • Sacha Chua: Emacs and whisper.el: Trying out different speech-to-text backends and models
  • Yay Emacs live-coding: tweaking my whisper.el setup (46:11)
• AI:
  • OpenCode Agent Chaining: Planner-Editor-Review Workflow - ZashBoy.com
  • dev-agent-backlog (org-mode system for coding agents) is now a claude plugin (Reddit)
  • openspec.el - Interface for OpenSpec, a tool for spec-driven AI coding assistant development
  • You can have Andrej Kaparthy's Council of LLMs anywhere: Antigravity! Claude Code! Emacs! (27:32)
• Community:
  • Emacs vs. vim Real World Analogy: Cargo Bike Vs. Folding Bike (@publicvoit@graz.social)
  • Christian Tietze: Emacs Carnival 2026-01: “This Year, I’ll …”
    • This Year I'll… · Curious Musings
    • Emacs Carnival Jan 26: “This Year, I’ll de-obfuscate” | zimblog
• Other:
  • Another beautiful modeline: maple-modeline, and share some packages that I've written: maple-preview, -note, -translate, -iedit, -scratch, -diff, -minibuffer
  • Emacs: easily set timers with TMR (14:33, Reddit)
  • Emacs в 2026: Секретное оружие или старый хлам? |vim, vscode, lisp, org-mode|Podlodka Podcast #460 (01:43:00)
  • Experimental Skia rendering backend as cairo alternative
  • Unofficial Emacs Portable Binary v31.0.50 (Reddit) - Linux only
• Emacs development:
  • emacs-devel: Re: Auto-suggesting Packages - Eli Zaretskii
  • Add 'select-frame-by-id' and 'undelete-frame-by-id' (Bug#80192)
  • Support cons cell for 'line-spacing'
  • New bindings for vc-revert
  • Flymake support for yaml-ts-mode.
  • Add JSON path utility command to json-ts-mode
  • (garbage-collect-heapsize): New function
  • * lisp/tab-bar.el (tab-bar-split-tab): New command.

• New packages:

  • advent-mode: Advent of Code mode (MELPA)
  • denote-review: implements review process for denote notes (GNU ELPA)
  • devcontainer: Support for devcontainer (MELPA)
  • magit-git-toolbelt: A Magit interface for git-toolbelt (MELPA)
  • mu4e-llm: AI-powered email assistance for mu4e (MELPA)
  • org-roam-latte: Auto-highlight unlinked Org-roam references (MELPA)
  • ox-reveal-layouts: Predefined layouts for ox-reveal (MELPA)
  • signel: Signal client for Emacs via signal-cli JSON-RPC (MELPA)
  • tengo-mode: Major mode for the Tengo programming language (MELPA)
  • ultisnips-mode: Major mode for editing Ultisnips snippets (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 e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

A couple of weeks ago I read a lovely story in The New Yorker by Calvin Tompkins about starting a journal in his hundredth year. Tompkins was born the same year that The New Yorker was founded and, ironically, spent most of his working life writing for the magazine. Last year—his hundredth—he surprised himself by deciding to start a journal as a sort of countdown to his hundredth birthday. The story is mostly entries from the journal but I found them fascinating. Perhaps you will too. If nothing else, you’ll get a first hand glimpse of what old age really looks like. The TL;DR is that there’s good news and bad news.

In any event—although I am nowhere near my hundredth year—I was inspired to start my own journal. Of course, it was going to be written with Emacs but the question is how. There is the builtin journal app as well as some third party packages but I chose simplicity. I didn’t need anything special or complex with arcane functions so I just added an Org capture template to create a file+datetree file in Org mode. Here’s the whole thing:

("J" "Personal Journal" entry (file+datetree "~/org/personal-journal.org")
         "* %<%R: >%? \n%t" :empty-lines-before 1)

I have some startup options in the file itself to set visual-line-mode, use a variable pitch mode, and couple of other things: the same setup that I use for my blog posts. All this is simple and familiar. There’s nothing new for me to learn since it’s basically the same setup that I use everyday to write my Irreal posts.

The takeaway is that if you’d like to start a journal, it’s really easy. Just use a simple Org file with a corresponding capture template.

Here is just a quick one, I was working with an org-mode table for tracking work weeks and needed to auto-populate a Date column where each row increments by exactly one week. The table structure looked like this:

The first row has a base date (2026-01-05), and I wanted subsequent rows to automatically calculate as weekly increments: 2026-01-12, 2026-01-19, and so on.

Initially, I tried several approaches that seemed logical but encountered #ERROR results and eventually settled on a working solution which is to hardcode the base date directly in the formula:

#+TBLFM: $3='(format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d" (time-add (date-to-time "2026-01-05") (* (- @# 2) 7 24 3600)))

which gave:

and I can now of course extend the table for all the weeks in the year and I don’t have to fill in manually any more!

Here’s how it works:

• (date-to-time "2026-01-05") - Convert the hardcoded base date to Emacs time format
• (- @# 2) - Calculate the offset from the base row
• (* (- @# 2) 7 24 3600) - Convert the offset to seconds (weeks × days × hours × seconds)
• time-add - Add the offset to the base date
• format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d" - Format back to ISO date string

To ensure that my skepticism of LLMs did not blind me to progress, and to keep my finger on the pulse, I’ve been incorporating them into my Emacs config, starting with gptel and, more recently, macher. In December, I took another look at Gemini, and noticed a significant improvement over Flash 2.5 with the arrival of Flash 3 Preview.

In this post, I share the configuration I currently use, and mention some open questions I still hope to address.

Tools #

gptel is a beautifully clean and simple interface for LLM chat. Despite its simplicity, it actually has fairly advanced functionality, which includes MCP integration, introspection of queries, multi-modal input (such as images), and tool usage (extending LLMs with access to elisp functions of your choosing).

macher runs on top of gptel. It provides a “pseudo-agentic” workflow, in which you provide the LLM context about your current project, such as the list of files. It also defines several tools that the LLM can use, such as the ability to read files. You can use macher to generate a patch, which you then review, apply the parts you like, or ask macher for further improvements.

Configuration #

The macher installation simply follows the recommendations in its README:

(use-package macher
  :custom
  ;; better folding and source block highlighting of the reasoning process
  (macher-action-buffer-ui 'org)

  :config
  (macher-install)
  (macher-enable))

And here is the basic gptel configuration, ensuring that macher is pre-loaded:

(use-package gptel
  :commands (gptel gptel-mode)
  :config
  (require 'macher))

Now the model definition for Gemini, to access the latest 3.0 models:

;; https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models
(setq
  gptel-model 'gemini-3-flash-preview
  gptel-backend (gptel-make-gemini "Gemini"
                  :key "<Get your key at aistudio.google.com>"
                  :stream t
                  :models '(gemini-3-flash-preview
                            gemini-3-pro-preview
                            gemini-2.5-flash
                            gemini-2.5-pro)))

Note how you list the models you want to choose from, and then pick the default.

You will need an API key, which you can generate at https://aistudio.google.com. I’m pretty sure you also need to activate billing to access gemini-3-flash-preview, but let me know if you succeed without doing that. My total cost, after playing around with it a bunch this week, was ~3 USD.

If your Emacs config lives in a public repository or on an untrusted machine, you’ll want to be careful in adding the token to it. gptel automatically uses tokens listed in ~/.authinfo. See Mastering Emacs for more on auth-source.

Adding Google search #

EDIT: I’ve since noticed that, while adding the search tool this way works, it also messes up macher. So, don’t try this yet until #750 is resolved.

The above configuration works fine, but I noticed that some answers were outdated. Gemini supports “grounding” via Google Search. For example, instead of telling you that TypeScript 5.3 is the newest release (which it was, at the time of its training), it can use Google Search to verify that, in fact, the latest version is 5.9.

gptel#750 tracks the issue, but in the meantime you can manually adjust the query sent to Google, and tell it to enable Grounding with Google Search:

;; Enable Google Search capability for gemini
(cl-defmethod gptel--request-data :around ((backend gptel-gemini) prompts)
  "Add search ability to Gemini requests."
  (plist-put (cl-call-next-method) :tools (append '(:google_search ()))))

This is obviously just a temporary hack, until #750 can be resolved.

Grounding with Search may incur additional costs, as per the Gemini API docs:

5,000 prompts per month (free), then (Coming soon**) $14 / 1,000 search queries

Usage #

To generate a patch on your current project, you must do two things:

1. Select project: Tell macher which project you’re working on. The easiest way to do this is to open a gptel buffer (which you can give any name you like, e.g. gemini:add-tests) and then M-x cd (change directory) into your project.

   I haven’t checked, but I suspect this requires the project to be under version control.

2. Activate macher: As part of your query, mention @macher anywhere to enable it. E.g., @macher add unit test scaffolding. C-c <enter> executes the query.

   If you type @macher and it does not get highlighted with a little box surrounding the text, then macher isn’t correctly installed. Try running M-: (macher-install) manually.

   You can add additional context to a query (e.g., a programming guidance document outside of the project) using gptel-add (this is standard gptel functionality).

While the query is executing, it displays a folded reasoning block. You can type TAB to unfold it, and watch the various steps the LLM takes. After a while, a patch will be generated in a separate window.

You can apply the entire patch using diff-apply-buffer, or single parts of the patch with diff-apply-hunk.

Issues to resolve #

With my configuration, diff-apply-buffer works fine as long as only existing files are modified. When new files need to be created, it misunderstands the file prefix in the patch, and fails to auto-complete its name. I filed an issue to discuss that with the macher author at macher#45, and hopefully can post an update soon.

Conclusion #

LLMs recently seem to have undergone a phase change in coding ability. Of course, even in this phase any code generated needs to be very carefully reviewed and tested. Andrej Karpathy’s tweet earlier today summarizes where we stand quite well (I recommend reading the top comments too).

E.g., when talking about the new capability, he also warns:

The nearest neighbor really is some kind of a junior engineer. Its ideas about what experiments to run […] have been surprisingly bad, but its execution on ideas I’ve given it have been surprisingly good. — https://x.com/karpathy/status/2015888674739912910

The mistakes have changed a lot - they are not simple syntax errors anymore, they are subtle conceptual errors that a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev might do. The most common category is that the models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They also don’t manage their confusion, they don’t seek clarifications, they don’t surface inconsistencies, they don’t present tradeoffs, they don’t push back when they should, and they are still a little too sycophantic. — https://x.com/karpathy/status/2015883857489522876

So, while we should tread with care, there are exciting avenues to explore. I’ve been developing open source computational libraries for a long time, and as our ecosystem grows I notice myself spending more and more time on maintenance, and less and less time on reading papers and developing new features. My hope is that LLMs will free our small communities—who have very limited time and resources—from repetitive, tiring maintenance tasks, so we may return to what we love to do: crafting intuitive APIs around innovative algorithms that, in turn, enable real-world science.

Does Emacs run slower on macOS than it does on a similar machine running Linux? I don’t know. I’ve been running Emacs almost exclusively on macOS for somewhere around 17 years so its performance on macOS, whatever it is, seems normal to me.

Over at the Emacs reddit, staff-engineer says that he runs it on both macOS and on Linux. The Apple machine is, in fact, more powerful than the Linux one but is nevertheless less performant when running Emacs and staff-engineer wonders why.

He received several excellent answers that are definitely worth reading but I especially like the one from totbwf who explains that a large part of the problem is that macOS uses a tiny size for its pty buffers and that this can significantly slow down Emacs when it calls an external process using a process-connection-type of pty. His solution to this is to simply advise functions calling start-process to use pipes instead of ptys. He says that this can speed up these actions by a factor of 10. For Magit, he says that you can get the same result by simply setting magit-process-connection-type to nil.

Even if you don’t want to add a lot of advises to your configuration, it may be worthwhile making this one simple change to Magit if you use it a lot.

To be honest, I have no idea if these fixes will work or not but they’re easy to try if you feel Emacs is too slow on macOS. If changing the connection type helps, I would think that someone would fix it in Emacs core for macOS installations. It doesn’t sound like it would be too hard but one of the problems is that there are few Apple users helping with development.

When I mentioned Denote again a couple of days ago, Omar commented that whenever someone mentions using Denote or org-roam, he’s curious to know if that person tried vanilla org-mode first, without additional packages.

I get it. After all, I’ve been resisting the whole Zettelkasten bandwagon and org-roam with it for a while, keeping the same opinion about org-roam Omar seems to have about Denote (I’m speculating here, of course). In general, I don’t like the idea of Doom Emacs or Spacemacs for the same reasons. Denote, for some reason, never registered this way. I liked it from day one.

As I was answering his question and he asked for more details, I thought it might make a good post. So here we are.

Not a whole lot changed for me since I first looked into Denote. I still mostly use it for my blog posts (like the one you’re reading right now) and my info notes, which mostly contain technical how-tos to myself and to a lesser degree, some records and memos, like a list of equipment in my home or who’s who at work. At this point, I also have a third, personal folder with notes only on my Linux computer as well, which mostly contain “supplemental” notes as I call them to journal entries I want to expand on in private (I use my work iPhone with Journelly, which does a fantastic job, but I don’t trust Apple or any cloud service for that matter with my private stuff).

It has been slow progress, but I’ve improved my usability with Denote, which I recently enhanced further after having the pleasure of talking to Prot 1:1 in one of his online tutoring sessions (always a pleasure, and highly recommended if you ask me).

The main philosophy behind Denote is something I’ve been in agreement with for a long time, before I started using it, or Emacs, or even got familiar with Linux: the idea of how to date and rename files. I’ve never agreed with the American way of writing dates, and I always prefer the ISO format: yyyymmdd followed by hhmm. To me, this is how things should be organized. So when Denote came around with Prot explaining that this is how he sees files should be organized - date, followed by keywords, and then a title - it just clicked.

You can extend this file-naming scheme to all your personal files if you’d like (at least all the files you visit with Dired), and I’m in the process of doing exactly that. Because the renaming function is built into Denote, it’s easy to stay concise and avoid mistakes (for example, renaming one file 20260124 something, and then another 2026124, emitting the 0 for January). While it’s true you could easily do that without Denote, to me, this core piece was like a sign that said, “Hey, look at this, this guy is building a package that is based on something that makes sense, check it out.”

Tags are another important part of Denote. Org-mode has tags built into headers, which works, but the headers, to me, are a bit too specific to need them. For the most part, I can get the level of information I need through the header itself, and I use tags to associate a certain header with a person - but even that is not useful, as I often work with too many people for the tags to really mean anything. Meanwhile, it’s the files themselves that need tags: certain workflows are similar, but are tagged to work for different operating systems (say, how to set my work VPN on Linux vs on my Mac), or maybe I have a naming convention for different departments at work, and I want to tag the relevant departments.

I didn’t always break my different workflows and notes into files. In the past, I had one org file as a wiki: a single file with many headers explaining workflows and procedures. I often had errors there. It was one big file that I often opened and edited, so I had syncing issues, headers that got mixed up, etc. The other problem I had with the wiki was logical: at times, a certain subheader would fit under two different headers, and I would have a hard time deciding where to place something. Headers work as categories, while tags work as ,well, tags. If we take the VPN example from before, I could put my VPN instructions under “networking,” “security,” or “remote work,” but not all. I don’t have this problem with Denote.

Another, more recent skill I started using with Denote is its metadata and search features. Meta notes work as an index of other files, where I can have one file with a dynamic list (updated whenever the file is loaded) of live links to other files with the same tag or other regex I use. Meanwhile, searching with Denote using denote-grep (something I learned recently) shows a list of all the files matching my search in collapsible form, making it easy to find what I need. I can use one of many denote-query forms to filter those results even further, and of course, there’s denote-consult, which, well, if you know consult, you know what it does, and it’s excellent.

Finding stuff is a central issue for anyone keeping notes, no matter what system they use. Denote supplies me with the best tools I’ve seen for this job. It’s true that many of these tools are already available in Emacs and in org-mode. Denote doesn’t alter these existing options; rather, it builds on them. In fact, that’s a big part of Denote: the way its commands are constructed borrows from what Emacs already does, so if you’re familiar with one, you intuitively know what the same thing would do inside Denote.

Another example of the above is the org files you create with Denote. You can use Denote directly with a capture template, and each file is created with file tags that make sense if you use org-mode: #-title, #+date and #+filetags, which denote changes automatically as you rename files with it. These work together with additional options I include in my notes, such as #+STARTUP: inlineimages. In a Markdown export, such as this very post you’re reading now, Emacs knows to ignore these org-mode only options, so I don’t need to clean them out when I’m ready to post. It’s a nice touch that already exists in vanilla org-mode, but with the added benefits of Denote, like having my post tagged, dated, and easily found in a search alongside the rest of my Denote files in the future.

There are definitely more features of Denote I don’t use, or use enough (blacklinks, which I believe are more of a recent introduction, is one of them), but as I stated above, this is a process. I learn more every week, and as my notes collection increases, so does my understanding of how to use Denote in a way that works for me.

Since the switching to eglot I've ended up making a few related changes.

(defun mes/toggle-flymake-buffer-diagnostics ()
  (interactive)
  (if-let* ((window (get-buffer-window (flymake--diagnostics-buffer-name))))
      (save-selected-window (quit-window nil window))
    (flymake-show-buffer-diagnostics)))

(defun mes/toggle-flymake-project-diagnostics ()
  (interactive)
  (if-let* ((window (get-buffer-window (flymake--project-diagnostics-buffer (projectile-project-root)))))
      (save-selected-window (quit-window nil window))
    (flymake-show-project-diagnostics)))

(use-package haskell-ng-mode
  :afer eglot
  :ensure (:type git
           :repo "git@gitlab.com:magus/haskell-ng-mode.git"
           :branch "main")
  :init
  (add-to-list 'major-mode-remap-alist '(haskell-mode . haskell-ng-mode))
  (add-to-list 'eglot-server-programs '(haskell-ng-mode "haskell-language-server-wrapper" "--lsp"))
  (setq-default eglot-workspace-configuration
                (plist-put eglot-workspace-configuration
                           :haskell
                           '(:formattingProvider "fourmolu"
                             :plugin (:stan (:global-on :json-false)))))
  ...
  :hook
  (haskell-ng-mode . eglot-ensure)
  ...)

(use-package haskell-ng-mode
  :ensure (:type git
           :repo "git@gitlab.com:magus/haskell-ng-mode.git"
           :branch "main")
  :init
  (add-to-list 'major-mode-remap-alist '(haskell-mode . haskell-ng-mode))
  (with-eval-after-load 'eglot
    (add-to-list 'eglot-server-programs '(haskell-ng-mode "haskell-language-server-wrapper" "--lsp"))
    (setq-default eglot-workspace-configuration
                  (plist-put eglot-workspace-configuration
                             :haskell
                             '(:formattingProvider "fourmolu"
                               :plugin (:stan (:global-on :json-false))))))
  ...
  :hook
  (haskell-ng-mode . eglot-ensure)
  ...)

(use-package python
  :init
  (add-to-list 'major-mode-remap-alist '(python-mode . python-ts-mode))
  (with-eval-after-load 'eglot
    (assoc-delete-all '(python-mode python-ts-mode) eglot-server-programs)
    (add-to-list 'eglot-server-programs
                 `((python-mode python-ts-mode) . ,(eglot-alternatives
                                                    '(("rass" "python") "pylsp")))))
  ...
  :hook (python-ts-mode . eglot-ensure)
  ...)

(use-package python
  :ensure nil
  :preface
  (add-to-list 'major-mode-remap-alist '(python-mode . python-ts-mode))
  :init
  (with-eval-after-load 'eglot
    (assoc-delete-all '(python-mode python-ts-mode) eglot-server-programs)
    (add-to-list 'eglot-server-programs
                 `((python-mode python-ts-mode) . ,(eglot-alternatives
                                                    '(("rass" "python") "pylsp")))))
  ...
  :hook (python-ts-mode . eglot-ensure)
  ...)

TMR provides facilities for setting timers using a convenient notation. Lots of commands are available to operate on timers, while there also exists a tabulated view to display all timers in a nice grid.

• Package name (GNU ELPA): tmr
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/tmr
• Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/tmr-changelog
• Git repositories:
  • GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/tmr
  • GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/tmr
• Video demonstration: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-01-19-emacs-timers-tmr-demo/
• Backronym: TMR May Ring; Timer Must Run.

Below are the release notes.

Version 1.3.0 on 2026-01-25

This version adds some user options and new features to an already stable package.

Timers can be paused

The command tmr-toggle-pause will prompt for a running timer and pause it.

Users who have something like the following in their configuration, have access to tmr-toggle-pause under the P key:

;; All TMR commands are behind this prefix key.  So `tmr-toggle-pause' is C-c t P.
(define-key global-map (kbd "C-c t") #'tmr-prefix-map)

In the buffer produced by the command tmr-tabulated-view the pause functionality applies to the timer at point. The tmr-toggle-pause is invoked with the P key.

An extra column in the tabulated view shows whether a timer is paused or not. Here is an example:

Start      End        Duration   Remaining  Paused?  Acknowledge?   Description

08:49:41   09:19:46   30m        29m 17s    Yes                     Work on TMR for 30 minutes
08:49:31   08:54:31   5m         3m 53s                             Prepare tea
08:49:21   08:59:21   10m        8m 42s              Yes            Edit the description with this one instead

Configure the confirmation text for acknowledgements

When a timer is set to be acknowledged (i.e. the user must confirm that they saw it elapse) it prompts for confirmation. The default input text that confirms the acknowledgement is ack. This is now subject to configuration via the user option tmr-acknowledge-timer-text.

Change how frequently the tabulated list is refreshed

The buffer produced by tmr-tabulated-view is set to automatically refresh every 5 seconds by default. In previous versions this was every 1 second. The new user option tmr-tabulated-refresh-interval can be set to a number of seconds or nil. In the latter case, the automatic refresh is disabled.

Removed the long-obsolete tmr-tabulated.el

Its code was merged into tmr.el on 2024-10-30 and all it was doing thenceforth is issue a warning to those who would require the tmr-tabulated feature. Now (require 'tmr-tabulated) produces an error.