Software

I prefer seeing a new tab, not the URL search dialog

I saw the Irreal post about Journelly, but mostly ignored it because I wasn’t looking for a new iOS journaling app. He did mention that Journelly is by Álvaro Ramírez, author of Plain Org, lmno.lol, and others, so that made things more interesting.

I ran across something neat while reading the Mu4e release notes

While tinkering with Obsidian recently, something I liked was having a daily notes template with a Dataview query showing the other files I’d added that same day. I added something similar for Denote. It’s a Yasnippet:

On macOS, hitting CMD-Shift-. in Finder toggles the display of hidden (.dot) files. I wanted the same thing in Dired mode.

Using both Howm and Denote for my notes in Emacs. But why?

Ladybird: Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.

A week ago, I toyed with the idea of using Gnus for reading Email in Emacs. As expected, I hated it at first. But then…

I went down a rabbit hole with the built-in Remember mode in Emacs today.

lmq-10/denote-search This package provides a search utility for Denote, the simple-to-use, focused-in-scope, and effective note-taking tool for Emacs.

I’m happy using Fish for my shell. One thing I’d not gotten around to after switching is finding a good directory jumper. The original z doesn’t work well with Fish. I used to use fasd and autojump, but thought I’d look around for something new. For some reason, I’d never heard of zoxide: A smarter cd command. Combined with zoxide.fish: Tab completion and initialization for zoxide in fish shell, zoxide does the job nicely.

Twibright Labs: Links It’s a Lynx-like web browser. I don’t quite understand why I would want to use it for everyday browsing, but it’s fun to see what sites look like without all the hubbub. Here’s this site in links:

Remember my recent email fiasco, during which I ended up with tens of thousands of duplicate emails? I remember it. After storming off and ignoring the problem for a week, I decided I should do something about it. Today, I fixed it!

I have a soft spot for Pass: The Standard Unix Password Manager, but Apple’s new Passwords app has been working fine. I use Safari, so the whole thing is very convenient. 

All I wanted was to use notmuch on my MBP to manage email, just like I do on my Mac Mini. The only viable solution I found was muchsync. There’s no macOS installer for it1, so I figured I’d compile it myself. 

I’d been happily using Doom Emacs until just over a month ago, when I decided to start from scratch again. 

Fish shell welcome message showing weather conditions For some reason, I always want to know the weather conditions. I barely go outdoors, but I still like to know what’s happening. I have a few shell scripts that kick out some version of the weather. Here’s the one I use most:

Using GoAccess to process my web server logs is going fine. It’s nice not paying for an analytics service, but it’s definitely a messier process.

Ghostty is a new, platform-native terminal app from Mitchell Hashimoto. I’ve been alternating between Ghostty and Apple’s Terminal for about a week.

I like the idea of building my own Emacs config, so I set Doom aside and (re)built my own configuration (mostly) from scratch.

I’ve used Zengobi’s Curio for many years when I needed a visual system for managing projects and associated files. In a recent version, Curio gained a Journal feature. It’s fairly rudimentary compared to dedicated journal apps, but I recently started testing it as a way to create a sort of scrapbook each day. It works pretty well for that. I export a PDF of the day’s entry, print it, and put it in a binder.

I’m trying something new. I’ve become a pretty heavy user of Org-roam for personal notes. I put nearly everything there now; technical notes, contact information, project notes, vendor info, etc. These notes are all nicely linked and backlinked and live in my main ~/org directory so I can easily find things right within Emacs.

I want my per-line code comments to line up nicely, so I’ll often add a bunch of spaces by hand to make things just so. I realized that, being Emacs, there must be an easier way to handle this. Of course there is.

When I drag and drop an image into Emacs, I want the attached file to end up in ./img/YYYY/. This is how I tried configuring org-download in my setup (I use Doom Emacs):

Derek Sivers suggests, in a much-linked-to post, that all your stuff should be in plain text files, and I (almost) agree with him.

I kept a “daybook” using Tinderbox for years. I drifted away from Tinderbox for a few years after I became infatuated with Linux or iOS or other “cross-platform” systems. Right now, I’m back with a vengeance.