My SetApp subscription was scheduled to renew today, but I didn’t let it. I figured that if I buy the apps outright that I actually use, I’ll spend around the same amount as I would on a 1-year SetApp license for both Macs. The purchased apps would either come with lifetime licenses or a small annual upgrade fee. This means next year I’ll pay a much smaller amount for all the same software.

I’ve been testing a version of Johnny Decimal using folders and org-mode files. While doing this, I found myself frequently wanting to create a new .org file in the current (Dired) directory with the same name as the directory (long story).

In a past life, this would have been a fairly straightforward challenge. I’m not remotely fluent in (emacs) lisp, but I’ve always enjoyed learning, so I would have dug in and figured out how to write the function myself.

howm is an Emacs package for taking notes. It was recommended to me recently, so I thought I’d take a look. The project page says “howm: Write fragmentarily and read collectively.” Worth a shot, right?

I haven’t seen too many people talking about howm. The best introductions I’ve found are from Leah Neukirchen and Andrei Sukhovskii.

I installed it via use-package with the following

;; howm package config

(use-package howm :ensure t
  :config
  (setq howm-directory "~/Documents/howm/")
  (setq howm-home-directory "~/Documents/howm/")
  (setq howm-keyword-file (expand-file-name ".howm-keys" howm-home-directory))
  (setq howm-history-file (expand-file-name ".howm-history" howm-home-directory))
  (setq howm-view-use-grep t))
;;  (setq howm-view-grep-command "/opt/homebrew/bin/rg"))

;; Fix for help bindings
(define-key howm-menu-mode-map "\C-h" nil)
(define-key riffle-summary-mode-map "\C-h" nil)
(define-key howm-view-contents-mode-map "\C-h" nil)

;; Sensible buffer names
(add-hook 'howm-mode-hook 'howm-mode-set-buffer-name)
(add-hook 'after-save-hook 'howm-mode-set-buffer-name)

I couldn’t get the rg settings to work, so I’m still using grep. It’s fast enough for this test.

I spent some time in Obsidian again yesterday. I do this once a month or so just to see if somehow it’s changed into something I’d like to use. Obsidian is great software, in theory, but I still find it boring and unpleasant to actually use.

A few months ago I became twitchy about my aging Synology so I replaced it with an old Mac Mini. The idea was that I understand how Macs work and if something breaks I can more easily deal with it.

I never unplugged the Synology, though. You know, just in case.

A week ago I started getting emails from the Synology that Drive 1 was failing. What I should have done is to unplug the thing and move on. But what I did was to order a new 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drive.

The more I lean into using Org-mode files for everything, the more isolated I’m feeling. It may be irrational, because “plain text”, but having to export or otherwise translate everything when I post to my blog or other tools is becoming less fun. Org-mode Island is beautiful, but lonely.

Later: Jeremy Friesen reacts to the above with his take on the isolation of using Org-mode. Here’s some follow up.