Emacs

I haven’t used Doom Emacs in a while. Thought I’d give it a spin. Besides, I still miss my vim bindings from back in the day. Evil mode to the rescue.

As a huge fan of Denote, I still sometimes dabble with other ways of taking notes in Emacs. For example, I like the way Howm does notes. I have a growing set of Howm notes, but they feel isolated from my other notes. For a while, I tried keeping Denote and Howm together but it felt like swimming upstream. I bailed on that and broke them apart again. More recently, I learned about an Org-roam-alike called Org-node. I like org-node quite a lot. There are no enforced file name rules, as in Denote. Any Org-mode heading or file can be a node. All one needs to do is give it an ID property. It’s very fast at finding notes. I pointed org-node at my entire ~/org directory. Finding a node is still basically instant. ...

Don’t ask me why I occasionally try to move away from Emacs. I can’t explain it. Under duress, I’d say it’s because Emacs swallows the world, and I like changing things up. Doing everything in Emacs makes that difficult. Org-mode is unmatched, but it’s also essentially useless outside of Emacs1. I get a little twitchy about that. Also, sometimes a package update throws a wrench into my Emacs config or I become tired of C-x C-whatever all the time and so I start shopping for a replacement. ...

tanrax/org-social: Org Social is a decentralized social network that runs on an Org Mode file over HTTP. You can create posts, interact with groups, make replies, mention other users, create polls, or personalize your profile. All this without registration, without databases… Just you and your Org Mode file. It’s a ton of fun for us emacs nerds. Follow mine here: https://jackbaty.com/social.org

⚠️ Note that this doesn’t work properly. There’s a “nil” at the end. Howm has a handy menu for viewing tasks and notes. One thing I wanted to add was my Emacs diary entries for the current date. This took 3 things: First, I created a function for inserting the day’s entries from Emacs diary in the current buffer. (defun my/insert-diary-entries-for-today () "Insert diary entries for today at point." (interactive) (let ((diary-list-entries-hook nil) (diary-display-function 'ignore)) (let ((diary-entries (diary-list-entries (calendar-current-date) 1))) (if diary-entries (dolist (entry diary-entries) (insert (cadr entry) "\n")) (message "No diary entries for today"))))) (and by “I” I mean Claude, mostly) ...

It makes no difference what software I use.

Rambling about a little loop I find myself going through with Emacs vs Not Emacs

The other day, I converted my entire TiddlyWiki into an Obsidian vault, just to see if I could. Since I still spend most of my time in Emacs, I thought it would be nice to search the vault from there. The post, From Obsidian to Emacs, by Mike Hostetler, mentioned using the Xeft package, so I thought I’d try it. Here’s my config: (use-package xeft :ensure t :defer t :config (setq xeft-recursive t) (setq xeft-database "~/.deft.db") (setq xeft-directory "/Users/jbaty/Documents/Notes/Vault/") (setq xeft-ignore-extension '("png" "jpg" "jpeg")) (setq xeft-extensions '("md")) (setq xeft-title-function #'file-name-nondirectory)) Xeft relies on Xapian for searches, so a module needs to be downloaded or built locally. I didn’t have any luck with the downloaded version, so I deleted the package, started over, and had it compile locally. The trick there was entering the prefix “/opt/homebrew” during installation, since I’d already installed Xapian using Homebrew. ...

org-mouse is a built-in package for Org mode that lets one do some handy things using the mouse in Org files. Things like checking checkboxes and toggling subtrees. (use-package org-mouse :after org) Or just (require 'org-mouse) Clicking in [ ] Do this thing to complete it is easier than navigating to the line and hitting C-c C-c for each item. There’s no shame in using a mouse, even in Emacs. I sometimes prefer to sit back, grab the mouse, and click things.

I had a couple of drinks last night and opened my laptop and accidentally launched Obsidian and thought, “Oh, I remember. This is pretty cool! I should use this for everything.” so this morning I’m staring at Obsidian wondering what now? But why not just bail on the Obsidian app and drop back into my beloved Emacs? I’ve been asking myself that question all morning. Ostensibly, I simply felt like a change of venue this morning, and Obsidian seemed as good as any. But there’s something larger lurking under the surface. ...

I recently discovered Org mode’s speed keys option and it’s pretty great. One caveat with speed keys is that they only work if the point is at the very beginning of a heading. To help with this, I (with Claude’s help) created a small lisp function and hook to move the insertion point to the beginning of the first heading whenever I open an Org mode file. I’m recording it here in case it’s useful to anyone else. ...

If I were to only have one computer, I’d use notmuch for email in Emacs. I might also import non-email stuff as notmuch messages so I can search everything in one place. But, I now have 3 computers; 2 running macOS and one running (Fedora) Linux. Notmuch takes too much of my energy to keep synced between machines. So what about Mu4e? Mu4e is probably the “nicest” Emacs package for managing email, but it still requires a local synced copy of all my messages. This means configuring mbsync on all machines, etc. ...

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. What intrigued me most, though, was learning that Journelly is backed by plain-text Org Mode files. Bonus! Now it had my attention. Álvaro was kind enough to let me into the TestFlight, and I’m putting it through its paces this morning. ...

I ran across something neat while reading the Mu4e release notes A (experimental) “transient” menu has been added for mu4e. You can use it e.g., with something like: (require 'mu4e-transient) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c m") #'mu4e-transient-menu) It’s very handy!

I was feeling envious of the Obsidian Web Clipper, which is quite fancy, so I thought I’d try leveraging it for use with Denote. My first run at this involves a couple of steps: Tweak the web clipper to save files using Denote’s format and front matter Save the file without adding it to an Obsidian vault Move the saved file into my Denote folder Here’s the Web Clipper template configuration I ended up with: ...

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: # -*- mode: snippet -*- # name: Denote insert today's links # key: dnl # -- #+begin: denote-links :regexp "^`(format-time-string "%Y%m%d")`$0" #+end I just run that after first creating the daily note and I get a list of links to the other Denote files from that day. There’s probably a way to automate that, but this is good enough for who it’s for.

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?

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. ...