Emacs

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. ...

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. The command denote-search is the main point of entry. It accepts a query, which should be a regular expression, and then searches the contents of all the notes stored in denote-directory for it. The results are put in a buffer which allows folding and further filtering; all standard commands offered by Xref are available as well. ...

New t-shirt is funny. I’ve been shopping for desktop computers to run Linux. Something easy and nice, like a low-mid range Thelios, maybe. This is a terrible idea and I should stop doing it at once. When do you think I’ll finally find something that I’m good at? There are too many people in my head. I like Matt Birchler’s Quick Reviews app, but I wish it would look up the year/director for me. The new iOS app might do something like that, but I won’t use the app on iOS. ...

My use of Howm has continued to grow organically. In other words, I don’t set out to use Howm, it just happens :). One of Howm’s unique features is its TODO implementation: ...

I “settled” on using notmuch for my email, but now I’m reconsidering that decision. Notmuch is great, but using it forces me to have two email stores. One is IMAP (via Fastmail). The other is my local notmuch database. Mbsync keeps things kind of synced, but it’s really only a few flags. Notmuch doesn’t delete or move email on the server. This means I’m managing, for example, my Inbox, in two places. It’s not hard, but is it necessary? ...

I hesitate to use org-goto in my Org mode files because I find the UI for it to be confusing. In a recent post, Streamlining Navigation in Org-Mode using an adapted org-goto, James Dyer makes some nifty improvements. The TL;DR is this: (setq org-goto-interface 'outline-path-completionp) (setq org-outline-path-complete-in-steps nil) Now, the target list is a simple completion window showing the entire outline.

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

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 wanted to add an :ID: property to several hundred files, but only if one didn’t already exist. I cheated and asked ChatGPT for help. It helped.

I’ve been back in Doom Emacs for a few days. This is how it’s going.

I am experimenting with using Org-roam again for my notes.

Listing directories first and hiding file details by default in Dired

Making tags readable in Org-mode DONE headings

I’ve updated my org-mode reading list using my fork of the org-books package

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. ...

As often happens, I started to waffle on where to keep my notes. I blame Obsidian for this. But also Bear and Evernote and Logseq and DEVONthink and and and. Obsidian is insidious. Sometimes all I want is to write something down and Obsidian makes that easy. Then it shows you a nice Daily Notes page. Then it makes back/linking easy. Then it teases me with a million simple-to-install plugins. ...

Doom Emacs is pretty great, especially for former Vimmers. I lived in Doom for a long time because it makes so many little things nicer, without having to dedicate one’s life to customizing Emacs. Toward the end of last year I wrote I’m Doomed again when I moved back from my vanilla config. Then, early this year, I rolled my own config again, and spent a lot of time getting things just so. I even removed Evil mode and have been using the usual Emacs bindings. It’s the closest I’ve felt to being comfortable in Emacs in a long time. ...