Set point at first heading when opening Org mode file

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. ...

May 7, 2025 Ā· 160 words

Consolidating my email handling in Emacs

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 ā€œnicestā€ 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. ...

April 23, 2025 Ā· 211 words

Journelly - Org mode-backed journaling for iOS

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 Ɓlvaro RamĆ­rez, 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. Ɓlvaro was kind enough to let me into the TestFlight, and I’m putting it through its paces this morning. ...

April 2, 2025 Ā· 380 words

Mu4e transient menu

I ran across something neat while reading the Mu4e release notes A (experimental) ā€œtransientā€ 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!

March 29, 2025 Ā· 38 words

Using the Obsidian Web Clipper with Denote

I was feeling envious of theĀ Obsidian Web Clipper, which is quite fancy, so I thought I’d try leveraging it for use withĀ 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: ...

March 25, 2025 Ā· 282 words

Listing today's notes in Denote journal entry

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. ...

March 18, 2025 Ā· 99 words

Toggle hidden files in Dired buffers

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

March 8, 2025 Ā· 245 words

Denote and Howm, sitting in a tree

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

March 8, 2025 Ā· 749 words

Using Gnus for email

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… ...

March 6, 2025 Ā· 842 words

I went a little nuts with Remember mode in Emacs

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

March 4, 2025 Ā· 595 words

Denote-search, a simple search utility for Denote

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. ...

March 4, 2025 Ā· 147 words

Thursday, February 27, 2025

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. ...

Mist 34.0 | Low 32.6, High 35.6 Ā· 146 words

Org mode capture template for creating Howm TODOs

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: ...

February 24, 2025 Ā· 311 words

I think I have to go back to Mu4e

I ā€œsettledā€ 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? ...

February 19, 2025 Ā· 239 words

An improvement to org-goto from James Dyer

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.

February 5, 2025 Ā· 61 words

Vanilla to Doom to Vanilla

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

January 17, 2025 Ā· 163 words

Reduce & Simplify - Redux 2025

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

December 31, 2024 Ā· 375 words

Emacs from scratch once 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.

December 14, 2024 Ā· 400 words

Adding an ID property to Org-mode files in directory

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.

November 10, 2024 Ā· 530 words

A Doom Emacs status update after several days

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

November 5, 2024 Ā· 471 words