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.

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.

⚠️ Note that this doesn’t work properly. There’s a “nil” at the end.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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:

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 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).

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. 

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.

I want things to be simple and without distraction. I want to avoid futzing all the time. To this end, I often try to move away from using Emacs for everything. Emacs is not simple, no matter how hard I try to force it to be simple.

Howm and TiddlyWiki share some features that I like

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’m just coming off a week using Obsidian. Obsidian is really good and powerful and easy to use and extensible and probably the correct answer to the question, “Where should I keep my notes?”.

When is trying to avoid futzing actually just more futzing?

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.

Following up after reading Jeremy Friesen’s response to my earlier post

I’m using using Denote’s silo feature for accessing my Beyond the Infinite folder

I mentioned that I should create a lisp function for sending my org-journal entries to Day One. Turns out I’d already done it. The only problem was that the original version assumed I was using a new org file every day. I’m now doing monthly files, so I needed to change how the text selection was made. Here’s the new function.

Prot’s Spacious-Padding Emacs package adds some room to breath in the Emacs UI.

This morning, I had trouble finding something that I was certain I’d written yesterday. I was pretty sure I’d written it in one org-mode file or another, but it seemed to be missing. Turns out it wasn’t missing. I just couldn’t see it because of the way the results show up when searching for something in Emacs. The display of search results when running projectile-ripgrep is pretty awful, and I missed what I was searching for. Here’s what it looks like in Doom Emacs by default.

I often want a list of attached files displayed right in the org-mode file.

Just a quick appreciation of a common Org-mode feature.

I should stop trying to roll my own Emacs config. So I did.

A lisp function for generating either Page Bundles or normal Markdown files when creating new Hugo posts.

Could I too start storing things as email and find them later using Notmuch?

I’ll probably continue using Org-journal no matter what

Using both Denote and Org-roam packages seems crazy, but I’m trying it.

Technically, it’s easy. Actually doing it is a nightmare.

My thirty-days-of-Obsidian lasted nine days.

Wasting time in Emacs. Essential Knowledge book bundle.

I have been wondering if the benefits of using ox-hugo just so I can write posts using Org-mode format is worth the extra layer of abstraction. I prefer Org-mode to Markdown, but Markdown is fine. In fact, Markdown-mode makes editing Markdown in Emacs quite pleasant. Ox-hugo is a great package, but increasingly seemed like a clever but unnecessary abstraction. One of its best features is that it makes creating new posts super easy. I never liked using the Hugo CLI, so ox-hugo solved that problem.

I need to re-calibrate. Is Emacs a waste of time? Complexity.

Dammit I just lost an hour on Mastodon even though I’m supposed to be “off” social media. I have nothing to show for it, either. It’s insidious!

I usually prefer reading my email using Mu4e in Emacs, but the Vim (“Evil”) keybindings have been broken since upgrading to 1.10.x. (See this PR for background). This added so much friction that I went back to Mail.app and Notmuch. Recent changes in evil-collection have fixed the issue but weren’t available yet when updating Doom. The fix for now was to (unpin! evil-collection) in packages.el. Much better!

It’s happening again. My love of powerful, complex software has overrun my ability to avoid tinkering.

At the end of each month, I convert my Org-journal entries into a nice PDF, print it, and put it into a binder.

Update: I think Org-roam is the right answer for most people, but I could not resist the simplicity and lack of dependencies of Denote, so I am back in Denote as of June, 2023.

Ten years ago, Steven Johnson wrote The Spark File, in which he describes his process for keeping track of hunches, ideas, etc. in a single text file.

I’ve been tracking an issue with the way backlinks are displayed that affects my use of Org-roam. Someone (hwiorn) finally discovered a workaround when using Doom Emacs: delete the compiled version of org-roam-utils. Like this:

I know that film photography and Emacs are completely unrelated, but I have been thinking about both of them quite a lot recently.

The more notes I put into Org-roam, the more I want to put there.

I use Notmuch in Emacs for managing my email. It’s fast, powerful, and (once used to it) easy to use.

Emacs can be ugly, but it doesn’t have to be. Above we have the highly-polished and thoughtful iA Writer on the left and Emacs on the right.

Dired mode in Emacs is fantastic, but one little thing that annoyed me was that the directory listings show file ownership and permissions, taking up space with information I almost never care about.

I rage-quit Emacs this morning. By that, I don’t mean that I hit C-x C-c really hard, although I did do that. I mean I stopped using Emacs.

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):

I’ve settled on WordPress for this blog. (“settled” is a fluid word for me, but let’s assume I mean it for now). However, I prefer to do most of my writing in Emacs and Org mode. To help with this, I’ve configured org2blog and I’m writing this post with it.

A week ago I decided to cancel Doom Emacs and go back to building Emacs from Scratch, and once again I was reminded what a terrible idea that is.

As you probably know, I struggle with where to keep my notes. For a few months now it’s been a battle between Org-roam and Roam. Org-roam has been in the lead, mostly due to Roam being unstable and (soon to be) expensive. Also, my infatuation with Org mode is on again.

Org-roam continues to impress. I use org-roam’s “Daily Notes” feature every day as a frictionless place to put notes that may or may not need to be moved or otherwise dealt with later. It’s the Org-roam version of a similar feature in Roam.

A quick rundown the chaos in my head around Roam and Emacs and how it has affected my day so far.