in no particular order

Interesting bits elsewhere:

• Dangit, Git!?!
• Stop Interviewing With Leet Code
• Start all of your commands with a comma
• This copilot is stupid and wants to kill me

Older entries

klara and the sun

A nicely written (as always with Ishiguro) history of Stevens turned into an artificially intelligent being, in a near future reminiscent of Never let me go. In other words, i found this novel heavily inspired in previous works of the author, which i admittedly find better than this one, but that doesn't mean the book doesn't throw at you a bunch of provocative musings or lacks a tranquil beauty that makes it absolutely worth reading.

simple note taking

I was just watching Prot's explanation of his new package denote, a very elegant note-taking system with a stress on simplicity and, as the author puts it, low-tech requirements. Now, those are excellent qualities in my book, and i think i'd quickly become a denote user if it weren't for the fact that i already have a homegrown set of utilities following a similar philosophy. Inevitably, they differ in some details, as is to be expected from software that has grown with me, as Prot's with him, during more than a decade, but they are similar in important ways.

I've had in mind writing a brief note on my notes utilities for a while, so i guess this is a good time for it: i can, after showing you mine, point you to a polished package following a similar philosophy and sidestep any temptation of doing anything similar with my little functions :)

slimmer emacs with kitty

A problem of using Emacs as my operating system is that any otherwise minor friction with its interface quickly becomes an irritant, and i thus find myself needed a truly smooth emacs-human interaction; or, to be more precise emacs-jao interaction: my must needs are going to be, sometimes, triffles to you, and the other way round.

During the last year, a perceived sluggishness in Emacs's X11 display performance, together with a very noticeably increased RAM consumption have become one of those irritants, and i decided that enough is enough, and moved (for the time being at least) from exwm to, essentially, using xmonad and kitty as my Emacs's display engine.

el infinito en un junco

If you can read Spanish, i wouldn't miss the opportunity to read this beautfiul essay in the original: Irene Vallejo's prose is clear, elegant and very beautiful. It's a delight (and a relief) to read. And, if you can't read Spanish but have a translation handy, i wouldn't miss the opportunity to read it either, for a very entertaining account of the history of ancient books sprinkled with lots of interesting (to me, at least!) bits about the Greek and Roman worlds. The book is morever wrapped in a subdued and sober optimism that i've found reinvigorating and sorely needed in these times, when one often feels like running on empty. Heartily recommended!

let's talk lisp

I just got a second-hand copy of this classic. Sometimes, used books are more charming than new ones:

relaying mail to multiple smarthosts with opensmtpd

I like to use a local smtp daemon for sending email from my laptop, because that way i can send emails even while disconnected and, even when the network is up, because i don't have to wait for the network protocol to be completed with a remote smarthost. Oh, and i also need local mail delivery.

For many years i've used postfix to those ends; it has an acceptably simply-ish configuration; but recently i've become fond of VPNs (mullvad, if you want to know), and was annoyed by its getting confused when /etc/resolv.conf changes (for instance, because you get the VPN up after postfix's service has started). I've found a pleasantly simple alternative: OpenSMTPD.

a high signal to noise emacs command

Over the years, i've written perhaps hundreds of little emacs commands. Most of them looked useful at the time (why, i absolutely needed them!), but just faded away after a few weeks. There are a handful though that i use all the time, and i specially like it when their signal (features, usefulness) to noise (lines of code) ratio is above average. Here's one with a surprisingly high one:

(defun jao-buffer-same-mode (&rest modes)
  "Pop to a buffer with a mode among MODES, or the current one if not given."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((modes (or modes (list major-mode)))
         (pred (lambda (b)
                 (let ((b (get-buffer (if (consp b) (car b) b))))
                   (member (buffer-local-value 'major-mode b) modes)))))
    (pop-to-buffer (read-buffer "Buffer: " nil t pred))))

apropos library

A gem introduced in emacs 23 that i've overlooked all these years:

M-x apropos-library

notmuch threads folding in emacs

In the last couple of months, i've been moving from Gnus (after more than twenty years using it!) to notmuch, as part of a simplification journey (simpler code means a more hackable (emacs) environment) and also because tagging finally clicked-in (but don't believe anyone telling you that notmuch is only about tagging, it allows search and folder-based workflows just as nicely). Naturally, i've found several things i liked in Gnus's interface missing in notmuch's, but the simplicity of the latter has made possible implementing most of them, sometimes with remarkably little code. One of them is thread folding.

fun with dependent types

reading and searching gmane with gnus, fast

Reading mailing lists via Gnus by pointing it to the usenet service news.gmane.io is a well-known trick among emacsers. It has a couple of drawbacks, though: network latency and no search. The two problems have, as almost always with almost any problem in Emacs land, a cure. The names of the game are, in this case, leafnode and notmuch.

reading source code is fun

From a recent checkout of the Emacs source code:

;;; desktop.el --- save partial status of Emacs when killed -*- lexical-binding: t -*-

;; Copyright (C) 1993-1995, 1997, 2000-2021 Free Software Foundation,
;; Inc.

;; Author: Morten Welinder <terra@diku.dk>
;; Keywords: convenience
;; Favorite-brand-of-beer: None, I hate beer.

;; This file is part of GNU Emacs.

Mine is Guinness :)

notmuch queries via consult

This package provides notmuch queries in emacs using consult. It offers interactive functions to launch search processes using the notmuch executable and present their results in a completion minibuffer and, after selection of a candidate, single message and tree views.

simplicity pays off

i've been using Bastian Bechtold's org-static-blog for this blog for more than a year now. Back in the day, i mentioned how well it integrated with my emacs workflow and how its simplicity was a big asset¹.

consulting hunks

I use Dmitry Gutov's diff-hl to highlight (with fringe marks) modified hunks in my files under git revision control. The package comes with a command, diff-hl-next-hunk, that one can use to navigate them. So, taking a peek at consult-lines, it was straightforward to put together a consult function to navigate, with completion and preview (although i disable the latter) the hunks in the current file:

consulting spotify in a better way

After my latest adventures writing a small spotify library and learning in the process a bit more about consult, its author, Daniel Mendler, was kind enough to comment on how i had implemented the asynchronous search using consult's API, showing me better ways.

an emacs packages hat trick

i've found these last days a handful of really useful little emacs packages:

an even better video wharf

A couple of days ago, i was writing about embark and my first experiment defining a new embarking to play remote video streams. Omar Antolín Camarena, embark's author, has been kind enough to not only read it, but comment on a couple of significant improvements that i think well deserve this follow-up.

embarking videos

Inspired by Prot's musings on completion, i've, ahem, embarked in a reconsideration of my completions setup (as you might have intuited from my recent experiments with the spotify API and consult). As it happens, i'm starting to feel quite at home with a combination of selectrum, prescient and consult, and the ideas to augment what i have with contextual actions using embark seem really natural to me.

consulting spotify

Note: you can tangle this file (e.g., with C-c C-v t inside Emacs) into three elisp packages, namely espotify.el, consult-spotify.el, and ivy-spotify.el.

what's not to like

I've just discovered Codeberg, a code hosting site that, finally, has let me create a user with plain emacs-w3m, shows me content reasonably well there, with a refreshingly uncluttered layout, handles graciously org files (why, it's even generating a table of contents for me), has a good privacy policy, it's not under the wings of any corporation and had my preferred username free for grabs.

appius and virginia

two decades of gnu mdk

I've just published GNU MDK 1.3.0, its 28th release, which finally migrates MDK's graphical user interface to GTK+ 3, to keep up with the, ahem, not-so-modern times and see to it that MDK keeps alive for at least another decade or two.

the simulacra

exhalation

xmobar: a battery trick

i've been maintaining xmobar for more than a decade now, and i still use it daily and tweak it almost as often. With almost a hundred contributors besides myself, and many bugs to solve, i am always learning new things. The latest one, that font awesome thing everyone seems so fond of.

this is shakespeare

the mode lines i have not seen

i don't dislike emacs' mode line, i just wish (possibly out of a fetish for simplicity and minimalistic user interfaces) sometimes it wasn't there.

unlearn

For years, i've been using C-x p, C-x o and C-c <n> to move to other windows, but with ace window i am substituting all of them with M-o. Problem is, muscle memory interferes and i find myself clumsily moving around (and often lost) with the former ones. Or i did, before i followed an advice from Stefan Monnier in emacs-devel: unbind those keys you want to forget, and you'll get an error when you relapse.