Trying out Gnus is a humbling experience that also provides a perspective on why people might not want to deal with Emacs, preferring alternative editors: it is not immediately obvious that overcoming a steep learning curve would bring benefits compared to an easier solution (like using a different news client). I just want to read my RSS feed, presented in a concise, elegant fashion, I don't want to battle with an UI that might've made sense back in the modem era
Today I learned and practiced using Pikchr. Pikchr is a low-level diagram markup language. This is my second attempt at it and I think it clicked this time.
The program is available is a single function library and a CLI that emits SVG.
For the first time in...a few decades at least. Maybe ever. Emacs is regularly and unceremoniously segfaulting on me. Pretty clearly something to do with tree sitter, which is a bit frustrating. (#Emacs 29.3 on MacOS from brew)
Not that anyone likely cares, but I just refactored my #emacs config away from literate org-mode, into a collection of specific elisp files. The top level init.el is now quite clean.
I got tired of having to edit source blocks in the org-mode config and having to preload org-mode just to load my config, all just so it looks prettier (?) when reading it on github.
The elisp files still have sections, rg can search them just fine. I'm happy. https://github.com/garyo/emacs-config
So excited that I was able to write a blog post in #orgmode#emacs and publish it to my #classicpress blog from within orgmode! The new post ain't much to look at, and there's no content to speak of. Just a proof of concept. And it proofed!
One of the issues with the #REPL (and #emacs which is just a great big text-oriented repl) is that it is additive in nature; it usually takes major effort or a restart to REMOVE things once they've been added (thinking on plugins which modify app state). #Clojure
I sometimes notice that Emacs freezes up when I press a key like d to delete (adding the tag:trashing) for a couple of seconds. It's hard to track down, but I believe that I run into a conflict with a cron job updating the notmuch database, and Emacs waits for the notmuch tag change command to finish, which waits for the cron job to finish.
Does that sound likely? How do y'all debug and improve this?
I'm finding some really interesting blogs out there, and am reminded of the early days of the internet, when it wasn't all monetized and people just wrote about stuff they were interested in for fun. And I had an RSS feeder and got updates when people posted stuff. Plus blogrolls.
So I'm sure there's a way to do this now in #emacs, right? Can someone point me in the right direction? I've heard about elfeed but don't know anything about it.
So I was a bit off my org-roam habits and decided to get back on track. Since my daily driver is macOS, I am using Railwaycat's emacs-mac formulae on Homebrew. And boom! #emacs doesn't launch even before upgrading due to some wierd gcc issue.
Tried to upgrade... can't compile because of libgccjit issue (necessary for native compilation feature which makes elisp work faster). Turns out there are some breaking changes from GCC upstream and had to browse published issue to apply some workarounds.
In the process I've discovered the --HEAD option for brew which apparently allows to get the most recent-ish branch for a given formulae. So now I have Emacs 29.3 over default 29.1 for this contraption.
PS. As I like the Emacs help system which can browse its own source code to describe a function, it wasn't readily available with brew. Had to copy the code from brew cache to some static location and Emacs just asked to point for the sources there, nice!
Productivity increases with the level of customization you are making in the tools you are using most often.
The downside is that the more used to these customizations you get, the more lost you'll feel when
using a system that is not configured as yours.
Simple example: create a new binding in #Vim or #Emacs. This is not only very common but
also very encouraged. After getting used to that, connect to a remote server.
The rootwork v0.2 blog posted about the author's journey through text editors, from classics such as vi(m) and Emacs to tools I've never heard of. They explain what they use the editors for and why.
After spending some time learning meow's editing model, I've finished a moderate customization of the default qwerty layout. It's an attempt to find a synthesis of my emacs, vi, and CUA muscle memory while favoring selection-first editing.
My #emacs discovery for today is dired-omit-mode. It hides less interesting files (object files, backups etc). There are a few options to tweak what you want hidden.
The default binding is C-x M-o but I've also put it on just M-o in my config so that I can toggle it quickly.