Bozhidar Batsov's personal blog
It’s been a couple of months since the last neocaml release, and the reason is simple — for a while there I was genuinely out of ideas. Back when I shipped 0.6 I declared (again!) that I was done with new features, and this time I almost meant it. But ideas have a way of creeping back in, and 0.9 turned out to be a meaty release. Here are the highlights.
Regular readers know I have a soft spot for AsciiDoc – I’ve written about it more than once, and it’s the markup behind the documentation of most of my bigger OSS projects (CIDER, nREPL, Projectile, RuboCop). It hits a sweet spot Markdown never quite reaches: rich enough for proper technical writing (admonitions, includes, real tables, cross-references), without dragging in the full ceremony of…
I think I’ll take my REPL neat My parens black and my bed at three CIDER’s too sweet for me… – Bozier
Last week I announced Port, a small prepl client for Emacs. That post focused on Port itself, but writing it left me with the itch to do a follow-up on the bigger picture, because the socket REPL / prepl story is one I’ve been meaning to write up for years.
For ages I’ve had “add prepl support to CIDER” sitting somewhere in the back of my head. CIDER is built firmly around nREPL, but prepl ships with Clojure itself, and the appeal of dropping the external REPL server requirement is obvious. Recently, as part of a broader internals cleanup “mini-project” in CIDER, I finally sat down and put a prototype together: cider#3899.
I promised I’d take a break from building Tree-sitter major modes, and I meant it. So what better way to relax than to build… color themes? Yeah, I know. My idea of chilling is weird, but I genuinely enjoy working on random Emacs packages. Most of the time at least…
I’m pretty much done with the focused development push on neocaml – it’s reached a point where I’m genuinely happy using it daily and the remaining work is mostly incremental polish. So naturally, instead of taking a break I decided it was time to start another project that’s been living in the back of my head for a while: a proper Tree-sitter-based F# mode for Emacs.
When I released neocaml 0.1 last month, I thought I was more or less done with the (main) features for the foreseeable future. The original scope was deliberately small — a couple of Tree-sitter-powered OCaml major modes (for .ml and .mli), a REPL integration, and not much else. I was quite happy with how things turned out and figured the next steps would be mostly polish and bug fixes.
The keyboard is the most important tool for a programmer. Choose wisely.
I’ll admit it: when I first started using Claude Code, I mostly ignored the built-in skills. Everyone online was saying “go make your own skills,” so that’s what I did. I wrote custom skills for all sorts of things and I got plenty of things done with them.