Technical notes and essays about Clojure, Emacs, Lisp and the odds and ends of web development.
12 February 2026 To resuscitate my blog, I thought I would join this month’s Emacs Carnival , with a suggested topic of Completion and talk about completion in my favorite subject, Emacs Lisp. Let’s talk about interactive and how we can have a function prompt the user with a list of choices, but then return a slightly more technical version. For instance, prompting with a hostname, but returning…
Has it really been almost a decade since I first started pontificating about Literate Devops ? At this year’s EmacsConf, I talked about some of what I’ve been doing during the intervening years. Most of my thoughts, I had already written about , but I enjoyed giving a demonstration.
8 March 2025 An idea of using pandoc to archive Internet articles, essays and blog entries as Org files. Read more...
18 October 2024 Revisiting my decade-old demonstration code, I created a new approach. I also realized I had something more general that may have wider application. Oh, and I get to show you how I go about writing Lisp macros. And now to you use it in recording my talk for EmacsConf 2024. Read the essay…
3 December 2023 This year’s EmacsConf was really good with some interesting talks and ideas. I really appreciate all the lovely comments and compliments about my talk. Thank you. """ Your browser does not support the video tag. Please download the video instead. (I also copied the video to YouTube ) Linkage: Ironsworn Emacs project code: emacs-ironsworn Note that this code depends on my earlier…
26 April 2023 While working on a web interface spitting out JSON, I wish I had a jq -like interface in Emacs. Easy enough to write. Read the essay .
16 Jan 2023 What if find-file in Emacs, along with the file’s name, could display more information, like the title or tags of an org-formatted file? I made this using ripgrep (so fast, we don’t need an index), and with extensions to completing-read (like Ivy , vertico , or Selectrum ), I can filter and narrow the list of all org-files, until I find what I want. Read more…
Yes, Mastodon is the talk of the tubes, and I’m glad this new federated service has its day in the sun. Before Twitter went mainstream, only technical people used it, and it felt like a nerdy community. Those days are long gone. When I first grabbed my Mastodon handle over at mastodon.xyz , I could see the potential for community, but without people I wanted to talk to … This changed when Louis…
3 Dec 2022 During EmacsConf 2022, I gave a lightning talk with 10 minutes (actually 14) to present the top 10 Reasons why you Retry Eshell. But the talk ballooned, and I felt the content was too condensed to be useful. I wrote an essay to fill in a lot of the details (as well as links to the extension code). Read more…
30 May 2021 While I'm intrigued with the Pomodoro Technique … you know, where you work in discrete time segments, with equally discrete break intervals. Perhaps making the work/relax cycle more specific and focused may convert these cycles into practice, and condition our brains. However, while I would like to focus my thoughts in discrete bursts , I don't want to interrupt the flow . You know,…
25 Dec 2020 When starting a long process, I prefix a shell command with beep , a shell script I wrote to alert when the process had completed. I've been wanting to have a version for Emacs, and thought that I would also demonstrate how easy it is to add a feature to Emacs. Read more… Updated: Enhanced the function to only "beep" when a command when too long, which means I can attach the beep to…
23 Dec 2020 Other than editing buffer, the most common user interface in Emacs is completing-read , which allows you to select an item from a list of choices. I thought I would expand on it with a bit of Lisp code to explain how to give your interactive functions a bit more interaction. Read more…
17 Jul 2020 I use three different browsers, but I really want all of them to be as mouse-less as possible. Here is a discussion of my Emacs and browser configuration. Do you have similar tips you'd like to share? Read more…
3 Nov 2019 While awfully early for folks like me in the Pacific Timezone, I really enjoyed EmacsConf 2019 (I’ve never attended a conference in my pajamas before). My talk was plagued with technical issues, and I’m sure it came across pretty disjointed. I am planning on re-recording this talk and putting it up on YouTube. I have written a transcript of the slides for my presentation , as well as a…
27 Jan 2019 Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned.” Due to Emacs, I may have accrued nearly a lifetime by now. I've been tweaking and refining my take on the Getting Things Done process, and thought I'd share my process. As a recurring theme on my website, the original essay bloomed into three separate chapters: Chapter 1 illustrates my workflow…
20 Jun 2018 Continuing my multi-year quest to craft a pensieve made of code and text files, I've been lately focusing on ways to quickly copy content from various sources into this text mind . If you are not familiar with this Emacs' org-capture feature, check out my gentle introduction . If you use org-capture and want to level up, check out my advanced org-capture ideas .
8 Apr 2018 While the primary goal of code reviews is better software quality, we can't loose sight of two other critical goals: Creating better programmers Creating cohesive teams that collaborate well These two bullets have got me thinking, and thought I would share some techniques I have learned over the years in regards to effect code reviews. Read more…
22 Mar 2018 While all projects take longer than expected, good ones where the craftsman cares about the quality, require even more time, but now I am can type a review on my new keyboard.io , I love the results. Read the review…
22 Oct 2017 Gave a demonstration of EShell to both the PDX and London Emacs User groups. While the recording may be fun to watch, feedback told me that the white rabbit holes I dived into were interesting, a transcript of the slides and demonstration may be easier to copy/paste.
21 Apr 2017 Last night, interested Emacsians from around the PDX area gathered together for a hack night , with a goal to implement a rudimentary, breadcrumb project. The basics of how to make a breadcrumb project should be easy to grasp for a group of hackers… and also fun to extend after everyone leaves to home. I polished my notes from the evening and cleaned up some of the function and…
25 Sep 2016 Just because we need a lot of organizational support characters in your text files doesn't mean you have to physically type them all. After a fun discussion with Mr. JJ Asghar , I wrote up a mini-tutorial on getting Emacs to do some of the heavy typing for you when you create a /new file/… you know, boilerplate needed when creating a new file of a particular type. My tutorial covers…
Next month, I will be hosting a workshop on regular expressions at Open Source Bridge . Should be lots of fun, and to prepare, I've been updating my Regular Expression Scratchpad with a tutorial .
1 May 2016 I was asked to review the new Kinesis Foot Pedal, and while I have a wee bit to tell you , I was really intrigued with how I could use it towards our ever increasing goal of getting more power with fewer finger movements. Spoiler Alert: I talk about the Avy package. Read more…
1 Apr 2016 In this old essay by Steve Yegge , he has a nice synthesis of static vs dynamic types, but also includes lots of interesting observations on Emacs (one would have to, since static vs. dynamic is almost as old a debate as emacs vs. vi ). I liked this quote: People have observed that Emacs has QWAN 1 : a nice, organic, comfortable rightness that fits like a pair of old jeans, or a snug…
30 Mar 2016 While I never intended to make Org Mode look or behave like a word processor , but with slight tweaks every now and then, that is my end result. Although all my code is in my dot-files repository, I figured I better highlight just the applicable code. Read more…
17 Mar 2016 Yesterday, I hosted a workshop on Literate Programming with org-mode for the PDX Emacs Hackers group. For everyone who couldn't attend, I decided to expand it into a tutorial. Warning: The examples are pretty lame. Read more… PS: I think that I have finally figured out my RSS woes, so you shouldn't have issues if you follow along.
6 Jan 2016 If you haven't used imenu in Emacs, you should try it. It gives you a way to select all top-level items of a file… functions and constants in source code or headers in an org-mode file. I have a couple of suggestions to make the interface a bit nicer: Read more…
16 Nov 2015 Sure we should program as if we are writing for our team mates, but writing code for people is far less precise, for what might be readable to one, may be Perl code to another. This essay is simply the start conversations… Read more…
8 Nov 2015 My daughter read a book about Ada Lovelace, which generated discussion about Alan Turing, which generated discussions about computers, which showed me how much kids not only don’t know about computers, but how unlikely they are to understand the guts underneath the icons . Over the weekend, I completed my personal hack-a-thon on a project to demonstrate the depths of a computer , but in…
29 Oct 2015 Had a good time at the first Portland Emacs Hackers meetup. I couldn’t record my presentation on Magit that night, so I recorded my demonstration of Magit and its ease of rebasing. Also, some teammates accidentally pushed a merge into one of our repositories at work, so I wrote shortcut instructions on keeping a clean, sequential Git history. Read more…
1 Oct 2015 My current dayjobgig is building private clouds, and I'm surprised at how much context switching I need to do due to waiting for the bloody things to deploy. Perhaps I need to invest in sword play.
30 Sep 2015 Each week, I teach an after school class at my local Middle School. Today, while getting ready to present, I switched over to the browser tab containing my presentation and waited for the kids to take their seats. One girl raised her hand and asked about a browser tab that showed Emacs Meetup . Clearly she wouldn’t care about some old programming editor, but I quickly summarized so I…
1 Sep 2015 I was asked to speak about Literate Devops at EmacsConf 2015 . Due to work and family complications, I knew that I couldn’t physically attend. Wait, what year is this!? We should open a can of virtualization on this meatspace! The week before, we tested out the technology, and the Furies looked favorable upon me to remotely attend a live conference. On Saturday, September 29th at…
12 Aug 2015 I’ve collected some table formatting code for OpenStack’s nova command, and placed them in an Tower of Babel file that make :post commands in org-mode files able to use them. The os-table function, in that file, converts the ASCII tables from OpenStack’s CLI into org-mode tables that I can export, render, and feed into other code blocks as values. This feature came in handy today… Read…
10 Aug 2015 For your own projects, you can commit to Git anytime, but one of the advantages of committing frequently is sharing code…either to your team mates or even to yourself. Best approach, however, is to commit a single bug or feature at a time, but use Gerrit to make sure that single commit is perfect. Read more…
Today I got around to playing around with the wrap and the post options to org-mode source blocks, and updated my Literate Devops essay , to help explain how I email my formatted notes directly to my team mates.
17 May 2015 I have been in many meetings over the years where the presenter's screen is more of a distraction. If you find yourself sharing your Macintosh desktop, may I suggest a couple of tips? Read more…
10 Apr 2015 While I seldom leave Emacs, I do dabble on the shell from time to time, and many colleagues ask about my terminal usage with tmux , so I present my very-opinionated Getting Started Guide to TMux .
9 Apr 2015 I swore I wouldn’t put any more examples of my literate devops idea, but when I habitually used org-mode during a recent exploration of MySQL database instance, followed by emailing the results to my teammates, I thought I would share. Read more… Update: A section of the exported document on accessing a database can be viewed here , but a few of you have requested the original org-mode…
21 Mar 2015 On the Macintosh, the Finder can trigger a script due to any change of a file in a directory (Apple calls these Folder Actions ). I was tempted to try and learn enough of this so I could rsync all local file changes to a system in the lab…. Seemed easier for me to just modify Emacs. Read more…
10 Mar 2015 I’ve discovered the ultimate in Yak Shaving: Gnu Shaving! Since I keep everything as org-mode formatted text files, I tried an experiment to directly convert the spreadsheet-like tables in my “tax notes” into a PDF mail for my accountant. Here are my tips…
22 Feb 2015 After reading the Wired article, Why We Should Design Some Things to Be Difficult to Use , I finally realize that Emacs should be hard to use, and we really should just give up changing it to be easier for new-comers. This quote sums up my 20 year experience with Emacs: [Fujifilm took] the controls out of deep menu functions and putting them back on chrome knobs that just beg to be…
20 Feb 2015 In Emacs, a key sequence is special key binding that uses multiple keys in a series. Since they require more effort to type, a sequence is chosen for functions that interrupt the normal editing flow. Let’s explore some code associated with key sequences as well as write a macro to help make these more palatable. Read more…
16 Feb 2015 I’m not saying the Emacs Way is objectively better, but you may find your work-style improved if you incorporate this way in your workflow. Let me demonstrate the way with a few examples. Read more…
17 Jan 2015 I have played with a lot of window managers, and while many claim to be unobtrusive and minimal, I really just want Emacs in full-screen mode. So, I create an .xinitrc file that contains only: exec emacs That's right, folks, Emacs is my window manager . Read more… or simply check out the results .
23 Dec 2014 Manipulating the commit history in Emacs isn’t as straight-forward as other Magit processes, so I thought I would share my notes. Read more…
6 Dec 2014 Saw this video with Woz , where he describes how he wanted every trace on the original Apple board to be placed where the chips would be in the best position. He then said: It had to be that artistically perfect to me, because it represents yourself when you do a great design. Yeah, we can relate.
26 Nov 2014 Maintaining servers falls into two phases: First, bang head until server works; second, capture effort into some automation tool like Puppet or Chef. Recently, I’ve been playing around with making the first phase closer to the second. For lack of a better word, I’m calling it literate devops . Read more… Update 1: I finally got around to troubleshooting using Tramp references to…
25 Nov 2014 I like to publish only positive essays on my blog, and I’ve been conflicted about publishing my perspective on perching on Paul Graham’s shoulders to extend his essay on the Hundred-Year Language . So keep in mind that any snarkiness is my inept attempt at humor. Read more…
30 Oct 2014 After many years of teaching Scratch at my local elementary school, I decided to start teaching an after-school session at my local Middle School. With diverse interests and abilities (not to mention, I'm considerably more busy during my day job), I thought I would try a new approach: nothing. Read more…