Recent content on The Emacs Cat
Just recently I upgraded one of my Dell laptops to the latest Ubuntu
26.04 LTS with a clean install. The installation process was smooth
and enjoyable. 
 Ubuntu 26.04 ships with Emacs 30.2, which made me happy, so I
installed it immediately—more precisely, the emacs-pgtk 
Wayland-optimized package, since Wayland is the default windowing
system on Ubuntu 26.04. 
 The…
Introduction 
 In my years of using Emacs, I’ve noticed a common pattern: developers
who are highly proficient at editing source code in Emacs switch to a
“normal IDE” (as they call it)—such as CLion or Visual Studio—when
they need to debug their code. They usually explain this by saying
that Emacs feels a bit weird for the task. 
 However, I’d much…
Part 1. Emacs and Software Development 
 Just a couple of days ago, I published on GitHub my first open-source
project, the TEC library , a
lightweight and fast C++ framework designed for efficient performance
in resource-constrained concurrent environments. 
 This project marks an important milestone for me as a die-hard Emacs
user because the entire development was…
I recently came across a Reddit post titled
 How to group buffers that are important to visit later 
which discusses various methods for buffer grouping in Emacs. 
 In the comments, which are typically engaging, some users
mentioned using the built-in bookmarks package, while others
recommended the easysession package or alternative approaches for
effective buffer grouping.…
These days, I’ve come across numerous posts and Reddit threads
praising Org mode as one of the most compelling features of Emacs.
There’s no doubt this is true, and I’m amazed by how many people use
Emacs solely for Org-mode. As a software developer, I rely on Org
every day for note-taking, maintaining my knowledge
database ( org-roam ), agenda management ( org-agenda ,…
These days, I use three different operating systems at work and home:
Ubuntu Linux (Dell Latitude 7490 13" laptop), Microsoft Windows (Dell
Latitude 7400 13" laptop), and macOS (27" iMac). My primary tool
across these platforms is Emacs, which I use for nearly
everything—coding ( C++ ,
 Python ),
blogging ( Hugo ),
reading (Elfeed),
note-taking ( Org Mode…
Last week there were some quite interesting posts about
windows management in Emacs —
 Emacs’ windows navigations and some Emacs zen 
(a review by Irreal ),
 Emacs window management tweaking ,
for instance. 
 In this regard, I’ve decided to share my configuration for the issue. 
 For switching between windows in Emacs I use the ace-window 
package…
I do almost all my text editing in Emacs, and it would be worth
to store the last modified date/time of a file — org/plain
text/source code/whatever — in the file, without consulting the
file system. 
 Fortunately, that is Emacs, and it always extends a helping hand. In
our case this is the time-stamp Emacs built-in function that provides
automatic time-stamping…

 To read my newspapers I load my RSS feed via the elfeed package . 
… 
 Also, I identify any RSS feed entry that does not provide the full
text. And those live in provisional status. My reflexes are to ask
“there’s lots of full-text feeds, why bother with this truncation?” 
 Jeremy Friesen, A Walk Through My Digital Neighborhood 
 
 Jeremy is totally right!…

 Software reproducibility testing is a critical aspect of
software development and maintenance.
It ensures that software is reliable, consistent, and predictable and
that it can be easily replicated and verified by others. 
 Ana Pustan, Reproducibility Testing: A Complete Guide 
 
 For many of us, it won’t be a surprise that
the Emacs Org mode is perfectly…
C++ is my primary programming language since – I can’t believe it
myself – 1991 (yes, it was Turbo C++). As I’m going to do almost
everything within Emacs 29.4 now – no doubt I want to have the C++ IDE in
Emacs, in the same way I’m using Emacs as the
 Python IDE . 
 Thankfully, eglot , the Emacs client for
the Language Server Protocol…
Python is one of my programming languages I’m using for both work and
home life – no doubt, I’d want to use Emacs as an IDE for Python
programming. There is a certain set of features we’d expect to have
in any IDE: 1) code completion, 2) code navigation, 3) error checking. 
 Thanks to the fact that both eglot , the Emacs client for the
Language Server…
Some time ago, I decided to customize my Emacs startup screen in order
to display something helpful for me. Ultimately, after much
consideration, I’ve settled on the following items I just want to see on
my startup screen: 1) 3-month calendar, 2) agenda, 3) diary, 4)
something just for fun. 
 No doubt, there are a number of packages that can assist you in making
a…
In his comment on Irreal ’s post
 Some Configuration To Solve Common Problems ,
 gregbognar noted that some of my
configuration is seriously outdated . In some sense, he is absolutely
correct – I’ve been collecting Emacs settings/tweaks since 2012, and
keeping them unmodified for 12+ years. 
 But on the other hand, it demonstrates how stable and powerful…
After reading the quite interesting post Blue Sky 
by Mike Zamansky I decided to begin
my gentle migration to Bluesky , a new and promising social media platform. 
 I completely agree with Mike’s opinion on Twitter as well as other
social platforms. Like many of us, I migrated from
 Twitter – keeping my existing account
there – to Mastodon…
I’m happy to be back after one year away and it feels great. 
 Below are some chaotic mini/micro – or even nano – excerpts from my
 ~/.emacs file I have been tuning in for 12 years. These days, I’m
running Emacs 29.4 on Ubuntu (Pop!_OS) 22.04 and, rarely, on macOS. 
 These tweaks have been collected from various sources; I provide a
reference to the…
After reading a quite interesting post by Irreal on Org mode clock tables ,
I decided to share my — a bit specific — experience with the subject. 
 The Task 
 Like many of us these days, I’m working remotely. My employer requires
a periodic report and I should track my time I spend on various task —
exactly as Irreal describes in his post. Of course, I’m using Org…
Recently, I’ve discovered a number of posts on Reddit — like
 tree-sitter-hl-mode does not do
anything 
or How to use Emacs 29
Tree-sitter? 
— and decided to share my simple tree-sitter setup that
seems to be working on my Emacs 28.2 like a charm. 
 Step 1. OS: Installing the tree-sitter app 
 First of all, I’ve downloaded the latest pre-build binary…
I’m a big fan of Eshell, but some things in Eshell look, hmm,
a bit strange. One of such things is how the Eshell’s command clear clears
the screen. 
 As it is decribed at the Unix Wiki page, clear is a computer operating
system command which is used to bring the command line on top of the
computer terminal. The key words are “bring the command line on top…
Irreal has recently published a
post with a reference to the Vernon
Grant’s
 emacs-keyboard-shortcuts 
README that contains a list of Emacs keyboard shortcuts Vernon uses on
a regular basis. 
 It’s worth to bookmark it or to download the markdown README locally even
if you think you know Emacs very well (there is no such people,
though). 
 Many…
If you are an emacser, you are probably already following the Sacha
Chua’s blog . If you are not, you should.
Sacha maintains an incredible blog on Emacs-related news, upcoming
events, Org Mode, configuration, new packages, and many other things
from the Emacs world. 
 English is not my native language so I need the right tools to
improve my language skills. My…
As it’s described in the GNU Emacs Manual, an abbreviation or abbrev
is a string of characters that may be expanded to a longer string. The
user can insert the abbrev string and find it replaced automatically
with the expansion of the abbrev. This saves typing . 
 Mostly I use builtin abbrev package to enter the special
characters like greek letters, arrow symbols etc.…

 Do you use #Emacs to run shells or terminal emulators?
Well, you should. With vterm you have a fast alternative to the
builtin ansi-term. And if you prefer shells, you’ve got EShell and
Shell Mode.
And don’t forget serial-term for embedded programming.
— Mickey Petersen (@mickeynp) on Twitter, July 18, 2022. 
 
 Eshell Aliases 
 An excellent
…
Working with satellite data I often have to convert a coordinate value or an
angle value from the DMS notation ( degree@minute’second" ) to a decimal
degree in the floating point number format and vice versa. 
 DMS to Decimal Degree 
 Of course, I want to do this directly in an Emacs buffer, so I wrote a
simple function that uses deg and hms functions provided by…
I started this blog in 2017. After a long break, I decided to continue
blogging about various things related to Emacs. And not just to Emacs. 
 Also, I’ve switched from Jekyll to Hugo for a variety of reasons, mainly
because of the Mainroad theme.
About The Emacs Cat 
 My first attempt to dive into the vast ocean of Emacs was in 1997,
over 25 years ago. 
 My first attempt was unsuccessful; I now realize I couldn’t fully
grasp the spirit of Emacs at the time. 
 My second—and successful—attempt came in 2012. Since then, I’ve been
using Emacs for nearly everything, from coding in C++ 
and Python to
maintaining…