NANO Minemacs

In my earlier post I had mentioned that I might try combining NANO emacs features with Minemacs - which is my current Emacs setup. NANO emacs README has instructions for manual install which is what I ended up doing. There is a separate repo just for the NANO theme, but somehow it did not work for me. Instead, cloning the NANO emacs repo, and adding “just enough"™️ configuration to Minemacs worked for me.

→ The Arc Browser ∞

Finally, got the access to the Arc browser.

Quick overview of what it is.

It is build on top of Chromium browser engine. But adds difference experience altogether. Benefit of using Chromium is that most of the extensions that work with Google Chrome already work. In fact, one installs the extensions from Google Chrome webstore itself 😄

Most awesome feature that made me want to try it is that it will Auto-close inactive tabs after 12 hours (default - can be increased to 24 hours, 7 or 30 days)

They have and publicize the keyboard shortcuts. All browsers have keyboard shortcuts, but other the usual ones to open and close new window/tab, I hardly use any.

I also tried Notes that can be shared with anyone. I’m unlikely to use the share functionality. But the Easel - which allows drawing (and sharing) - seems interesting.

The concept of Little Arc is interesting. It is a smaller (hence Little) floating browser window.

They also have split view which I’m yet to explore. Seems useful when using bigger monitor.

If you want to try it yourself, here is an invite link

Gitlab WebIDE

This week I’m travelling for work, and hence carrying only my work laptop. So far all my microblog entries were written from my personal laptop I have option to clone the repo on my work machine, or not publish anything for this entire week (it is not like I publish every day, still ..) I prefer not to clone my perosnal repo on work machine, and missing publishing also something I don’t want.

→ Nano Emacs ∞

NANO emacs looks quite amazing, polished. Unfortunately, evil-mode is not turned ON by default.

One thing I’m going to try is to combine NANO theme (and some related packages) with Minemacs.

Minemacs has evil mode and keybindings which are close to Doom and I had no problem switching to it.

NANO emacs README has instructions on how to install just the theme and other parts, so that might do the trick.

🤞

Type accent marks in Wezterm on macOS

The tips from my previous post didn’t quite work while writing the blog post using helix editor. But as much as I can guess, it is a feature of the terminal and not the editor itself. So no point searching “Accent marks in Helix” 😄 Turns out initially1 wezterm didn’t support accent mark without special configuration. ('use_ime = true'), but since then it is enabled by default. Yet, it didn’t work for me.

How to type accent marks in macOS

In my previous post I needed to type letter é but didn’t know how. (So I just copied it from the browser page that search result returned, explaining how to type accent marks on macOS 🧠) But later, I searched and got it working. We use what is called as Dead Key method. In Keyboard viewer, pressing the ALT (or Option) key, shows the dead keys. So to type é, I press ALT+e, this produces the accent, then (after releasing ALT) I press e.

Affirmations

Every day, in every way, I am getting better, better and better. Negative thoughts, negative suggestions, have no influence over me at any level of mind. I came across these in a famous book The Silva Mind Control Method1 The book is quite old. I used to see this (along with “The word power made easy”) at every bookseller while I was growing up. (English not being my native tongue, I ignored these back then)

→ Memos: A lightweight, self-hosted memo hub ∞

I’m not sure what the main feature of this app.

Memos can be anything

Somewhere it says “Twitter like”, and it does have different visibility settings. Default being “Only visible to you”, but it can be changed.

It also has user management, so it may be useful for say family with 3-5 users, may be smaller start up 🤷‍♂

I think the best part is ability to self-host. Maybe on Rpi, or in house server (If considering for family)

For a small startup, cheap host may be better.

All the data is stored inside ~/.memos folder locally, which is mounted inside docker container.

Docker seems to be the only officially supported/documented/the easiest option to get started. They also have well written document for deploying to render (I might try it if I stay with it for a while - or not 😄)

Since all the data is stored in ~/.memos (in a SQLite DB, if it matters) it is very easy to migrate to different machine.

Currently, my real .memos folder resides inside Dropbox, and a symlink from ~ points to this real folder. So I can access/update the same data from two different machines (I tested it, it works)

Do Something

These days I’m reading a book “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” In it, Author suggests that if you are stagnated, just “Do something” and it will get you out. I had not posted here in a long time. High priority things at work, late nights, that sort of thing. While high stress situation ended, the lethargy continued. Till I posted about Org-roam earlier today. and now I’m posting my second post of the day 😄

Org Roam

Since I started using minemacs few days ago, I discovered some new things like org-roam As you might know, it is implementation of concepts from Roam research in org-mode (That may not be accurate description, but close enough) I had tried org-mode long time ago, when I moved from vi/m to Emacs. But later, as I wanted to share (publish) my notes, I settled on markdown format. (Yes, I’m aware that org-mode allows publishing notes, but for now I prefer native markdown files) Yet, org seems useful for personal notes since it is integrated within Emacs.