I have been using Emacs for several years now. But I switched to (and stayed with) Emacs only because of evil mode.

I had been vi user for decades before that. Even today, I use (Neo)vi(m) occasionally.

Right now, I’m writing this in Helix editor, which is lot closer to modal editing of vi, than of Emacs.

So there.

I am aware that various shell support vi mode, but the default is Emacs.

My previous theme indiefeed supported both light and darkmode. The current one does not.

I’m in the process of fixing that.

But I didn’t know how to test it ? i.e. Depending on the time of the day, Firefox would either select light mode or dark.

Turns out, Developer tool lets you switch it (for that page).

When in Inspector tab, look for icons for Sun (light) and moon (dark).

See the diagram below :

Add something like the following to your css

@media (prefers-color-scheme: light) {
	body {
		background-color: #f0f0f0;
	}
}

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
	body {
		background-color: #0f0f0f;
	}
}

I’m just learning this. But this above doesn’t look scalable. My previous theme, defined colors as variables, per color-scheme and in the other css, use these variables instead of actual colors.

That way, you need to modify colors only at one place 🎉

See this

D2 allows me to generate diagrams from the same source file using different layouts

It comes with two built-in layout engines :

Dagre is the default :

Other one is ELK This needs to be specified explicitly as :

D2_LAYOUT=elk d2 in.d2 out.svg

and here is the output

I came across D2 on Mastodon I think. (Like most things. But I can’t find the original toot 🤷‍♂)

I used mermaid.js earlier. In fact, I also added mermaid support for this theme.

Benefit of Mermaid is that since it is generated by mermaid.js, I don’t need to save and include the image in my blog (and worry about mismatched filename and/or path, resulting into broken image.)

On the other hand, not many hugo themes support mermaid, but link to an image is supported by hugo and every other SSG.

Yesterday, after I came out of a shop, some elderly woman was begging. Near that shop, it is not uncommon.

She did not look like a beggar. Yet she was.

At first, I gave her Rs. 50 - which maybe more than what people usually give beggars (I think).

I was surprised that she said I don’t want money, I want rice and daal (lentils) instead. I was positively surprised. Not many beggars ask for things. I told her to buy grocery herself. There is a grocery store next door.

I wrote about Espanso long time ago. I have been using Espanso since then.

Recently, I had a need to add timestamp in a note. Espanso already comes with a trigger to insert date via :date. As the name suggest, it just inserts the date.

So I added the following to the match/base.yml file.

  - trigger: ":timestamp"
    replace: "{{timestamp}}"
    vars:
      - name: timestamp
        type: date
        params:
          format: "%b %d, %Y %I:%M%p"

As might be obvious, now I get timestamp just by typing :timestamp anywhere.

I came across stashpad during this Stackoverflow podcast.

What caught my attention was when Cara mentioned

Everyone has untitled.txt open that they use every day

That is me!! 😆

It is really easy. Cmd + N to create a new empty file, and start typing. I use BBEdit for this. I’ve seen my colleagues use Sublime text I have also used Sublime text for exactly that and only that purpose for a long time, since it saves these unnamed files across reboots/application restarts. One less headache. I don’t have to think of what to name the file, where to save it, format (this is easy, I’ll just save it as .txt or .md)

After creating an account on Mastodon, next question was how to find people to follow ? 🤔

While mastodon has existed for a while, only recently it started getting attention. So lot of people you follow are not on Mastodon. Yet.

I followed a couple of approaches.

First, I searched for topics I am interested in. I started with Emacs and Ruby. Found a few accounts to follow.

Then I literally searched find tweeple of mastodon. It turns out a lot of sites like Wired, PCMag, HowToGeek are writing about it. Most of these articles are from less than a month old 😄