It started with a post on Emacs Stories Telegram group. Someone posted a pretty picture with Emacs-logo-on-a-butterfly and a comment M-x butterfly

But the actual command M-x butterfly is boring (to me at least)

I wanted the nice image.

Some nice soul on the group directed me to this page

First I changed the icon of my doom emacs to this image.

I followed these instructions.

No immediate success.

Because, I have Emacs installed from brew, so one in /Applications folder is a symlink to the actual file in /opt/..

As mentioned earlier I tried new starter kit called Emacs Bedrock.

Getting started was easy with --init-directory option in Emacs 29

I also enabled a few mixins in init.el as recommended. Especially evil mode.

The *Quick Help* that shows up at the start is very useful. Especially for someone like myself who is not familiar with native emacs keybindings.

Enabling evil mode means I can at least edit the text.

But there are so many thing one does other than editing the text.

Recently when reading about emacs Bedrock I learnt that emacs 29+ has command line option that lets the user pass custom init directory via emacs --init-directory=MYDIR option. ¹

This makes it easy to try out different starter kits without touching your stable/working config

Currently, I use Minemacs on my personal machine. In past I would rename my .emacs.d to try new config. (Then switch it back)

This makes things easier.

First impression people have is that Emacs is an editor. So in an editor one should just save as to different name/path. ¹

But save as is different from renaming a file. save as creates a copy of the file with a different name/path. So one has two files with old and new paths.

But rename leaves just one file at thenew path.

Older versions of Emacs (< Emacs 26) did not have this functionality built-in So either one had to use dired or people wrote their own functions.

Now that I’m working on .NET and C#, I enabled csharp-mode in Doom Emacs. While exploring minor modes related to csharp-mode, I came across Glasses minor mode.

Here is the EmacsWiki page.

TL;DR:

The default setting is to separate the Capped bits with an underscore, so EmacsIsStudly shows as Emacs_Is_Studly.

I too, prefer to see the code as-is, but it is good to know that Glasses mode exists. I can see it being useful.

I’ve been using nano emacs theme with minemacs I got bored today, and wanted to try something new.

• I’m trying circadian.el
  • modus-operandi during the day
  • doom-tokyo-night during the night

• Iosevka font (Have not settled on exact variation)
• Also trying org-modern but I use denote - so I’m not sure whether it matters

Continuing from previous post ..

Turns out there is a specific way to handle subtasks in org-mode.

I used something like following - which did not work

* TODO Main task [0/3]
- [x] Subtask 1
- [ ] Subtask 2
- [ ] Subtask 3

As we can see, I expected to see [1/3] but I continue getting [0/3]

Correct way to do this is :

* TODO Main task [1/3]
  ** DONE Subtask 1
  ** TODO Subtask 2
  ** TODO Subtask 3

With the correct syntax, I don’t even need to C-c C-c to update / in the main task. As soon as any subtask chnages from TODO to DONE (or vice versa) the header automatically changes 🎉

Yesterday, I started using org-mode for tracking my TODO items.

I had tried it a long time ago. Org is very powerful, and it can list the TODO items across multiple files.

But that gets (at least in past) overwhelming.

So I started simple.

I started with setting org-agenda-file to ~/org/work.todo

That is the only file I’m tracking my work items.

Then I use org-agenda to list all the open items.

I’ve been using org-roam for some time for my note taking. One of the practical problem is I’m used to Markdown so much, that switching to org syntax does not come naturally to me.

The other day, I had to look the syntax for begin_src - which is just 3 ticks in markdown.

So I checked to see if there are note taking packages in emacs that support taking notes in markdown, and thus I came across denote

As I wrote earlier, I was unable to use magit because of the third party issue. Doom fixed it within hours (bigger community)

But minmacs also fixed ¹ it (only one person)

I had to follow a slightly complex set of instructions, but I’m glad it all worked out in the end.

I will continue to use Minemacs on my personal machine. Working in markdown is pleasure in minemacs. I want to get robe working with minemacs, and codium and chatgpt