→ Minemacs ∞

I came across this new starter configuration, described as “Minimal Emacs config for daily use” via Sacha Chua’s Weekly Emacs Newsletter ¹ If you are Emacs user, you should subscribe. You don’t have to share your email unless you want to. She shares the links on Mastodon² (and other social apps)

Back to Minemacs 😄

It supports emacs versions 28.2 and above (But I got it working with 28.1³)

It is kinda refreshing. Doom Emacs is quite solid, and I’ve tweaked it to my liking over the years, but wanted to try something new.

The developer is very responsive.

I also discovered org-roam by perusing through source code. (Hopefully another post about org-roam soon)

I think you should give it a try.

Emacs D2 Mode

It was only a matter of time before there was Emacs mode for D2 😆 and here it is. I’m yet to try it though.

Emacs Mode in Shell

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.

Mindmaps in Emacs

I have been using Emacs for about 4+ years now, and I still find new things. One of the thing I discovered this week is ability to create mindmaps without leaving the comfort of Emacs 😄 This is made possible via PlantUML. Doom emacs makes it very easy to set it up. Enable plantuml in the init.el of your doom emacs config. M-x doom/reload (This will install the appropriate packages) M-x plantuml-download-jar (Make sure you have working java installation) doom/open-scratch-buffer org-mode (Not sure if this is needed, but better be explicit) Now create following in your scratch buffer that is already in plantuml mode.

Emacs: How to exclude files when searching in a project

I use SPC / a lot to find stuff inside a project. Since starting on Ruby project, a lot of my search results, specifically the first ones are inside the spec file (which is test case in Ruby) I may want those instances as well, but more often than not, I prefer the search results in the source code before test cases. The project is huge, and I have to scroll a lot before I see non-spec code, which becomes tiresome.

Back to Emacs

If you are reading my posts, you would have realized that I had switched to nvim and went down the rabbit hole with different configurations etc. I think I got it to a stable state, and then I stopped tinkering. But when I recently started coding again in Ruby, I realized that nvim is good as an editor, but at least I was not able to configure it as IDE. It has all the right tools (lsp, syntax highlighting, packages) yet something didn’t work 😞

IRC

I could not believe myself, that I finally created an IRC account. Lot of people have asked how come I am not on IRC. They told me that we get to interact with smart people on IRC, including creators of great software, libraries, framework. But for some reason, I resisted. It felt complex, compared to modern communities like Telegram, Discord etc. Today someone suggested it again on the Doom Emacs Telegram channel, and this time I decided to give an honest try.

text mode browsing in Emacs

I’m leaning more and more towards text based workflow. Earlier I enabled twittering-mode in Doom Emacs, and tweeted from Emacs. How 🆒 is that. But that is when I realized that twitter has lots of URLs. If I visit a URL from my Twitter feed, it opens up in external browser by default. I have two problems with that. My flow gets disturbed. The browser already has gazillion links open.

Integrated terminal in Emacs

I spend most of my time in Emacs and Terminal. I make code changes in emacs and switch to terminal to run the tests. It would be nice to do that without switching between the two.

In the past, I had tried shell-mode and inferior shell (python) for this, but it didn’t work, till I found vterm