Emacs features have a discoverability problem, and we’re chipping away at it one demo at a time. The years since I wrote the last one of these have yielded more surprising and useful finds, so it’s time again for a “batteries included” report. Note This is the third in a series of articles highlighting useful but...

TL;DR: Get LLMs to do things from Emacs, with gptel and your help. A short one today, without the usual flourishes. gptel is a large language model (LLM) client for Emacs. At its core is a wrapper around the HTTP APIs provided by all LLM providers, including the smaller language models you can run locally on your...

Continuing my avocation of writing to increasingly niche audiences, today we have a matter at the intersection of several small Venn bubbles: the group of Emacs users who code in Emacs, who use Git (or version control) everywhere, who work using offshoot or feature branches, while using the diff-hl package to...

Window management in Emacs gets a bad rap. Some of this is deserved, but mostly this is a consequence of combining a very flexible and granular layout system with rather coarse controls. This leaves the door open to creating and using tools for handling windows that employ and provide better metaphors and...

TL;DR: “We have X-references at home” Cross-references in Org mode are not as well developed as its (relatively) new citation system. Org’s built-in linking system is fairly comprehensive and exports to all formats well enough. But if you’re coming to Org from LaTeX, you might prefer something more familiar and...

A modest defense of the rodent So, Emacs and the mouse. This is an unexpectedly contentious topic, with discussions that end, at best, with careless dismissal. More often they turn into arguments with folks talking past one another. The advantages of using the mouse for common actions in Emacs are immediate and...

TL;DR: Sometimes Emacs needs a timeout A diamond is very pretty. But it is very hard to add to a diamond. A ball of mud is not so pretty. But you can always add more mud to a ball of mud. – Gerald Sussman, paraphrasing Joel Moses A common problem with Emacs’ giant ball of shared state: Any code can step on the feet...

Or: Further Musings on the Tedium of Long Key-Chords. In the past I’ve covered various bespoke approaches to the problem of repeating long key sequences: Transient, Hydra, repeat-mode (and repeat-mode’s helpers) require progressively less forethought and custom elisp chops to set up. Today we continue our aggressive...

Emacs 29 is getting native Tree-Sitter support, and the buzz is hard to miss. Tree-Sitter maintains and provides a concrete parse tree of the buffer that you can query, but that’s as far as it goes. Acting on this information to provide context-aware navigation and editing tools is left to package authors, who have...

Addressing an innocuous question about the Notmuch email client’s default behavior took me surprisingly deep into the bowels of the package code. When the normal customization methods didn’t help, I realized it might be a good opportunity to live-code a solution. The hope was that it might outline a recipe for...

Are you tired of pressing C-x o repeatedly to switch to the window you want in Emacs? Or M-g n and M-g p to cycle through compile errors or grep matches? How about navigating outline headings with (yuck) C-c @ C-n and C-c @ C-p? The correct answer to the latter is that no one traverses headings this way, because...

If you use Emacs for more than editing text, there are many daily occasions to use Emacs as a pager. Here’s my list: Read-only files (with view-mode) Scrolling through emails (notmuch) RSS feed entries (elfeed) Reading ebooks (nov.el) Web browsing (eww) Man pages (man or woman) Help buffers and Info documents Git...