u/misterchiply

I saw this on the r/TUI subreddit. For any CLI + Obsidian fans, you'll dig this!

This post is a lover letter to Emacs Lisp macros. I've been a long time user as a lisp hacker, and my recent obsessions with Douglas Hofstadter's strange loop concepts and M.C. Escher's mind bending artwork have enhanced my appreciation of this language's most beautiful and thought provoking feature. This post can teach you about macros and what makes them useful, but I also hope it can instill a fascination with their concept. https://www.chiply.dev/post-elisp-macros-are-beautiful

This is a post on a Bob Weiner's Hyperbole package, and what makes it's flexible hypertext concepts so special in Emacs.

I'm hosting August's Emacs Carnival! Check out the post for details, looking forward to hearing from you all!

This has almost certainly been posted here before, but just wanted to add this.

This is a modern browser of the Emacs docs. I'd still prefer Emacs's built-in Info system for this, but I think this has an advantage over the official HTML documentation from a usability perspective.

1. There is mega fast text search (tool bar at the upper right or press Cmd-K)
2. There is a Table of Contents in the sidebar, which I really like as it helps me see where in the manual I am. I'm weird as I consume most manuals as a reference rather than trying to internalize the entire tome. The weirdness is that I actually memorize (or try to memorize) the index of any manual / technical book I read. The heads up display of where exactly I am in the Table of Contents helps me understand where in the broader structure of the documentation I'm reading, which I find really informative. You don't get this with the plain HTML files.

A meta feature: I'm really interested in getting more people into Emacs as I'm really passionate about it. One of the biggest turn-offs I hear from folks is that Emacs is arcane or old news. The info manual and raw-ish HTML manual can be daunting for new users (I personally love the Info manual as it's easy to navigate and interactive; I dislike the HTML manual as it lacks Info's navigation features). This modern rendering of Emacs's docs is a vote against this common complaint, so I like that it can be more inviting to beginners or people who are considering adopting Emacs over something with more shine like VSCode.

As a caveat, it seems like the Emacs tab for the Emacs docs is actually rendering the org docs, I'll probably open an issue for that.

Edit: it also looks like a more modern version is available https://doc.emacsen.de

Edit: I did open that issue for Emacs docs.

This is my entry for the July Emacs carnival! The theme is on "Programming" so I've chosen to write about support for two of my favourite tools that give IDE like features in a generic way: tree-sitter and LSP.

This post is about Hyperbole's HyWiki package for knowledge management.

I've been doing a deep dive into knowledge management and PKMSs, and in my research I've found that HyWiki offers the best of all words. It has a truly unique behavior compared to other PKMSs that allows it to obviate the bookkeeping involved with linking your notes together, and allows your curated knowledge to propagate into the rest of your Emacs, not just your siloed notes vault.

https://www.chiply.dev/post-hyperbole-hywiki

Has anyone experimented with or used a package that represents PKMS (org-roam/logseq/obsidian etc...) style graphs as pure text? Most PKMS solutions render this in the browser, which limits their utility as they reside outside of the Emacs ecosystem. I've been designing something like this but wanted to know if it has already been done!

This package came from another experiment of using SVG to improve Emacs's UI. I've wanted a graceful way to have multiple indicators in the margin (abstractly the 'gutter') for a while now, so I implemented this in svg-margin.

svg-margin implements 1) API that lets you easily compose indicators from decoupled providers, and 2) an SVG rendering engine that renders these indicators as so you can have them co-exist on a single gutter line. Read the article for the config guide, links to code, and more details on how this was implemented (and why SVG made this easier).

This is a condensed version of my very long June Emacs Carnival post on the same topic. I wanted to make this as I felt it would be more intuitive for beginners, who are most likely to benefit from learning Emacs's auto-discovery features.

https://www.chiply.dev/post-june-emacs-carnival

This is my entry for this month's Emacs carnival! It's the missing README for beginners, and demonstrates exactly how Emacs teaches you Emacs.

"Rendering an Emacs status bar as an SVG image, like with my svg-line package, really is several times heavier than the native text engine. The skeptics were right, but it doesn't matter in practice: even a fully-repainted 3000-pixel ultrawide bar holds ~77 fps, and a thin inline animation rasterizing a fresh frame every tick runs at 130–520 fps. To put that into perspective, this is still well above the 60 fps that high-frame-rate games target. More than enough for a text editor if you ask me!"

"Emacs provides four useful status bars (mode-line, header-line, tab-bar, and tab-line), but each imposes different, inconsistent limits on multi-line layout, alignment, icons, and interactivity. svg-line (see code on GitHub) solves this by rendering them as SVG images, and normalizes a rich feature set across all status bars with a consistent configuration. svg-line works by defining a small rendering engine built on Emacs's native SVG support. Configuring status bars is easy: you simply write one :content function and call svg-line-activate. You can see my custom configuration of mode-line, header-line, tab-line, and tab-bar in my Emacs config."

Inspired by Nicolas Rougier's work on Emacs UI improvements with SVG

I've been studying Nicolas Rougier's (of Nano Emacs) work on improving the Emacs UI and came across this amazing talk. It's interesting in and of itself, but also shows how deeply he thinks about UI and text rendering (very relevant to emacs).

Thought this text-obsessed community would find this interesting. In general, he has incredible videos, and I've been using a lot of his SVG rendering ideas to make my Emacs UI better.

Edit: I should emphasize that this is relevant for Emacs because Emacs supports SVG (scaled vector graphics) meaning that the vast majority of what Nicolas demonstrates can be incorporated into Emacs where the built-in text rendering is lacking.

"This is the sixth post in my series on Emacs completion.... This one coins a term for a special case, Incremental Suggesting Read (ISR), where the candidate set produced by incrementally typed input is a suggestion, rather than a literal completion of that input. The ability to generate inferred matches in addition to literal matches vastly expands the scope of what a 'completion' system can do. Two conceptual sources supply the suggestions: 1) semantic retrieval and 2) generative synthesis.

This post is more speculative than useful, so carry that pinch of salt with you as you watch the video or read this post."

"David Foster Wallace (DFW) designed Infinite Jest as a Sierpinski Gasket using the classical top-down construction, placing three institutional vertices (ETA, Ennet House, the Wheelchair Assassins) and subdividing the structure at many scales below. Readers, on each reread, fill in the same Gasket using the chaos game, a non-sequential sampling that converges on the Sierpinski Gasket over many iterations. This explains why first readings feel like noise (burn-in), why the entry point doesn't matter, and why the book rewards near-infinite rereading. Although the book is naturally finite, the Gasket built over it by the reader is infinite."

"Think about how you organize things in your dwelling: a house has rooms, rooms have shelves, shelves have drawers. If you've ever heard the name 'Marie Kondo', then you have likely embraced that drawers too can have dividers. These can be commandeered for smaller drawer-within-a-drawer spaces the moment your proliferation of joyful treasures warrants a subdivision.

Physical space, when we organize it well, is recursive or tree-like. Digital workspaces, somehow, almost never are, and that's why I created space-tree (see code on GitHub), the subject of this post."

Would love to hear feedback as this is my first Emacs package and will be submitting to Melpa on Monday. Contains a video demo!

I recently overhauled the general 'type' awareness in my emacs, and one really important, syntax aware source of these types is treesitter.

I want to be able to integrate these with modal editing systems like meow and evil.

I mainly use evil. I've tried evil-textobj-tree-sitter, but that doesn't work as it seems to be incompatible with Emacs's built-in treesit implementation. I also tried evil-ts-obj, but I don't like it's notion of 'compounds' and 'statements' which don't map intuitively onto functions (for example, how do I visually select around a function with this package? I can't find a way to do that).

Before I roll my own version of this, I wanted to ask if others have had success with establishing treesitter based 'nouns' in their modal editing system.

Basically I want to be able to, for example in a python file

- vif: visually select inside function

If there is no robust implementation for this kind of thing, does anyone have tips before I punish myself with some lisp hacking?

What makes this pattern so elegant to me is the familiarity of its experience. I don't know about you, but I've been annotating books and taking notes with pencils and pens for almost my entire life, and this is often the most engaging and soul-lifting experience. There is a je ne sais quoi in this interaction that makes me feel closer to, if not part of, the thing I'm reading. This is a physical annotate-in-place, and it works beatifully.

I've been long searching for a cognitive bridge between the ergonomics of putting pen to source text with the infinite flexibility of a software solution. annotate-in-place is the pattern that provides that bridge, and org-remark in Emacs is one implementation of that pattern. With it, digital note taking feel as intuitive and ergonmic to me as note taking on a physical medium.