r/emacs

i work at a devops consultancy and we have about 180 youtube videos. recorded architecture reviews, internal tech talks, client postmortems, vendor integration demos, conference presentations people bookmarked. they're all shared in a markdown file in our wiki which is basically a list of youtube links with dates. useless for finding anything unless you remember exactly when the video was recorded.

i wanted a way to search these videos by what was actually said in them without leaving the terminal. so i built a workflow around vim, bash, and fzf.

the first piece is a bash script that takes a youtube url and pulls the full transcript using transcript api. it saves the transcript as a plain text file named after the video title with the date prepended. one file per video. all the transcripts live in a directory called ~/transcripts.

the second piece is an fzf wrapper script. it runs fzf with --preview against the transcript directory. as you type, fzf fuzzy matches across all transcript files and the preview window shows the matching file with the match highlighted. select a result and it opens the transcript in vim with the cursor on the first match. i bound this to a key in my shell so i can hit ctrl-t and start searching immediately.

the vim side is where it gets useful. each transcript file has a yaml front matter block at the top with the video title, date, speaker, tags, and the youtube url. i wrote a small vim function that reads the url from the front matter and opens it in the browser. so the workflow is: fzf to find the video, vim to read the transcript, one keypress to open the actual youtube video if i need to watch it.

the ingestion script is about 30 lines of bash. curl to call the api, jq to parse the json and extract the transcript text, a few lines to generate the yaml front matter, and tee to write the file. i have a text file with all 180 urls and a for loop that processes them. the whole batch ran in about 4 minutes.

the fzf wrapper is maybe 15 lines. the vim function is 8 lines. the keybinding is one line in my vimrc.

about 180 videos indexed as plain text files. the consultants on my team use it before client calls to search for whether we've discussed a similar architecture before. i use it almost daily to find specific things from recorded tech talks. the nice thing about plain text files is that grep works, ripgrep works, fzf works, vim's built in search works. no special tooling needed beyond what's already on my machine.

the whole thing took an afternoon and i haven't changed anything since.

Hello! I've been both a Doom Emacs and vim/nvim + tmux user over the years, alternating between both for multi-year stretches.

Just coming off a stretch of using nvim + tmux, and using https://github.com/theprimeagen/tmux-sessionizer for workspace management. Part of what's pulling me back to emacs is magit and very specifically org-mode; the org plugin in nvim is good, but just not quite the same thing.

Projectile does a pretty good job of providing similar functionality to the sessionizer, and I know I can easily extend it if I need. However, in my day-to-day I make heavy use of tmux panes, switching between nvim windows and terminals. I'm finding that the same flow in emacs feels kind of "clunky"... I apologize I don't have a better way to describe it, but it just seems slower, escaping/mode changes seem to be buggy, its less clear how to manage multiple panes etc...

Does anyone have any tips or tricks? Am I thinking about it wrong? Some killer plugin i'm missing? Thanks in advance!

View the repo here:

Navi - A New Shiny Org-Roam Graph

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New to the whole "zettelkasten" deal, but I instantly knew I was meant to use emacs. After configuring for a while, I only had one regret regarding a certain competitor named after volcanic rock.

As of today, I no longer have that regret. If you are an org-roam user, please try this out and give me some feedback! I will listen to any and all suggestions and thoughts (so long as they are constructively delivered).

Some fun features to convince you:

  - Throw nodes — fling them and they coast with real momentum, bounce off each other via physics

 - Age heatmap — notes you haven't touched in months visually rust, grey out, and grow cracks. Ancient ones look genuinely weathered

 - Particle effects — ambient clouds drift around each node; comet trails when you launch one across the screen (E to toggle)

 - Local graph — press L to focus your selected note's neighbourhood, 1→2→3 hops outward; everything outside fades away

 - Borderless mode — strips the title bar completely and tiles flush in AeroSpace like any other window

 - Zero setup on first run — drop the two files anywhere, run ./navi, it finds your DB and bootstraps itself

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Even though it's heavily vibe-coded, I did my best as a self admitted emacs neophyte to realize my vision. If even one person finds it cool, it will be worth the effort and more. So please, give it a whirl!

Much love,

Ganten ❤️

I've been using Embark for many years, and it's one of my favourite Emacs packages because of how much it expands what Emacs is capable of. People often talk about how "Emacs puts everything on your computer at you fingertips". Embark, with it's recognize-a-thing, dispatch-any-command pattern provides a shockingly concrete implementation of this idea. Hyperbole also followed this idea in the early 90's, but I find Embark's usage is more widespread among modern Emacsapiens (over 1.2k stars on GitHub and 324,425 downloads on MELPA: that's incredible for an Emacs package!).

I've wanted to hear from Omar ( u/oantolin ) about the creation of this package (and his general take on Emacs usage) for a while now.

Very stoked for his appearance on the Lispy Gopher Climate podcast tomorrow!

See post on Mastodon. You can tune in at this link! The show will start around 8pm Eastern Standard time tomorrow (May 19th).

Edit: this is Embark for anyone unfamiliar: https://github.com/oantolin/embark

Here I put a little comparison. But basically I find no way to customize the faces because there don't seem to be specified faces.

M-x describe-char doesn't precise anything else than for the red and grey text,

face font-lock-string-face

and

face font-lock-function-call-face

Is there a solution ?

Thanks !