r/linkarzu

The professor sent me an email one day explaining how emacs is a way of life and I found it intriguing as it was well written and made sense. He seems to be an emacs enthusiast and also seems to be using macOS, so I want to know more about the way he uses his workflow.

So far all I know about the professor is that his name is Daniel, and this is his blogpost:
https://turingmachine.org

This video comes out of this livestream:
https://youtube.com/live/hsPHmIMURqw

I know, audio is not leveled but we had technical difficulties the day of the recording and not much I can or want to do about it at this point.

Monthly call with the YouTube members that have the "CEO" level in which we'll discuss several interesting topics.

This is transmitted live with everyone, so you can join and chat with us during the call

What is this podcast about, why, and where to find it?
https://linkarzu.com/about/#whats-the-linkarzu-ceos-monthly-hangout-podcast

If you're not a YouTube member yet, you can join here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrSIvbFncPSlK6AdwE2QboA/join

I need someone to reality-check me on this.

I have 12,000 notes. Meticulously tagged. Linked. Organized into a graph that looks beautiful. I've spent hundreds of hours on this vault.

Yesterday I needed to find my notes on pricing strategy for a project I'm working on. I knew I'd written about it. I searched for it. Found 47 notes that mentioned pricing. Read through seven of them. None had the insight I was looking for because I hadn't written it down, I'd linked to someone else's article about it.

And that's when it hit me. My vault isn't a knowledge system. It's a reference graveyard. I've been filing information instead of processing it. The links look like understanding but they're just proximity. Two notes being connected doesn't mean I've synthesized them.

I'm genuinely questioning whether private knowledge management works at all, or whether the act of organizing for only yourself removes the pressure that forces real understanding.

Has anyone moved away from PKM and found something better? Or am I just using it wrong?

I finally installed Emacs on macOS as a Neovim user, and brother, this was a completely different world.

Yesterday was a complete fail because I didn’t even manage to install Emacs during the stream, so this time we actually got it installed, opened it, broke it, fixed it, and started figuring out where everything lives.

In this video I install Emacs using Homebrew on macOS, try to understand why there are two Emacs apps, what the client, server, daemon, and “start at login” options mean, and then start building the most basic init.el setup from scratch.

Since I’m coming from Neovim, a lot of the stream is me trying to understand the Emacs way of doing things instead of immediately turning it into Neovim with Evil Mode. We talk about default Emacs keybinds, whether home row mods make Emacs easier, how to open files, how to quit buffers, where the init.el file goes, how to symlink the Emacs config into my dotfiles, how to fix the lexical-binding cookie warning, and how to load the config without restarting Emacs every 30 seconds like a caveman.

We also follow some System Crafters guidance, talk about Prot’s Emacs approach, and slowly start figuring out whether this thing is actually a text editor, an operating system, a cult, or all of the above.

Livestream this came from:
https://youtube.com/live/ooyn60c5UbA

Members:
If you want your message read out loud during livestreams, include !say

Example:
!say I have a small pp

Donations of $10 or more on Ko-fi, preferred, or YouTube Super Chats will show up on screen and be read aloud by a computer voice.

Support me:
Buy me the Switch 2:
https://ko-fi.com/linkarzu

Join the YouTube Members:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrSIvbFncPSlK6AdwE2QboA/join

My Merch Store:
https://merch.linkarzu.com

My Dotfiles:
https://github.com/linkarzu/dotfiles-latest

Follow me on X:
https://x.com/link_arzu

I’ve been looking for a good CleanShot X replacement on macOS, preferably something open source, and the whole search has honestly been kind of depressing.

There are new apps for everything now, every single day, and a lot of them look great from the website, screenshots, or README. But once I actually install them and try to use them in a real workflow, many of them feel unfinished, fragile, or like they were thrown together very quickly. I tested a few screenshot apps that gave me that exact feeling, and it made me feel pretty disappointed with the current state of macOS utility apps.

I even skipped macshot in my first attempt, but I decided to give it a try.

It is still not perfect, and I found bugs and missing features, but it is the first open-source screenshot app I’ve tested that actually feels close enough to my CleanShot X workflow to be worth following.

I made a video going through what works, what still breaks, and what I think would make it a real CleanShot X replacement.

macshot:
https://github.com/sw33tLie/macshot

The main things I liked:

• Screenshot history
  • You can go back to previous screenshots
  • You can reopen them and edit them again
• Editable annotations
  • This is a big one for me
  • I don’t want arrows, numbers, and drawings burned into the image immediately
• Quick capture
  • Works well for my normal screenshot workflow
  • Screenshot goes straight to clipboard
• Scrolling screenshots
  • I tested this and it worked better than I expected
• WebP export
  • Useful for smaller files

The missing features I would really like to see:

• Fixed aspect ratio screenshots
  • Square screenshots
  • 16:9 screenshots for thumbnails
  • Custom ratios for things like Reddit banners
• AVIF export
  • I use AVIF a lot for blog posts and images in my workflow
• A way to clear screenshot history from a shortcut or URL scheme
  • Very useful for streaming or recording
  • Sometimes screenshot history can include work-related or private stuff
• A toggle to save edits without asking every time
• A toggle to save from the floating thumbnail without asking for location and filename
• One-finger swipe to dismiss the floating thumbnail, like CleanShot X

Bugs I found while testing:

• Moving existing annotations did not always trigger a save prompt
• Beautify did not always ask to save after quitting
• Beautify seems to become destructive after saving
• The Vivid filter can break the image preview when switching between filters

Overall, I’m not saying macshot fully replaces CleanShot X yet, but it is the closest open-source option I’ve tried so far for my actual daily screenshot workflow.

Curious if anyone here is already using macshot, or if there are other OPEN SOURCE macOS screenshot

Ghostty is getting a lot of attention, but there are still Kitty features that keep me from switching.

In this video I show one of the big ones: Kitty terminal scrollback opened directly inside Neovim 0.12, with colors, clipboard copy, normal Neovim motions, Flash.nvim jumps, and no extra Kitty scrollback plugin.

The important Neovim 0.12 part is that Kitty can send the scrollback into Neovim using the built-in terminal buffer behavior, while preserving the terminal colors. In my Kitty config, I map kitty_mod + z to open the current scrollback in Neovim, start at the bottom of the output, make it read-only, and let me press q to quit back to Kitty.

That means I can open terminal history, navigate command output, search scrollback, jump around with Flash.nvim, select text, yank it to the clipboard, and return to the terminal cleanly. No tmux needed for this, and no separate Kitty scrollback plugin needed.

I also compare this with why Ghostty and WezTerm do not fully replace Kitty for my workflow right now. Kitty gives me sessions, floating windows, bookmark workflows, smooth pixel scrolling / partial scrolling, terminal progress support, and a lot of extensibility. Ghostty is still installed on my machine as a backup terminal, but Kitty is still the terminal that fits my workflow best.

The main topic is Kitty scrollback with Neovim 0.12, but I also talk about Kitty sessions, why I moved away from tmux, how I open groups of terminal bookmarks, how Kitty handles scrollback colors, and why features like pixel scrolling make the terminal feel smoother.

This is useful if you are configuring Kitty, Neovim 0.12, Ghostty, WezTerm, terminal scrollback, scrollback pager, terminal history, terminal colors, clipboard copy, Kitty sessions, tmux alternatives, Ghostty vs Kitty, WezTerm vs Kitty, kitty.conf, pixel scrolling, partial scrolling, or a keyboard-focused terminal workflow on macOS or Linux.

Link to full livestream: https://youtube.com/live/SVT9F_5vogA

Links mentioned:

Clear data on exit issue: https://github.com/imputnet/helium/issues/108

My dotfiles: https://github.com/linkarzu/dotfiles-latest

Official website: https://linkarzu.com

Podcast / interviews playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZWMav2s1MZRr93uiz6vjEWCdXL93QzGz

Support the channel:

YouTube Members: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrSIvbFncPSlK6AdwE2QboA/join

Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/linkarzu

Merch: https://merch.linkarzu.com/

Is this something you have needed to use? I'm rolling over quite a bit and hitting 2 keys at the same time more often than i ever thought. but i'm triggering the mod when it detects both keys pressed. This happens when i'm typing quickly and is forcing me to slow down to the point of frustration. Has anyone used tapping-term-ms and/or require-prior-idle-ms to solve this? Thanks!