Posts from March 21, 2026

Yes, the last time I mentioned blogmore.el it was v1.4 and now it's up to v1.7. So I tinkered a little with it last night, okay?

Anyway, the changes and additions keep happening as I have more fun writing some elisp again. Since the last post about the package I've:

• Added a command to refresh the date frontmatter property
• Added a command to add/refresh the modified frontmatter property
• Added a command to insert a link to a previous post into what I'm writing
• Made a few things defcustom rather than defconst for easier tweaking
• Added a hook that can be run after a new post is started
• Dropped the dependency on end-it and used the above hook to do the same thing

While this package is never intended for use by others, I guess it's not impossible someone might want to work with it (I had the same thing in mind with BlogMore itself yet someone else has started working with it!) and so I'm moving it in the direction of being my way by default but easy to modify to other requirements.

So, now, rather than forcing someone to have to use my obsession with end-of-file markers, I still have that without imposing it on anyone else by simply setting the hook.

(use-package blogmore
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/davep/blogmore.el" :rev :newest)
  :init (add-hook 'blogmore-new-post-hook #'end-it))

I think my favourite addition right now is blogmore-link-post. I like to cross-link posts in my blog as much as possible so having something that lets me do that and stay inside Emacs really speeds things up. So now I just run that command, I get speedy picker to find the post:

and the result is some Markdown inserted with the cursor between the two [] ready for me to write the text:

[](/2026/03/20/blogmore-el-v1-4.html)

Other things I link often are categories and tags, so I'm planning on adding commands that does something similar for those two.

It's a couple of days now since the news hit that OpenAI are in the process of purchasing Astral. When I first saw this my initial reaction was pretty much "woah", followed by getting on with what I was doing.

Until, that is, I opened up the socials. On Mastodon, Reddit, BSky, Threads, etc... anywhere I followed any Python-based content, I was seeing very firm opinions posted. Plenty of folk either talking like it was the end of their tooling as they know it, or proudly boasting that they'd avoided uv and ruff (and lately ty too I guess -- not that I've really tried that yet myself) because they'd predicted this evil outcome from the start and they were untainted by this but look at all you idiots who fell for this long play!

Okay, I exaggerate slightly, but there were some pretty strong opinions kicking around, especially in the (often fairly smug) "I stayed pure and never used uv" camp.

Personally, I don't get it. The last I looked the tools I use that Astral are behind are FOSS. Also, the last I looked, plenty of FOSS tooling is written by folk who are either paid to do so (I had my moment), given some time in the day job to work on those tools, or just plain have a day job and also work on those tools. If, as plenty are speculating, the Astral purchase is an acqui-hire, the likely result is going to be one of those three scenarios.

If it isn't one of those scenarios, if work on uv and friends just ceases, well, at best some smart folk can fork the tools that are useful and keep them going (this is a major benefit of FOSS after all) and, at worst, well... we can fork them and agent the shit out of them. Right?