Posts from April 24, 2026

When I'm writing documentation in Markdown I like, where possible, to mark up keys with the <kbd> tag. This was the reason for one of the updates to BlogMore: I'd not done any good default markup for <kbd> and the moment I realised, I knew I had to fix it.

Now that I'm writing more on this blog, and especially about coding, I'm mentioning keys pretty often (even more so given I'm doing a lot of tidying up of my Emacs Lisp packages). The thing is though: I find having to type out <kbd> and </kbd> kind of tedious, and it's something I mistype from time to time. I guess I could use some sort of HTML tag inserting tool or whatever, but I got to thinking that it would be handy if I could point an Emacs command at a particular sequence in a buffer and have it mark up the whole thing.

This resulted in a small bit of code I'm calling kbdify.el. It's pretty simple, if point is sat on some text that looks like this:

C-M-S-s-<up>

and I run kbdify I get this:

<kbd>C</kbd>-<kbd>M</kbd>-<kbd>S</kbd>-<kbd>s</kbd>-<kbd>&lt;up&gt;</kbd>

The result rendering as C-M-S-s-<up>.

I could probably take it a bit further, have it optionally work on a region and stuff like that, but even in its current simplistic form it's going to be loads quicker and a lot more accurate and will probably perfectly cover 99% of the times I need it. There is the issue that it's not going to handle something like M-x some-command RET in the way I might like, but then again some-command isn't a key. Like, does it make more sense to have:

M-x some-command RET

anyway? Personally I think this:

M-x some-command RET

probably makes more sense.

I think I'm good for now.

I've just made a small update to BlogMore. This fixes a minor cosmetic issue that's been bugging me for a while, but one that I kept forgetting to address. I noticed it again on a recent post. The issue is that if there are enough tags on a post that the collection of tags runs to a second line, there was no space between those lines.

Now, as of v2.15.0, there's a little bit of breathing room between those lines.

Much better.

When I'm working in Emacs I use the *scratch* buffer quite a bit. I find it especially useful if I'm working on some Emacs Lisp code, but I also find it handy as a place to drop something I want to retrieve soon, or a quick note that I want to refer back to soon; sometimes I even paste some text there and copy it back just to strip the formatting from it before using it elsewhere¹.

Because of this, for a long time, I carried a little function around that I had bound to M-s to quickly take me to the *scratch* buffer. Then, I think around the time I did the follow-up revamp of my Emacs configuration, I turned it into a little package for my own use called itch.el.

The command (itch-scratch-buffer) is simple enough: run it and I get switched to my *scratch* buffer. If I run it with a prefix argument it switches to *scratch* and resets the content back to the initial-scratch-message.

More recently I've found that I'm wanting a scratch buffer that is for writing Markdown. Like many folk I use it a lot for documentation, and of course I also use it for this blog. I also use it heavily for keeping notes in Obsidian². So, often, I find myself switching to a temporary buffer (*foo* or something), setting it to markdown-mode, and then writing what I need.

So yesterday I finally cracked and added itch-markdown-scratch-buffer. It's just like itch-scratch-buffer, only it creates a *scratch: Markdown* buffer, using the same clear-if-prefix rule.

So now I've got this bound to M-S-s and I can faff around just a little less when I want a Markdown scratchpad.