Posts from June 12, 2026

Every so often I get the urge to change how Emacs looks. Ever since I finally fell to the dark side, my Emacs has stayed looking pretty much the same. I like how it looks, but I do keep having this urge to find a darker theme, and to also make things just a wee bit more minimal.

At one point I was very much about, and in favour of, having as much information as possible in the mode line. Eventually I realised I didn't use that much and tried to declutter somewhat, mostly cleaning up minor mode information with diminish. Even then though, I had this feeling that there was still more information in the mode line than I really needed.

So, just now, as an experiment, I've decided to start fairly clean. I've dropped powerline and instead decided to have a play with mood-line. Rather than use one of its pre-configured formats, I've had a go at rolling my own:

(setq mood-line-format
      (mood-line-defformat
       :left
       (((mood-line-segment-buffer-status) . " ")
        ((mood-line-segment-buffer-name) . " : ")
        (mood-line-segment-major-mode))
       :right
       (((mood-line-segment-vc) . "  ")
        (mood-line-segment-cursor-position))))

So far I'm really pleased with the result.

For any given buffer the mode line display is now:

• The status of the buffer
• The name of the buffer
• The major mode of the buffer
• The git status for what I'm working on
• The cursor position

Honestly, I'm struggling to think of anything else I really need to see. Sure, I can imagine there's the odd minor mode I might need to know about, but generally I either have them enabled all the time anyway, or it's something so obvious that I know when it's not enabled.

I'm going to run with this for a while now and see how I feel. I can sense that I might want to tweak a couple of things (at the moment the left-hand side will move when I change the unsaved status of the buffer; on the right there's nothing that tells me that this file I'm editing right now is new to the repo and not part of it yet), but this basic configuration feels clean and right.

Meanwhile... the search for a theme that is darker and I actually prefer over the sanityinc-tomorrow themes continues. I fear this is going to be a lot harder.

Damn. Oh damn. My Reddit account is now old enough to buy beer¹. O_o

While I probably have accounts somewhere that are older than this, that's still a pretty long time to have held an account somewhere and still be actively using it.

I remember I'd been reading Reddit for a couple of years before I finally made an account; I can't quite remember what prompted me to do that. In that time I've been more or less active there (although seldom one to post things or make comments -- normally I just consume and vote). From what I can tell that suggests I was starting to read Reddit within a year of it being launched.

I vaguely remember those old days. I remember all the conversation when it moved away from being developed in Lisp. I can't remember if I was visiting it around that time.

I do have the charter member badge because, back when gold was launched, I was reading the site a lot and it seemed sensible to support it at the time. I've long since let that subscription lapse. I see zero benefit in Reddit Premium.

I still subscribe to r/lounge.

For some time, a couple or so years back, when they killed off most third-party clients, I stopped using the site for a while. These days I have got back into the habit of reading it again. While I do occasionally check in on a handful of Lemmy subscriptions, and do keep thinking I should probably look into lobste.rs², it's hard to break the habit of opening the Reddit app and scrolling for a wee while. I've yet to finally and fully replace it.

I should go look at some of my other longer-serving accounts on websites and services and see exactly which is my oldest one.

Another quick update to blogmore.el, again to fix an issue I've run into with the new frontmatter-handling code. This time it's to address an actual crash that could happen if a property was available but empty. For example, if a post had frontmatter that looked like this:

title: "blogmore.el v5.2.0"
date: "2026-06-12 08:31:15+0100"
category: Emacs
tags:

And I then went to use blogmore-add-tag, I'd get a crash saying:

Wrong type argument: sequencep, :null

The reason being that tags was being parsed with a value of :null, rather than (as before) having a value of nil (which of course meant I had a nice empty list to do things with). It was an easy enough fix.

At this point I think I've managed to shake out any serious issues with the proper YAML-parsing approach to frontmatter, as I've used it to write a handful of posts now.