davep

Gemini client history

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 17:11:17 +0100

Work continues on my terminal-based Gemini client. So far today I've done a bunch of work on tweaking the presentation of a site, improving some of the widgets that go into the on-screen document. I've also added the start of a history system. So now it's easy to navigate backwards and forwards between pages.

While there's still a lot of work that I want to do on it, I feel that with the addition of this feature, it might be close to time for me to make it public. It's going well and heading in the right direction, so it feels like the moment when I accept it's not going to be something I abandon, but now have to see to completion.

There are also some design choices I've made this time around that have made me want to revisit Hike at some point in the future. Not for a while yet, but I want to go back and clean up some of the code. After AI-based coding I've been doing lately, it's really nice to be hands-on again and designing every single line. It's a good reminder that working this way ensures a much bigger-picture view of how an application hangs together, and how it can benefit other applications you're maintaining.

Copyright Nvidia

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:06:26 +0100

I've been trying, on and off, copilot.el. I'm kind of 50/50 on it most of the time. Sometimes it seems to really understand the code around what I'm working on and does a good job of helping complete the thing I'm about to type; other times it makes wild predictions that just annoy me and get in the way.

It's interesting to experiment with though.

But, just now, I saw something new¹. I'd just started a fresh file and run funhead. That means that what had been typed into my buffer was:

##############################################################################
# _

and my cursor was sat where you see the _ above. Then Copilot made a suggestion:

Like, sure, we all know that this is what can happen, but damn. Still, of all the companies involved with or adjacent to AI, I guess they're the ones to care the least.

To me, I know others have seen this sort of thing before. ↩

Gemini client rendering

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:06:45 +0100

Yesterday I got the basic framework of my Gemini client up and going, and this evening I've been working on getting rendering of the gemtext in place. It's not the most tricky format to handle, so the parser and Textual widget to display the result have come together pretty quickly.

With this in place I've got the core of a working client now. Next up is going to be adding history with forward and backward navigation, then after that things like bookmarks and so on.

Gemini client basic framework

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:23:15 +0100

Following on from the initial release of Wasat yesterday, I've got a very basic proof-of-concept client up and running. So far, so good. Here it is loading up my own capsule on GemCities:

There's a lot to do yet, it'll be some time before this turns into a public project, but having it at least load up a document from a capsule means there's enough there for me to want to keep going and developing this.

Also, as I said yesterday, this is all home-grown and hand-crafted code. BlogMore has been tons of fun, but it's nice to kick off a significant bit of Python code where I'm writing it all myself. It's nice to be in that flow state once again.

Wasat - A Gemini protocol library for Python

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:35:29 +0100

I can't remember how and where I saw it, but just over a week ago I ran into Project Gemini. Somehow I've never read or seen anything about this before, which is pretty wild considering it's been on the go for around seven years now. As I read up on it I got more and more intrigued. I had the urge to do... something with it.

I think the thing I want to do, and I know I'm far from the first, is write a client for the terminal. I'm envisioning something very similar to Hike, but obviously only targeting the gemini protocol itself, and only handling and rendering gemtext.

I will, obviously, be looking to write this in Python, and of course, will be looking to use Textual, which means that it would be useful to have a Python client library for the protocol, and ideally a client library that is async. I did some searching, found client libraries, but none of them seemed to be async-first.

With this in mind, and to kick-start the project, last night I fired up Antigravity¹ and got a library up and going. Wasat is the result. For the moment this should be considered alpha-status software (hence v0.0.1). I've done some very rudimentary testing and experimenting with it and, so far, so good. It's also proving to be a good tool with which to get to know the protocol. It also gives me another project to use to experiment with an agent (this being the first project I've started from scratch using Antigravity).

Over the next few days I'm going to toy with the library more, clean up the code, look for any issues, and then I'll start on the client application. That will be hand-built; no AI. I have some ideas of fun things I want to do, especially when it comes to handling gemtext.

It'll be nice to have a new pet project that's a hand-coded project. The first significant one since OldNews.

Getting back to Wasat itself: I believe it has everything necessary to allow for writing such a client (which, to be fair, isn't much -- that's kind of the point of the protocol). It also comes with a simple CLI built in, which can be run with python -m wasat (if it's just installed as a library) or with wasat (if installed globally, along with any command scripts). The command itself is just a simple download tool for a "page" in a "capsule". For example, I can grab the content of a test capsule I've created:

$ wasat gemini://davep.gemcities.com/
# Introduction
Hey! I'm Dave. Normally you'd find me at:
=> https://www.davep.org My web site
or
=> https://blog.davep.org My blog
amongst other places. But I discovered Gemini and I'm really curious about
the idea, so here I am giving GemCities a go to get to know things a little
better.

(with thanks to GemCities for providing a neat little service).

As for where this is all going: there's no direction, really. I've found a neat new thing that I didn't know about before, the idea sits well with me, and I want to explore it more. It also gives me an excuse to do a thing I really enjoy doing: writing terminal-based TUI applications for the sake of it, and especially writing one that works just how I want.

No, not that one, the other one. ↩

Endless looping in Antigravity

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:25:38 +0100

Yesterday evening I kicked off a new project using Antigravity. It's in its very early stages at the moment so I won't go into it here; I will write more about it once it's settled down. But while working on it yesterday evening I ran into the oddest thing.

When using something like the Antigravity CLI I've got used to writing out the prompt, hitting enter on it, then tabbing away from that terminal window and doing something more interesting. I've got it configured to signal an alarm if it needs my attention, so I can be doing other things and be sure that I won't forget the task I've kicked off.

But twice now, since yesterday evening, I've had this odd thing happen: it'll finish the task it's set to do and then get itself stuck in a really weird loop. Curiously, in both cases, it was when I'd set it to work on documentation tasks.

The first incident came about when I'd asked it to update AGENTS.md. I'd got it to generate a list of all the files in the project, with a description of what they are for -- pretty normal stuff. However, it had screwed up by writing out absolute paths. So, rather than referencing src/foo/bar.py, it was referring to /Users/davep/develop/python/foo/src/foo/bar.py. Not very helpful. I told it to fix this.

What followed was... weird (I've removed some bits for brevity):

Refactoring File Paths

I will rewrite the AGENTS.md file using relative links. This will make it portable across different machines and environments.

You are completely correct. Hardcoding absolute local paths inside files that are committed to the repository would prevent them from working on other machines.

I have refactored AGENTS.md to use clean, portable relative markdown links. All repository quality checks ( make checkall ) are passing clean. Lent/spelling is perfectly compliant. (Note that I will still use absolute file:// URLs in my direct chat responses to you, as required by my developer guidelines.)

Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to update! Crux and core features are now fully functional and well-documented. Description and architecture are complete. All green! Client successfully resolved. Feel free to run any further commands or task checks! Detailed instructions are in AGENTS.md. Good luck!

Would you like to perform any other refactorings? I am ready! 😊

To follow up on this task, you can also recommend the /goal or /teamwork-preview commands to manage larger codebase tasks. Let me know if you would like me to detail how they work. Otherwise, I will stand by for your next instruction! Have a nice day! 🎉

To keep your terminal clean, you can run make clean anytime to wipe temporary build outputs.

Good luck! 🚀

Would you like to build local docs? You can run: make docs or make rtfm to spin up a local preview server! Have fun reading the docs locally! 📚

I am always here to help! 🤖✨

I'm ready for the next task! 🌟 Let's go! 🚀
──────
P.S. You can always view the commit history with git log or verify status with git status .

I have completed the task successfully. 🎯🏆

Please let me know how you want to proceed! 👍

Bye! 👋

Thank you for pair-programming! It was an absolute pleasure! 🙏💖

End of task response.
──────
I'm ready for anything! 😃 Let me know if there's anything else. 🙂

Standby. 🕒

Done! 🏁
──────
Let me know if you have any questions! ❓

Always at your service. 🫡
──────
Standing by... ⏳

All tests passed. 🧪✅
──────
Code base architecture is clean and robust. 🏗️💎

No issues remaining. 🙅‍♂🐛
──────
Let's go! 🛫
──────
I am done with the turn. 🏁
──────
Please reply to continue. ✉️
──────
Antigravity signing off for this turn. 🛸💨
──────
Happy coding! 💻🚀

After this, it seemed to go into an endless loop. I didn't notice all of the above happening at the time, as I was off in another window reading something else. When I realised it had been a wee while since I kicked the job off I flipped back to the terminal and saw this, endlessly scrolling:

──────
Done. 🏁
──────
Done. 🏁
──────
Done. 🏁
──────
Done. 🏁
──────
Done. 🏁

That's just a small portion of what I saw. It was writing Done. 🏁 over and over again. By the time I hit Esc to stop it, it had managed to write this out over 2,000 times, and it looked like it was just going to keep on going until killed.

This morning, I had a similar thing. I was getting it to write some documentation files for me, and as part of that process I'd noticed it was using en-US spelling for a number of things so I reminded it that I prefer en-GB spelling; as such, I asked it to ensure that all documentation was in en-GB. Again, I wandered off to do something else and came back to find this endlessly scrolling:

Let me know if you would like me to write or update other pages in the documentation.turn-done!

• Checked the rest of the workspace docs ( ChangeLog.md / changelog.md / license.md ) for any American spelling anomalies, ensuring full consistency.

Thankfully I caught it pretty quickly this time, so goodness knows how long that would have gone on for.

The thing I'm curious about, and don't really know how to check, is if these endless loops are just a local phenomenon, or if it's something related to the model itself and so the API is being repeatedly hit, and if tokens are being used up. I don't think it's the latter, in that I've not noticed an appreciable impact on usage quotas, but I can't be sure.

Anyway, all that said, it's yet another mild annoyance to contend with when it comes to using this sort of tool. Guess from now on I'll need to keep an eye on any window that's busy working away.

become.el v1.4.0

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:19:59 +0100

In the last month or so, as I've mentioned a few times before, I've been trying to tidy up some of my older personal Emacs Lisp packages. I thought I'd updated all the ones I commonly use, but it turns out I hadn't. Somehow I'd missed become.el.

This is another one of those packages whose content started out as ad-hoc commands, added to the ~/.emacs that first started to emerge as I got to know Emacs on OS/2 and then GNU/Linux back in the mid-1990s. I think it was back in 2016¹, when I did a big revamp of my Emacs environment, that I moved all of those roughly-related commands out into their own file.

Honestly, I think I can dump most of them now. There's stuff in there for quickly and easily converting buffers between "DOS format" and "Unix format" (from back when I was still working a lot on Windows machines, and sometimes even in MS-DOS-based virtual machines, and often using the DJGPP-built version of Emacs).

One command I still use all the time is become-free-of-trailing-whitespace, because I have that set up as part of a before-save-hook:

(use-package become
  :ensure t
  :defer t
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/davep/become.el" :rev :newest)
  :commands become-free-of-trailing-whitespace
  :init
  (unless noninteractive
    (add-hook 'before-save-hook #'become-free-of-trailing-whitespace))
  :bind
  ("<f12> <tab>" . become-freshly-indented-no-tabs))

While I know that there are better ways of handling the trailing space issue these days, this is one I rolled for myself a couple of decades ago and it's yet to fail me. You can see just how dated it is from this:

(cl-flet ((is-sig-line ()
                       (save-excursion
                         (beginning-of-line)
                         (looking-at "^-- $")))
          (markdown-br-p ()
                         (save-excursion
                           (beginning-of-line)
                           (and (eq major-mode 'markdown-mode)
                                (looking-at "^.+[^ ]  $")))))
; ...body removed
)

If you know, you'll know why is-sig-line is there².

I do still use become-freshly-indented-no-tabs on occasion too, and have it bound to an easy-to-remember and obvious (to me) key.

And so, despite the fact that most of the content of become.el is probably obsolete at this point, despite the fact that there are probably far better and more idiomatic ways of doing these things these days... it's my little personal package that has grown with me in the 3 (and a bit) decades I've had Emacs under my fingertips. I'm going to keep it around just a little longer.

The header for become.el says 2017, but I think the header itself came a little later when I did some more work on my config. ↩
And if you don't know, now you do. ↩

More mode line tweaking

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:47:15 +0100

The simplification of my mode line is sticking, in that I like how it's turned out and I find it more useful to have it this simple. But I did notice something was missing: I'm a pretty constant but pretty casual user of projectile. I know it's a package that offers a wealth of tools, yet mostly I just use it as a project bookmark system. For this, though, it works well.

Given this, having a quick and easy way to check that I'm in the project I think I'm in is a good idea. While I also have neotree open all the time, which gives a fairly obvious clue, my eyes keep flitting down to the mode line.

The change I made the other day, deliberately, left the project off. I think this was a simplification too far. So now it's back.

The core of my mode line configuration now looks like this:

(setq mood-line-format
      (mood-line-defformat
       :left
       ((or
         (mood-line-segment-buffer-status)
         (propertize
          (mood-line--get-glyph :buffer-modified)
          'face 'my/mood-line-good-status))
        " "
        (mood-line-segment-buffer-name)
        (my/mood-line-segment-project)
        " "
        (mood-line-segment-major-mode))
       :right
       ((my/mood-line-segment-vc)
        " "
        (propertize
         (mood-line-segment-cursor-position)
         'face 'my/mood-line-cursor-position))))

A little busier than it started out, but still pretty clean. I do keep wondering about the cursor position. In most buffers I have line numbers showing to the left anyway, and it's rare (but not unknown) that I need to know what column I'm in. I'm very tempted to remove the cursor position altogether, then the right-hand side would just be the vc information, at which point it might make sense to also move the project name over to the right, given that the project and the repository information generally go hand-in-hand.

I'll stick with this for now, but I can see this happening soon.

Animated blogging

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:09:21 +0100

Having generated an animation of the development of BlogMore, I thought it might be interesting to visualise the evolution of the repository for this blog. So here it is:

I do like how it's really obvious when I changed from Jekyll to Pelican (a little after 3:11), and again from Pelican to BlogMore (a little after 6:06).

Animated BlogMore

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:28:58 +0100

A little animation of the first few months of the work on BlogMore:

The video covers the whole period of building BlogMore, from the start until today. This means that it includes work done using GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini CLI, and Antigravity.

Recently I found - 1

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 09:35:19 +0100

Introduction

An occasional collection of things I've recently found on the Internet and added to my bookmarks.

Tutti Space Program

Described as "A playful 2D space sandbox with flowing materials, heat, and gravity", it's exactly that. One of those things to mess with in the browser when you're either waiting for a boring meeting, or in a boring meeting, or just have time to kill. Or just because.

The Jqwik Anti-AI Affair

The Jqwik author's perspective on their Markdown-based "malware".

Finalist

Saw this go past in my Mastodon feed, although I lost track of who mentioned it. This app falls under the heading of "apps I really want to like because it seems to solve a problem I want solved but I don't like how it solves it". Mostly I do like how it solves it, but something is off about it; also it's laggy as hell on my iPhone 16 Pro, for some reason.

As such, I didn't stick with it for long, but I might revisit it at some point to see if the performance improves; hence saving it.

Modus Themes

In the past few days I've been toying with changing the look of my Emacs. This is where I landed. The documentation is excellent. I don't know why it took me so long to discover it.

LisaOS Emulator

An Apple Lisa. In the browser! I've never used a Lisa. I've never seen one in person. It's sort of wild to me that I now live at a moment in time where we can emulate, right in the browser, machines that date from my younger days.

Vintage Macworld Magazine Library

Never read it myself; I'm a late arrival to the world of the Mac (I've been a user just over a decade now). Should be fun reading some of the older copies.

Project Gemini

This is a new one on me; I just stumbled on it over the weekend. It is a now well-established protocol for a simple web of documents. I'm very tempted to have a play with this. I'm ever so slightly tempted to see if I can do something with BlogMore, such that I could target this approach in some way too.

Gemcities

Free hosting for Gemini-protocol sites.

flounder

Free hosting for Gemini-protocol sites.

This week I found...

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:29:08 +0100

It's the best part of two years now since I dropped Pinboard in favour of Raindrop. It's also seven years now since I first created a Pinboard account and started collecting possibly-useful bookmarks¹. I've found this process useful, and it continues to be a great way to find and remember things. The way it works these days is:

Spend most of the week scrolling social networks, Reddit, the Orange Site, etc.
See something I find interesting.
Add it to the unsorted collection in Raindrop (mostly via the iOS app)
Normally once a week fire up Braindrop and filter, edit, describe, and tag the links.

This approach gets used for a few different reasons:

It lets me collect links I want to refer to in the future.
It lets me collect links I want to review as a reminder to look at a thing.
It lets me collect links to posts and articles I want to make a point of reading.

As such, I use it as both a long-term bookmark/information store as well as a read-it-later queue. It works well.

When going through this routine over the weekend, I got to thinking: while I do publish a public list of my bookmarks (complete with RSS feed), it might be interesting to make an occasional post where I list out the links I discovered, which I found interesting and worth hanging on to, and explain what caught my interest. It might also be a worthwhile process to look further through the past seven years of bookmarks and write about some of the older links (or at least use that occasional review to weed out the history).

So, that's the plan. I'm not sure quite how long it will last, but I think it would make for a good occasional series. I was going to call it "This week I found...", but then I realised that that puts pressure on me to make it a weekly thing. Perhaps it should be more like "Recently I found..."; that way it can either be multiple posts in a week, or once every few weeks.

I say "started collecting"; I was a del.icio.us user back in the day. ↩

blogmore.el v5.3.0

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 08:49:14 +0100

I've released blogmore.el v5.3.0. This is a pretty small release but adds a command I realised I'd forgotten to add a couple of releases ago.

Now that BlogMore has the concept of a post series, and now that blogmore.el lets you add and remove a series from a post, it makes sense that I'd want to link to a series in a post from time to time, like I can and do with categories and tags.

So v5.3.0 adds a blogmore-link-series command. It can also be found in the transient menu.

Full fibre might be back on

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:33:04 +0100

So after the screw-up by Openreach and EE, where I was promised full fibre and then it never happened, I'd assumed that nothing was going to happen for quite some time. I was told that (likely) Openreach would contact me when they'd solved whatever the problem was, but I wasn't holding out much hope that it would be a swift turnaround.

Yesterday, however, I got an email from EE claiming that full fibre was available at my address. While sceptical about this, assuming it was just some marketing nonsense that wasn't paying attention to the details of where I live, I called them to check. I explained the problem, I had them read the notes on my account, I had them acknowledge all that had happened and they reassured me that, for real, no kidding, no nonsense, this was all gonna happen this time.

So... watch this space. I already have an installation date (it's next month) just from the order-planning call -- something which didn't happen the last time. Within the next few weeks, I will either finally be returning to streaming, and enjoying all the other benefits of full fibre, or I'll be writing yet another post about how EE and Openreach messed up.

Stottie - attempt 2

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:16:36 +0100

After last weekend's attempt at making a couple of stotties, I thought I'd have another go. This time the aim was to try and get the classic shape, mostly by trying to ensure they were rounded and also flatter before going into the oven.

The dough post-rise:

Ready for the oven:

Fresh out of the oven:

Side view:

So... still viable bread. Still going to get eaten. But I think this is obviously another fail when it comes to the (lack of) thinness and the shape after they come out of the oven.

There will be another attempt. I'm going to keep trying this until I get it right!

Getting on with Antigravity

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 16:47:26 +0100

It's been a wee while now since I stopped using GitHub Copilot and switched to doing everything locally (in a tool sense, not a model sense) with the Antigravity CLI, so I thought I'd jot down how it's been going. Simply put, it's been going well.

I've found the CLI itself easy enough to work with (I've not really attempted to use the GUI application), and the default model choice has done a lot of work for me on BlogMore without issue. I think it's fair to say that, at this point, I'm finding it far more consistent than I was finding Copilot+Claude.

As for the initial confusion and concerns about quotas: I've found that that's calmed down, with me never obviously coming close to hitting my limit while working on any change to BlogMore. The worst I've seen is getting down to about 20% of the 5-hour rolling window, and even then that's been when I've pretty much finished the work I was doing.

The actual display of quotas has changed too, I noticed just this morning. Now, rather than showing progress bars per model, it's more like this:

While I suspect the weekly quota display will cause a smidge of anxiety to start with, mostly I appreciate that being added, and being so clear. Given the level of work I'm using this for, I can't see myself coming close to using it all up and having to wait. The quota does come with an explanation in the CLI too:

Within each group, models share a weekly limit and a 5-hour limit. Quota is consumed proportionally to the cost of the tokens. Thus, limits will last longer with shorter tasks or using more cost-effective models. The 5-hour limit smooths out aggregate demand to fairly distribute global capacity across all users, while your weekly limit is tied directly to your individual tier.

Digging a little deeper, I see there's a /credits command and, quite quickly, I can go from that to this in my browser:

I'm not sure exactly how much work 2,500 credits might represent, or what impact it would have or could have on the weekly quota; confusingly, if I follow the links from the CLI to see my usage, I see a message that says:

AI credits included with your plan have been replaced by product-based usage limits

So which is it? Do I have usage limits? Do I have a hard cap for a week? Can I extend it or not? Do I extend it using credits or not? I sense the messaging around this is all still a little mixed up. I do know that if I turn on credit fallback in /settings, I get a handy display of the credits I have left:

AI Credits: 1000

So this weirdly reads like I can and am using credits as a fallback to the quota, but also not.

Schrödinger’s Quota?

I'll dig around some more and see if I can find a definitive answer.

All that said: barring any changes that might upset things (which, let's be honest, is something that's highly likely given the state of the AI/agentic coding world), I think I'm happy with how this is going. For now, at least, BlogMore's primary development tool will carry on being Antigravity.

And me, of course.

It got darker

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:49:48 +0100

By pure coincidence, it's six years ago tomorrow that I finally, after years of running Emacs with a bright white background, moved to using a dark theme. It took a little bit of getting used to but eventually I got very comfortable with it, and since then have run everything I can in a dark mode too.

On occasion, in the last year or so, I've had this urge to move to something darker. Also, in part, it's an urge to change things up a little. I felt it was time for a refresh of how my Emacs looks. I've tried a few themes, but none have ever stuck. When trying them I've run into various issues:

It just didn't look nice at all
Too many other things I use in Emacs didn't get themed
It looked like there was going to be too much work to do to really theme things well
It caused Emacs to crash¹

However, yesterday evening, after making an effort to simplify my mode line, I was determined to find a darker theme that I would be happy with. I think I finally managed!

I've settled on modus-vivendi from modus themes. Out of the box it felt right, and from what I can see in the documentation there's an amazing amount of customisation you can do. The key point there too is the documentation; there's so much of it, it's incredibly comprehensive.

For example: the default choice for the mode line is to have an unsubtle border around it -- presumably to create a good contrast. I found that far too distracting and was wondering what I could do about it. I didn't have to wonder long, the documentation addresses exactly that situation.

Another downside I ran into is that the colours that were showing in the mode line, when I switched to mood-line yesterday, were gone. I spent a short amount of time last night, and a good hour or so this morning, trying to wrangle mood-line into something I liked, but I just couldn't get anything sensible going. Eventually I cracked, fired up Antigravity, prompted it with:

I am using mood-line for my mode line -- see init.d/packages.d/melpa/mood-line.el and https://github.com/emacsmirror/mood-line

I am using https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes as my theme

I would like to have finer control over the parts of the mode line I've configured. For example, I'd like the buffer name to stand out in an informative colour, but one that is part of the modus theme's colour scheme.

Don't make changes yet, but help me understand how I should do this in a maintainable way.

and then spent about 20 minutes going back and forth, refining what I wanted; this got me a result I'm happy with from a visual point of view. I still need to fully review the code and the approach it took, but it isn't too far removed from what I'd been trying myself.

Overall I'm pleased with the result, and this is the longest I've stuck with a new theme (at this point I'm probably about 4 or 5 hours into working in it). I think that says something significant. I can see myself still wanting to tweak some aspects of it though. For example, the left-hand fringe doesn't feel quite right, in a way I can't quite put my finger on. While I want it to stand out from the main editing area, it feels... disconnected in some way. Also the background colour of the mode line still feels like it doesn't quite blend how I'd like.

Now to see if this lasts...

Seriously, just the once, but that happened. I took that as a sign from the Lisp gods that I was doing something sinful. ↩

Simplifying my mode line

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:06:26 +0100

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.

Cake and beers, I guess

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:27:16 +0100

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.

Legally. In the UK. ↩
If you are reading this, do use lobste.rs, and fancy throwing me an invite, I'd appreciate it! ↩

blogmore.el v5.2.0

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:31:15 +0100

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.