Recent Posts

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...

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.

A quick little update to blogmore.el to fix a couple of issues introduced by the new YAML-parsing approach to reading frontmatter; both pretty much stemming from how falsy values are handled.

Simply put, both boolean false values, and also empty values (something that could commonly happen with tags and series) would end up showing up in the frontmatter as null. This release handles that situation.

Also, under the hood, I cleaned up some repeated boilerplate related to how the cached dump calls to BlogMore took place. The code for categories, tags and series data was almost exactly the same, save for the actual name of the thing being dumped. So I turned it all into a macro:

(defmacro blogmore--cache-dump (dump-name)
  "Generate a function to get DUMP-NAME from BlogMore, with caching."
  (let ((cache-name (intern (format "blogmore--current-%s-cache" dump-name)))
        (getter-name (intern (format "blogmore--current-%s" dump-name))))
    `(progn
       (defvar ,cache-name nil
         ,(format "Cache for the list of %s from existing posts." dump-name))
       (defun ,getter-name ()
         ,(format "Get a list of %s from existing posts." dump-name)
         (or ,cache-name (setq ,cache-name (blogmore--list-of ,(symbol-name dump-name))))))))

and now the defvar that creates the variable that holds the cache, and the defun that creates the getter function for the data, are reduced to this for all three collections of values:

(blogmore--cache-dump categories)
(blogmore--cache-dump tags)
(blogmore--cache-dump series)

Sure, I probably could have done all of this in a single global, a central getter function, and a hash table, but the macro approach feels so much more elegant, and more... lispy.

I had quite the adventure with PyPI this morning, and I don't think it's over yet. It started out with the release of BlogMore v2.43.0. I did my usual thing of doing a test release to the test version of PyPI, and then did a production release.

As normally happens, I then went on to tag the release on GitHub, followed by writing the blog post to announce the new version. While doing this, despite the fact that it wasn't necessary given the nature of the change, I decided to update BlogMore in my blog's repository. That's when things started to look odd.

I did the usual make update but nothing new appeared. Now, it's not unheard of that I do this and no new version of BlogMore appears. Often I do it a couple more times and it's fine. So I kept trying every minute or two and still nothing. So I checked back on PyPI. Sure enough, a search showed that it had updated:

(The 16 minutes being about the time since I'd made the release), but when I clicked through it was showing the last version from a couple of days ago. Even when I looked at the release history it was saying the latest version was the previous version:

Odd.

At this point, depending on how I searched and where I went, I'd either see that my latest upload wasn't available, or I'd get a 500 error.

Clicking through to the status page showed no errors. Clicking through to the Twitter account that was suggested showed nothing at all.

Leaving aside the whole issue of having an account on Twitter these days anyway, I felt it wasn't that useful to point people at a resource that seems to have never been updated, so I did raise an issue about that.

Digging around the status page at some point, despite the fact that the main display was green all the way, I did see a rise in "PyPI CDN Edge Errors". I'm not a web guy, I'm not an infrastructure guy, so I'm not really sure what this would mean, but it sounds like it's not a good thing.

Opening the graph to look longer term, it did seem today was a spike, with another spike quite some time ago.

At this point I left it a while, not announcing the new version of BlogMore. I came back some time later and, finally, I could see 2.43.0 was showing! Also, this seemed to coincide with the above graph calming down again.

Seeing this I went to upgrade BlogMore in my blog's repo/venv and this time it all worked.

Yay!

At that point I left it alone and went about my work day. However, I don't think whatever is going on is over. Despite the fact that it was showing BlogMore as being v2.43.0 earlier today, once things were settled, I just checked again as I started to write this and:

The search index on PyPI shows it as having been updated about 8 hours ago (as I write this), but the page itself shows that the latest version is from 2 days ago. At least installing it gives me 2.43.0:

$ uv add blogmore
Using CPython 3.13.1
Creating virtual environment at: .venv
Resolved 17 packages in 325ms
Installed 16 packages in 41ms
 + blogmore==2.43.0
 + feedgen==1.0.0
 + jinja2==3.1.6
 + lxml==6.1.1
 + markdown==3.10.2
 + markupsafe==3.0.3
 + minify-html==0.18.1
 + pillow==12.2.0
 + pygments==2.20.0
 + python-dateutil==2.9.0.post0
 + python-frontmatter==1.3.0
 + pyyaml==6.0.3
 + rcssmin==1.2.2
 + rjsmin==1.2.5
 + six==1.17.0
 + watchdog==6.0.0

Also: PISpy sees 2.43.0 as the latest version too (something it wasn't seeing during the height of the issues this morning).

It's all kind of confusing though.

Guess it's time for me to read up on CDN edge errors or something...

After recently adding Mermaid and maths support to BlogMore, I got to thinking that it now has connections with a handful of third-party resources. While almost all of them are optional (only FontAwesome comes close to being a hard requirement), it does mean that there are resources the user doesn't directly supply or control, and for which the URLs are hard-coded in the source for BlogMore.

I wasn't keen on this. While it's my intention to keep an eye on things and, periodically, check on those libraries and see if they need an update, I felt it was important that the user could override them on their own, without waiting on me.

So v2.43.0 adds a third_party section to the configuration file to give full control over these resources. The full version of it looks like this:

third_party:
  mermaid:
    script_url: "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mermaid@11/dist/mermaid.esm.min.mjs"
  katex:
    css_url: "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.16.9/dist/katex.min.css"
    js_url: "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.16.9/dist/katex.min.js"
  mathjax:
    js_url: "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-mml-chtml.js"
  fontawesome:
    metadata_url: "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/6.7.2/metadata/icons.json"
    webfonts_base: "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/6.7.2/webfonts"
    css_url: "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/6.7.2/css/all.min.css"
    woff2_url: "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/6.7.2/webfonts/fa-brands-400.woff2"
  force_graph:
    js_url: "https://unpkg.com/force-graph"

Of course, it's not an all-or-nothing setting; you can just set one of the values. So if you wanted to override the force_graph value it's enough to do:

third_party:
  force_graph:
    js_url: "https://unpkg.com/force-graph"

Hopefully this adds some useful flexibility. As well as giving the option to use a different version of a resource, it also allows you to host your own copy and refer to that instead. Heck, it would even allow totally replacing a library with a different one that has the same API, should you ever find yourself in that situation.

When I released blogmore.el v4.7.0 yesterday I finished off by saying that it was my intention, at some point, to rework the frontmatter-handling code so that it did proper YAML parsing. As often happens with these sorts of things, "some point" ended up being that evening.

I've rewritten everything to do with handling properties in the frontmatter so that it now uses yaml.el. This has a number of knock-on effects. The first and most obvious effect is that anything that is a list/array in the frontmatter is actually properly treated as a list. A good example here is tags. Now you can have your tags look like:

tags: [BlogMore, Emacs, "Emacs Lisp", Lisp, "blogmore.el", coding]

or:

tags:
  - BlogMore
  - Emacs
  - Emacs Lisp
  - Lisp
  - blogmore.el
  - coding

and blogmore.el will still handle things fine. The same holds for series too.

It should be noted, however, that because I'm now using actual YAML serialisation code, most other forms of a list will all end up being transformed into this kind:

tags: [BlogMore, Emacs, "Emacs Lisp", Lisp, "blogmore.el", coding]

So if you have a bare list:

tags: BlogMore, Emacs, "Emacs Lisp", Lisp, "blogmore.el", coding

and you make an edit to the tags via blogmore.el, it will end up as the version enclosed in []. BlogMore itself supports all three versions so this works fine.

There is a breaking change here too, which in part explains the reason I bumped the version to 5.0.0: because series can now be treated as a list I've removed the blogmore-set-series command and instead replaced it with blogmore-add-series and blogmore-remove-series. Both can of course be found in the transient menu.

Another big change in this release is the way that existing values are loaded up from your blog. Previously, when you went to add a category, tag or series, blogmore.el would use ripgrep (or a combination of find and grep if rg wasn't available) to pull out values to help populate a completion list. This worked fine as long as a) the frontmatter property was all on one line and b) the body of a post didn't contain something that looked like a frontmatter property. With this release of blogmore.el I've dropped this approach in favour of calling blogmore itself and using the dump command to get the actual lists of categories, tags and series.

This does mean that BlogMore needs to be installed in a location where blogmore.el can see it, and to help with this I've added a new defcustom called blogmore-command. By default this is set to call whatever version of blogmore can be found in your exec-path; if this results in unexpected behaviour you can set blogmore-command to point to a specific copy of blogmore.

There is, however, a small downside to this beneficial¹ approach: calling on blogmore and parsing all posts to get the values is generally going to be slower. With this in mind I've built in a cache for these values. The first time you load up the categories, tags or series, the values are held on to so that subsequent prompts are instantaneous (meaning there is no further call to blogmore). To ensure this doesn't confuse things, when you switch blog (blogmore-work-on) the caches are cleared. In the unlikely event that there is a problem with this approach, I've also added a blogmore-clear-caches command to force the clearing of the caches.

There are some other small QoL changes under the hood and also to the interface. I've moved some things around in the transient menu, and also ensured that a couple of options are better-disabled depending on the context.

All of this makes the package even more robust. Something that started as a quick hack back in March has turned into a tool I heavily lean on. Hopefully, for anyone who might happen to use BlogMore and GNU Emacs, it'll be a useful daily-driver for them too.

A quick update to blogmore.el. Having recently added series support to BlogMore it made sense that I then add a quick way of adding a post to a series in the package.

You can, of course, set a new one too, but the idea here (as with categories and tags) is that you can quickly find back an existing series and add the current post to it.

Also, as with tags, the expectation is that either a single series is being used, or if more than one series is in play for a post they'll be listed as a comma-separated list. The issue here is that while BlogMore supports this:

series:
  - Some series of posts
  - Some other series of posts
  - Yet another series of posts

the frontmatter-handling code in blogmore.el isn't very sophisticated at all; it doesn't actually handle it as actual YAML, instead just treating it as a set of key/value pairs separated by a colon.

At some point soon I want to give blogmore.el a revamp and base all of the frontmatter-handling code on something like yaml.el. I did do some experimenting last night to drop it in and handle proper lists. It worked well enough, but I abandoned the work as I realised I really wanted to start again from scratch and build blogmore.el from the bottom up using that package.

Some time soon...

I've released BlogMore v2.42.0. This version is all about changes to the dump command.

When I first added it it simply dumped all of the data available about posts within a blog, meaning it was possible to do all sorts of things with the data outside of BlogMore itself. Having done this, and used the result to good effect (and also having seen at least one person also make use of it), I got to thinking that I should probably expose some other data that's going to be helpful.

Given that blogmore.el needs to dive into things like available categories and tags, and given that I'd also like to add support there for the recently-added series support, I realised that dumping those values as JSON would also be helpful.

So this release extends the dump command, adding a set of sub-commands:

• posts: dumps the data about all posts in the blog (this is the default if you just run blogmore dump, so keeping the command backward-compatible).
• categories: dumps all categories as slug/title pairs.
• tags: dumps all tags as slug/title pairs.
• series: dumps all series as slug/title pairs.

For example, getting all categories from this blog:

blogmore dump categories

[
  ["ai", "AI"],
  ["coding", "Coding"],
  ["creative", "Creative"],
  ["emacs", "Emacs"],
  ["gaming", "Gaming"],
  ["life", "Life"],
  ["meta", "Meta"],
  ["music", "Music"],
  ["python", "Python"],
  ["tech", "Tech"],
  ["til", "TIL"]
]

Or all the available series right now:

blogmore dump series

[
  ["agentic-afterthoughts", "Agentic Afterthoughts"],
  ["buying-the-steam-controller", "Buying the Steam Controller"],
  ["edinburgh-fringe-2023", "Edinburgh Fringe 2023"],
  ["reading-2bit-files-for-fun", "Reading 2bit files (for fun)"],
  ["swift-til", "Swift TIL"],
  ["the-great-github-copilot-meltdown-of-2026", "The Great GitHub Copilot Meltdown of 2026"],
  ["the-virgin-east-coast-saga", "The Virgin East Coast Saga"],
  ["emacs-d", "~/.emacs.d"]
]

While this data could have been gathered from the content of the dump of posts, this approach makes it far easier to work with and more accessible; simply put, it means there's less work for the user to do if they just want all the tags (for example). With this, and with a little bit of caching in the code (because this does require parsing all the posts every time), I think it will make for a better approach to category, tag and (when I add it) series completion while writing a post.