I just bought a new font to use as my primary face in Emacs. It's a cool one called MonoLisa, I think it looks great. It has a nice looking script variant that lets you turn your italics into a cursive looking font. Unfortunately it's a fancy OpenType feature that most things, including Emacs don't support properly yet. In their FAQ they mention that you can use a tool called OpenType Feature Freezer to modify the font so that the optional glyphs become the default.

I've often found that the default Emacs frame title is a little bizarre. emacs@host Seems a little useless at describing what's going on in the actual window in my opinion, and I believe the space could be put to much better use. Perhaps it's designed for environments where X11 forwarding is common practice, or where GNU Emacs shares a system with XEmacs. Taking inspiration from both Emacs and Firefox, I came up with a frame title format that I think is much more useful.

A while back I posted a response to someone's question on reddit about how to get a list of all Emacs daemon buffers from a shell script. It was a pretty interesting problem so I thought I'd explain my answer here. The question was "Is it there a way to export the list of opened buffers to STDOUT?". In the comments I left a rather byzantine looking snippet of code that I'd managed to produce.

I've been writing a lot of GraphQL resolvers in ruby at work recently, and frequently run into a situation where I have to align many columns of text by hand. I figured this isn't a very unique problem, and that there was probably already some code within Emacs to handle it. As it turns out I was correct in my assumption. There's an excellent built-in package called align that takes care of just that.

I recently made a post about how I was able to configure the new tab page in my browser to display my org agenda. Since then I've been working on another project similar to that, trying to take the concept even further. A while ago I purchased an Inkplate 6 during its crowd funding stage on Crowd Supply, with the exact intention of creating something like this. At the core of the Inkplate 6 is the ESP32.

I absolutely love org mode. I use it extensively almost every day to keep track of tasks and due dates, both for my personal life and at work. A lot of this workflow centres around the org agenda, which compiles all the current and upcoming tasks and due dates from several files into a single view. The only gripe I had with it was that I had to be within Emacs to use it.

I manage a lot of servers. Some are serving static content like this blog, with others running services like Nextcloud, ZNC, Shadowsocks, or Mumble. I also have one or two game servers to play with my family and friends. These are spread across two providers for cost and geographic reasons. In addition, I have several machines running in my house, one running FreeNAS with some jails, another running Proxmox with several VMs and containers.

Not too long ago I purchased a Samsung Galaxy Tab A. I bought it mostly for browsing the internet and reading PDFs, but I've been using it a lot more for working in Emacs recently. With the help of Termux, I've gotten more or less a fully functional development and writing environment which has both a small physical size, and long battery life. With the use of a bluetooth keyboard, I have everything required to work, and comfortably at that.

dired mode is one of my favourite features of Emacs. I use it so often, it's pretty much my go-to file browser. I use it both on my local machine, and on remote machines via TRAMP. One feature of dired is the ability to enter sub-directories in the same buffer by inserting the contents under the current directory. While this is useful, I often want something quicker to check the contents of a directory without either opening it in a new buffer, or inserting it below.

Emacs is an amazing editor, but it can be a little slow to start sometimes. That's why emacsclient lets you run Emacs as a daemon and connect to it as a client, negating the startup time and letting you jump directly into editing. The two primary ways of getting Emacs onto your Mac are by either downloading it from Emacs For MacOS X or by installing it through homebrew using brew cask install emacs.