Emacs

Recently, I bought an old Chromebook from my daughter. She has a new M4 MacBook, and the old note PC had been left untouched for a year or two. It has a broken camera, and so she asked me only 25 dollars. Nice. I wanted to try the Linux(beta) feature. It is a Pixelbook Go “Not Pink” with Intel 8th gen Core i5 CPU, 8GB memory and 128GB SSD. Back then, I thought the $845 price tag was a little too high for a chromebook, and for her first PC. But she wanted the cute pink note PC from Google. ...

Emacs has many great packages. If you add tens or hundreds of them to your init.el, you might find the startup gets really slow. If that’s happened, you would want to know what are the culprits of the slowness, and hopefully to address them. Find out slow packages To know which packages are slow if you use use-package, you can set in your init.el just after enabling use-package: (setq use-package-compute-statistics t) After restarting Emacs, you can run M-x use-package-report. It shows something like this: ...

I have consolidated documents and other files in the homelab server such as: Memos and personal wiki pages (.org) Tax documents (.org, .pdf) Apartment leases (.org, .pdf) Holiday card-related info (.csv, .pdf) Calendar (.pdf, .py) Many files can be accessed from Emacs via tramp. But in some cases, I need local copies which either Emacs can’t handle well, need to access with local apps or need to access offline. An alternative and probably easier way is to make those files available by exporting a directory (ie, file server). But as files are in many directories and I don’t want to export everything, I haven’t set that up yet. ...

Here are my current Emacs settings from ~/.emacs.d/init.el. First, I declare package repositories. (require 'package) (setq package-archives '(("gnu" . "https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/") ("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/") ("nongnu" . "https://elpa.nongnu.org/nongnu/") ("org" . "http://orgmode.org/elpa/"))) (package-initialize) (when (not package-archive-contents) (package-refresh-contents)) Next is for use-package. It has been default since Emacs 29. I wonder if I still need this… ;; for use-package (unless (package-installed-p 'use-package) (package-install 'use-package)) (require 'use-package) (setq use-package-always-ensure t) (setq use-package-compute-statistics t) # to see packges that took long Appearance material-theme has been my favorite theme for some time now. It’s dark but warm, and easy on the eyes. ...

I love Emacs. Emacs is a great text editor, plus much more than that. You might say that anythig text-based can be handled nicely in Emacs. I first chose Emacs at work as it looked more sophisticated than vi. Decades later, I still use Emacs as I’ve been convinced that it’s one of the best tools and worth the time and effort to keep learning. Following are my current worklows using Emacs. ...