Software reproducibility testing is a critical aspect of software development and maintenance. It ensures that software is reliable, consistent, and predictable and that it can be easily replicated and verified by others.

Ana Pustan, Reproducibility Testing: A Complete Guide

For many of us, it won’t be a surprise that the Emacs Org mode is perfectly suited for reproducibility testing.

C++ is my primary programming language since – I can’t believe it myself – 1991 (yes, it was Turbo C++). As I’m going to do almost everything within Emacs 29.4 now – no doubt I want to have the C++ IDE in Emacs, in the same way I’m using Emacs as the Python IDE.

Thankfully, eglot, the Emacs client for the Language Server Protocol (LSP), is now – since version 29 – the part of Emacs. It remains to choose the appropriate LSP.

Python is one of my programming languages I’m using for both work and home life – no doubt, I’d want to use Emacs as an IDE for Python programming. There is a certain set of features we’d expect to have in any IDE: 1) code completion, 2) code navigation, 3) error checking.

Thanks to the fact that both eglot, the Emacs client for the Language Server Protocol (LSP), and tree-sitter, a powerful parsing library, are now – since version 29 – the parts of Emacs, It should not be too hard to construct a lightweight and fast Python IDE.

Some time ago, I decided to customize my Emacs startup screen in order to display something helpful for me. Ultimately, after much consideration, I settled on the following items I just want to see on my startup screen: 1) 3-month calendar, 2) agenda, 3) diary, 4) something just for fun.

No doubt, there are a number of packages that can assist you in making a pretty good-looking startup screen – like enlight, for instance. However, I decided to construct my own startup screen, a very simple one.

It requires having two command line utilities installed on your system: fortune to print out a random epigram, and calendar to print out some of the events that have occurred on the current date in the past. If you, like me, are using Linux or macOS – it will not be difficult to install them.

And this is what I got…

In his comment on Irreal’s post Some Configuration To Solve Common Problems, gregbognar noted that some of my configuration is seriously outdated. In some sense, he is absolutely correct – I’ve been collecting Emacs settings/tweaks since 2012, and keeping them unmodified for 12+ years.

But on the other hand, it demonstrates how stable and powerful Emacs is – everything is still working! If something works, don’t fix it – I’ve since tried to apply this rule wherever possible.

Here are a few functions/enhancements I found helpful.

After reading the quite interesting post Blue Sky by Mike Zamansky I decided to begin my gentle migration to Bluesky, a new and promising social media platform.

I completely agree with Mike’s opinion on Twitter as well as other social platforms. Like many of us, I migrated from Twitter – keeping my existing account there – to Mastodon. Unfortunately, Mastodon, largely due to its distributed architecture, seems to be more fragile than other platforms – recently, I have been warned that emacs.ch, a fediverse server I have been using for two years now, is about to shutdown in this December.

Sure, there is a (bit complex) way to transfer your Mastodon account to another server – and here is detailed explanation on how to do that. Perhaps, I will do that in the nearest future, but who can guarantee that the new server is immune from the same fate?

Anyway, Bluesky looks promising and I decided to give it a try. You can find me at @olddeuteronomy.bsky.social.

I’m happy to be back after one year away and it feels great.

Below are some chaotic mini/micro – or even nano – excerpts from my ~/.emacs file I have been tuning in for 12 years. These days, I’m running Emacs 29.4 on Ubuntu (Pop!_OS) 22.04 and, rarely, on macOS.

After reading a quite interesting post by Irreal on Org mode clock tables, I decided to share my — a bit specific — experience with the subject.

Recently, I’ve discovered a number of posts on Reddit — like tree-sitter-hl-mode does not do anything or How to use Emacs 29 Tree-sitter? — and decided to share my simple tree-sitter setup that seems to be working on my Emacs 28.2 like a charm.

I’m a big fan of Eshell, but some things in Eshell look, hmm, a bit strange. One of such things is how the Eshell’s command clear clears the screen.