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Irreal’s post Some Configuration To Solve Common Problems, gregbognar noted that some of my configuration is seriously outdated.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.

Irreal has recently published a post with a reference to the Vernon Grant’s emacs-keyboard-shortcuts README that contains a list of Emacs keyboard shortcuts Vernon uses on a regular basis.

If you are an emacser, you are probably already following the Sacha Chua’s blog. If you are not, you should. Sacha maintains an incredible blog on Emacs-related news, upcoming events, Org Mode, configuration, new packages, and many other things from the Emacs world.

As it’s described in the GNU Emacs Manual, an abbreviation or abbrev is a string of characters that may be expanded to a longer string. The user can insert the abbrev string and find it replaced automatically with the expansion of the abbrev. This saves typing.