A New Emacs Config

In addition to the main emacs theme, I remember some time a go coming across the org-modern package, so I enabled that. I had to turn of org-indent-mode to get pretty code blocks, but I was happy to remove that.

Funny enough I never really bothered with a modeline, or if I did, I'd just slightly modify it. Recently I did try powerline but did not get along with it. Seeing as I was playing with a new configuration, I decided to install doom-modeline, and I love it. I did have to disable a few settings, like the clock and the encoding indicator.

Any good theme is not complete without a good font, and after watching the Emacs From Scratch series, I wanted to try out setting a different font for code and writing. Emacs calls these fixed-pitch and variable-pitch fonts. However, due to the way I run emacs I had to set these in a org-mode hook like so.

  (defun jt/org-mode-fonts()
    (set-face-attribute 'org-document-title nil :font "Iosevka Curly" :weight 'bold :height 1.3)

    (dolist (face '((org-level-1 . 1.2)
		    (org-level-2 . 1.1)
		    (org-level-3 . 1.05)
		    (org-level-4 . 1.0)
		    (org-level-5 . 1.1)
		    (org-level-6 . 1.1)
		    (org-level-7 . 1.1)
		    (org-level-8 . 1.1)))
      (set-face-attribute (car face) nil :font "Iosevka Curly" :weight 'medium :height (cdr face)))

    ;; ;; Ensure that anything that should be fixed-pitch in Org files appears that way
    (set-face-attribute 'org-block nil :inherit 'fixed-pitch)
    (set-face-attribute 'org-formula nil  :inherit 'fixed-pitch)
    (set-face-attribute 'org-code nil   :inherit 'fixed-pitch))

  (defun jt/org-mode-setup()
    (jt/org-mode-fonts)
    (variable-pitch-mode 1)
    (auto-fill-mode 0)
    (visual-line-mode 1)
    (diminish org-indent-mode))

  (use-package org
    :pin gnu
    :hook (org-mode . jt/org-mode-setup)
  ;;SNIP;;

Now when I open an org-mode document, the body and titles font change, yet the code blocks font stays the same.

Putting all the theme configuration together, I've got something like this.

I'd heard of denote but had never really bought into a note taking management system, I would always just have a folder of folders and then grep if I needed to search them. I'd tried out obsidian but found that that was taking over my life, and I already have emacs doing that. Denote for me is the obsidian for org-mode, its just simple, and does not try to take over my workflow. I'm also going to try out journaling and see how that goes for "brain dumping" each day. For journals, I wanted it to be easy, I don't want to have to go through all the windows denote has by default. Denote does come with org-capture integration, and does allow for journals. However I had to hack around with the journal capture template, like so.

  (defun jt/denote-journal ()
    "Create an entry tagged 'journal' with the date as its title."
    (interactive)
    (denote
     (format-time-string "%A %e %B %Y")
     '("journal")
     nil
     "~/org/journal/"))

  (with-eval-after-load 'org-capture
    (add-to-list 'org-capture-templates
		 '("j" "Journal entry" plain (nil)
		   #'jt/denote-journal
		   :immediate-finish t
		   :kill-buffer t
		   :jump-to-captured t)))

I now don't get prompted for the "title" or "tag" for journal entries, it just does it for me. I also have another capture template just for a new note with denote, but that example is in the documentation so I wont show it here.

Accompanied with the consult-notes package, I can quickly search over my notes, by tags / titles.

As an Apple fanboy, I'm very much in the apple "walled garden", yet I'd prefer to be in the "emacs walled garden" more. So I went about seeing if there was a package to sync or send notes to Apple Notes. Unfortunately there's not a package on melpa, yet I did come across org-apple-notes.el and for the most part does send org-mode notes over to Apple Notes. There's a few style changes I have to do by hand, but for the odd occasion I send notes to Apple Notes, I'm happy with that.

I'd often watch people in emacs and wonder "how on earth are they running that buffer in emacs". Turns out the compile command is not well, just used to compile the buffer. It can be used to run a command with a keybinding, namely the command to run the file your editing. So I set the to the C-x C-x command, and it will run the compile command. But what I did not understand was how to set that, because surely bash ./foo.sh is a different command to python ./bar.py. Turns out if you prefix that command with C-u it will prompt you for the command, and then when I press C-x C-x again it will take that.

The emacs tutorial says to try and avoid using the arrow keys, however the default for next/previous-buffer is to use the arrow keys. In an attempt to stop myself using the arrow keys I've defined the following keybindings.

  (global-set-key (kbd "C-x .") 'next-buffer)
  (global-set-key (kbd "C-x ,") 'previous-buffer)

I'm not too sure if it will stick, but now I at least have the option.

I actually stumbled across this setting whilst trying to research a fix for a different emacs problem. What this hook does is to check if the buffer file has a shebang (e.g. #!/usr/bin/env python) in it and then it modifies its permissions, if necessary.

  (add-hook 'after-save-hook
          'executable-make-buffer-file-executable-if-script-p)

When I first got into emacs I did dabble with the eshell but back then I was still learning bash and how to use the shell. Nowadays I know about the async-shell-command with M-& and I can get by with that mostly. So I decided to replace my vterm keybindings with eshell, and so far so good, I love the fact I can invoke dired right from the shell. The tramp support too is pretty nice. The load-bash-alias package is also a must have, as I set a lot of aliases in my environment and its nice to carry those across with me into the eshell.

I'm spending more and more time with python at work, so It was about time I learnt what pyenv was all about, and I love it. No more 9th level of python dependency hell, and I for sure wanted this in emacs, luckily there's a pyenv emacs package. So I enabled that, and am not looking back.