<p>I’m currently rebuilding my main Windows machine after it had become close to unusable. Given that I upgraded it multiple times from Windows 7 all the way to Windows 11 without ever reinstalling the OS, this shouldn’t have come as a major surprise. Either way, this is the reason for the sudden outburst of Windows related posts so I can go and refer to my blog as my Internet Notes repository.</p>

<p>In the time honored tradition of using one’s blog as an Internet-enabled notepad, here’s a quick not on how I build GNU Emacs on macOS using homebrew and the emacs-mac port cask:</p>

<p>I’ve been trying to up my <code>use-package</code> game recently and converted my hand rolled package check and installer to <code>use-package</code>. I usually prefer to use packages from <code>melpa-stable</code> so I pin the default package source used by <code>use-package</code> to <code>melpa-stable</code> and override it where necessary That’s working well in general and looks something like this:</p>

<p>In Emacs, I usually end up enabling the same set of minor modes when I use one of my “writing modes”, namely modes like markdown-mode and org-mode. Enabling a single minor mode automatically is generally pretty easy via the appropriate mode hook, but enabling more than one minor mode requires one more level of indirection. Of course it does, because everything in computer science requires one more level of indirection :).</p>

<p>I’m by no means an Emacs <a href="https://orgmode.org">org-mode</a> power user - in fact, anything but - but I do use org-mode a lot for note taking and also when I need an outliner to try and arrange ideas in a suitable manner. It excels at both, and usually does what I need including exporting to HTML. Exporting to HTML covers about 90% of my use cases. As much as I’d like to, LaTeX does not feature in my needs, but I needed to export an org-mode file for use with Microsoft…

<p>I have a few more loose ends to tidy up before switching to the static version of the blog. One of the important tasks was to make sure I had a spell checker available. Back in the dim and distant past I had set up <code>flyspell-mode</code> with <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2015/03/03/setting-up-emacs-spell-checking-on-os-x/">hunspell</a>, but I wanted to check if there was something better available these days. Enter <a href="https://abiword.github.io/enchant/">enchant</a>,…

<p> I have been toying with the idea of migrating this blog to a static site to simplify its maintenance for some time. While <a href="https://wordpress.org">WordPress</a> is a great tool, this blog is a side project and any time I have to spend maintaining WordPress gets deducted from the time I have to write for the blog. Keep in mind that I'm self-hosting this blog and it's actually running on a Linux VM that only handles the blog. This is yet another server that I need to administer,…

<p>My <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2017/07/30/building-emacs-25-2-on-xubuntu-17-04/">previous instructions</a> for installing a newer Emacs version on Ubuntu still work. Ubuntu (and in my case, XUbuntu) 19.04 ships with Emacs 26.1 out of the box. As usual I want to run the latest version - <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-08/msg00577.html">Emacs 26.3</a> - as I run that on my other Linux, FreeBSD and macOS machines.</p>

<p>In a previous <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2019/04/08/unwelcome-surprise-homebrew-emacs-has-no-gui-after-os-x-mojave-update/">post</a> I mentioned that I upgraded my homebrew install of Emacs after Emacs 26.2 was released, and noticed that I had lost its GUI functionality. That’s a pretty serious restriction for me as I usually end up with multiple frames across my desktop. I did end up installing the homebrew <a…

<p>I’ve blogged about building <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2018/04/19/emacs-26-1-rc1-on-windows-subsystem-for-linux/">Emacs 26 on WSL before</a>. The text mode version of my WSL build always worked for me out of the box, but the last time I tried running an X-Windows version, I ran into rendering issues. Those rendering issues unfortunately made the GUI version of Emacs unusable on WSL. Nothing like missing the bottom third of your buffer to cramp your style. Or your…