Smiling

Upside down!

For a little while now, I've been developing software that needs to run on Windows (I know, I know!) and occasionally firing up batch scripts from within Emacs shell. Everything was working perfectly until I needed to add a simple delay between commands. That's when I discovered one of Windows batch scripting's more peculiar quirks.

Pigtails

And what have I been working on recently?, well lets consider the following questions…

• What should we eat Monday through Friday?
• What about the weekend when we have more time to cook?
• Didn't we just have pasta last week? And the week before?
• How do I plan for batch cooking without ending up with the same meal rotation?
• Where did I put that list of meal ideas again?

We've all been there, your code was working perfectly from a clean checkout, but after making a bunch of changes across multiple files, something has broken. The dreaded question arises! which change caused the break? This is the story of how a debugging session led me to discover gaps in Emacs' VC mode and ultimately create a custom solution.

The nursery is finished!

Crazy hair!

For my completion framework, I'm currently using fido-mode, and more recently, fido-vertical-mode. However, I'm scratching yet another itch in my ongoing quest to be more efficient in Emacs, specifically to jump to files more quickly. I explored this in a previous post where I enhanced the recentf functionality to work through completing-read in a predictable order, but what about the completing-read interface itself?

Nursery

As an Emacs user, you've probably found yourself wanting to clean up the indentation of an entire file. The standard approach is to select all (C-x h) and then run indent-region (I think, correct me if I am wrong!), but this has an annoying side effect: it destroys your current mark position, which might have been carefully set for other operations.

As an Emacs user, you're always hunting for ways to shave milliseconds off common tasks and generally noodling around and shaving some more of that yak!. File switching is one of those operations you do hundreds of times a day, so even small improvements compound dramatically. Today, I want to share a workflow that I have been tinkering with that combines the best of Emacs's built-in recent file tracking with modern completion interfaces.

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After months of development and refinement, I'm excited to announce Ollama Buddy v1.0 - an Emacs package that simply interfaces mainly to ollama, for local LLM usage, but can be integrated to the major online players. This project initially started as a simple integration with Ollama and since then has somewhat evolved into a more fully fully-featured AI Emacs assistant. The main focus with this package is a front facing simplicity but hiding (hopefully) all the features you would expect from an AI chatbot - wait I hate that term, I mean, assistant :). There is also the ability to craft a customizable menu system for different roles.

In our ongoing quest to construct a new fully functional Emacs package, in Part 1, we built the foundation and have a very basic package for our cursor heatmap package. Now we're ready to tackle the core challenge, actually tracking where the cursor is and detecting when it moves!

Evie playing on the floor!

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Not much of a post this week (and in fact this is pretty low effort!), but here I present some fun with image generative AI!

Yes thats right, yet another annotation system!, in this case it is a lightweight annotation system for Emacs that allows you to add persistent notes to any text file without modifying the original content.

https://melpa.org/#/simply-annotate https://github.com/captainflasmr/simply-annotate

Evie and daddie!

For a little while now, I have been developing C# applications at work and on Windows!, possibly the perfect storm for Emacs, but actually, it copes pretty well, especially with eglot and the LSP server OmniSharp.

Sleepie Evie!

This is more of a maintenance update. The main headline is the addition of an option to select a curl-based backend for those who may encounter networking issues. By default, ollama-buddy uses built-in low-level networking calls, but if you have network issues, you can now switch to curl!

Cutie!