So, I’ve seen some articles promoting Emacs-like editors written in Lisp languages, and one of the most common arguments seems to be: “it’s written in This Lisp and also scriptable in This Lisp, and that gives it great extensibility.” 1
It’s not wrong, but I think it does overlook a few things.
By the way: Happy New Year!
This Org-mode file was used for an
org-presentpresentation at EmacsConf 2025 – Juicemacs. This blog post is adapted from that presentation, with added transcript and explanations for a bunch of things I didn’t dig into during the presentation.
For EmacsConf 2025
Project: https://github.com/gudzpoz/Juicemacs
Contact: See the navigation bar (or join the Zulip chat)
This month’s Emacs Carnival features Org Babel. Since I submitted last month about using Org-mode to manage installed Arch packages, it means—I’ve got another chance to show off what Org-mode is capable of! 1
Today, let’s look at a more complex example: how I configure my 60% QMK keyboard with Colemak + APL symbols + Qwerty + other layers with Org-mode, and in particular, Org Babel.
So, Cloudflare was down today, again, and this incident brought down a huge part of the Internet with it. It’s actually pretty impressive how much of the Internet infrastructure depends on Cloudflare these days.
Should we try to be more decentralized? Probably. But will I migrate my sites away from Cloudflare? Sadly, maybe not. And here is why.
I install random packages from time to time (using Arch Linux, by the way), maybe to try out things, to solve an issue at hand or as an implicit dependency to my Emacs config or other scripts. And it was a pain having to keep in mind which is for which.
Then, I started keeping notes for them and automated a bunch of note keeping. And now, I have an Org-mode note file effectively serving as a minimal wrapper for the pacman package manager.
So I had been using Wayland (sway) for two years or so, and I finally decided to ditch it and switch back to X11 (i3). This blog post serves as an explanation for the decision and a reminder for the future me trying out Wayland the second third time.
Please note that the following complaints are from a frustrated user who really doesn’t bother to look under the carpet.
So I’ve long been puzzled by this behavior of my Emacs config: sometimes when I open a file in the terminal with Emacs, it adds a pair of square brackets around the current line/word/expression. After some digging, I’ve come to the conclusion that, I absolutely don’t want to work with ANSI escape codes.
Mandelbort benchmark: Emacs (native-comp) runs 10x slower than Java or Truffle implementation 1
So I’ve been working on an interpreter for Emacs Lisp using the GraalVM Truffle framework for a while now. As I’ve just completed its AST interpreter and a bytecode interpreter, I guess its time to give it a little write-up (or rather, some random babbling of various tricks).
Although the Truffle interpreter covered here is for Emacs Lisp only, most of the following should also be applicable to other Lisp dialects and maybe other Truffle-based language implementations.
There have been quite a few attempts to re-implement (part of) Emacs’ functionalities in languages other than C, like JEmacs, remacs, and lem. And we are seeing new efforts in EmacsConf 2024: rune 1, schemacs 2, and the revived Guilemacs 3. (Strictly speaking, Guilemacs is more a fork than a total rewrite, but anyway.)
However, a complete rewrite of (GNU) Emacs 4 has always seemed like an insurmountable task, not just because writing editors is hard. This article aims to look into some of these difficulties and the Emacs designs (that of course have been exposed in some Emacs Lisp API) that lead to them.