Recent Changes

2026-09-21

• 16:36 UTC (new) (history) 2026-09-21 forward-paragraph in Magit . . . . mbork – As I’ve mentioned many times, I am a heavy Magit user. Pretty often I do code reviews from within Magit. There was one thing that has bothered me for a long time.

2026-09-12

• 06:11 UTC (new) (history) 2026-09-12 Duplicating lines and other Emacs miscellanea . . . . mbork – A few weeks ago I wrote about how I remapped yank to my command which allows to transform the yanked text. The whole setup – where I press C-y twice to trigger the transformation transient – has one drawback: I sometimes legitimately want to call yank twice in a row. This happens when I need to copy the current line and modify the copy so that I have two similar lines in a row. (I often need this when editing Ledger transactions, for example.) What I sometimes do in such a situation is basically a dance of C-a C-1 C-k C-y C-y. It turns out I don’t need to.

2026-09-07

• 19:41 UTC (new) (history) 2026-09-07 Pasting primary selection from keyboard . . . . mbork – A few years ago I wrote about a setup I coded for myself for when I want to make paying my bills a tiny bit less painful. One thing I mentioned then was the primary selection. For those of you who don’t know it: under X.org, you can select a portion of text (for example by dragging the mouse over it) and then paste it in the same or another application with clicking the middle button. It is extremely useful for quick copy-and-paste operations where you do not have to issue a separate “copy” command (usually C-c, but often also found on mouse context menu). And by the way, Wayland also supports this. Sometimes I find it useful to use it even without the mouse.

2026-08-31

• 19:13 UTC (new) (history) 2026-08-31 Developing Claude Code skills . . . . mbork – As I’ve mentioned some time ago, I’ve been using Claude Code for some time now. Now, a disclaimer is in place. I’m still a bit skeptical about the current “AI” hype – in particular, I really avoid using the term “AI”. I consider it a very misleading marketing gimmick. When non-technical people hear the phrase “artificial intelligence”, a computational model capable of generating more or less random sequence of letters which sometimes create a semblance of “understanding” or “intelligence” is probably not what they think. Well, I am really a layman, too – I have some extremely vague understanding what happens inside these “chatbots”, but other than that they seem a bit magical to me as well – but my point is, they are really closer to a giant spreadsheet with billions (or even more) of cells than to Skynet. Anyway – even I have to admit that what Claude Code is able to do is pretty impressive. However, I quickly discovered that the OOTB experience is less than ideal. One of the easier ways to enhance Claude (and other LLMs, apparently) is by writing skills, which are basically reusable prompts or procedures for performing some tasks, written in natural language.

2026-08-24

• 19:01 UTC (new) (history) 2026-08-24 Transforming yanked text . . . . mbork – Recently I found myself killing and yanking more often than ever. One problem with that is that the capitalization and punctuation of what I have yanked is often wrong. As a (pretty stupid) example, I might see the sentence “This is bad.”, and I might want to write another one: “He thinks that this is bad, and he’s right.” If I use kill-sentence (M-k) or backward-kill-sentence (C-x DEL), I have the whole This is bad. in the kill ring, but what I need to yank is this is bad (with lower-case “t” and without the period), so I need to make both changes after yanking. After several dozen such cases I thought, this is Emacs, I shouldn’t be doing this manually!

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