Recent Changes

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!

2026-08-17

• 18:06 UTC (new) (history) 2026-08-17 A text expander for Android . . . . mbork – Like many Emacs users, I’m a heavy Org mode user. Some time ago I decided that I need a way to access at least some of my Org files on my (Android) phone.

2026-08-10

• 20:35 UTC (new) (history) 2026-08-10 Emphasizing a region in Org mode . . . . mbork – One of the most basic features of Org mode is its markup. It is basically the Markdown of the Emacs world (although some people, like Karl Voit, claim that it’s superior to Markdown), and it lets do basic things like italic, bold or verbatim very easily – at least if you’re writing text. I, on the other hand, happen to edit text pretty often. This is very different from writing. When I write, typing a slash before and after something I want to emphasize is easy. When I edit and just want to make some text bold, putting stars around it is much less convenient.

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