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.

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:

brew upgrade -s railwaycat/emacsmacport/emacs-mac --with-mac-metal --with-imagemagick --with-native-comp --with-modern-icon --with-natural-title-bar

This - amongst other features - turns on some experimental macOS-relevant features and most importantly, the optional native compilation of Elisp code.

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

(setq use-package-always-pin "melpa-stable")

(use-package js2-mode
  :ensure t
  :defer  t
  :custom
    (progn (js-indent-level 2)
           (js2-include-node-externs t)))

(use-package kotlin-mode
  :ensure t
  :pin melpa)

So in other words, if I’m on a machine that doesn’t have js2-mode and kotlin-mode installed, use-package will install js2-mode from melpa-stable and kotlin-mode from melpa. So far, so good.

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 :).

I’m by no means an Emacs org-mode 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 Word. While there is no exporter directing into docx format, Microsoft Word can read ODT (OpenDocument Text) and guess what, org-mode does include an exporter for ODT. Problem solved, and I hope this information helps if you’re running into the same problem.

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 flyspell-mode with hunspell, but I wanted to check if there was something better available these days. Enter enchant, which acts as a front end to multiple, different spell checkers. I like that Emacs has included support for enchant since version 26, plus one of the backends enchant supports is AppleSpell. In other words, when running on macOS, flyspell can make use of the OS’s built in spell checker and dictionaries.

Instructions on how to actually set up enchant on macOS are a bit thin on the ground, so I decided that I’ll put together a quick write up.

I have been toying with the idea of migrating this blog to a static site to simplify its maintenance for some time. While WordPress 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, and it's the odd one out, too, as all of the others are FreeBSD or OpenBSD servers.

My previous instructions 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 - Emacs 26.3 - as I run that on my other Linux, FreeBSD and macOS machines.

I only had to make one small change compared to the older instructions. Instead of running the versioned sudo apt-get build-dep emacs25 I ran sudo apt-get build-dep emacs. Once the dependencies are installed, you’re a configure/make/make install away from having a working Emacs 26.3:

In a previous post 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 Emacs for Mac tap which restored the GUI functionality. It had have one niggling problem for me, though. My muscle memory says that I use Shift-Meta-7 (aka Meta-/ ) for keyword expansion as I use a German keyboard layout most of the time. Unfortunately, with Meta mapped to the Apple Command key, Shift-Meta-7 is a menu shortcut. Instead of expanding keywords, I kept opening menus. That clearly wouldn’t do.

I’ve blogged about building Emacs 26 on WSL before. 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 editing.

Going all in with Emacs 26.2 with Cairo

I’ve just built the newly released Emacs 26.2 on my Ubuntu WSL with the options –with-cairo –with-x-toolkit=gtk and it looks like the rendering has improved massively. I’ve also recently upgraded VcXsrv to version 1.20.1.1, so it’s not quite clear to me if this is due to improved compatibility of WSL itself, changes between Emacs 26.1 and 26.2, or the fact that I turned on Cairo or VcXSrv upgrade.