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:

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:

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…

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…