<p>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.</p>

<p>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:</p>

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

<p>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 :).</p>

<p>I’m by no means an Emacs <a href="https://orgmode.org">org-mode</a> 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…