The Norfolk Coast Path (NCP) is a waymarked, long-distance footpath and National Trail in England. It stretches from Hunstanton all the way along the Norfolk coastline to Hopton. I walked it with my partner Vicki over the course of seven days in September 2022.

At first glance, undo seems like a simple thing expected of most software these days and hardly worth writing about. Indeed, when I say Emacs has a very powerful undo system—probably more so than any other text editor—you may wonder what could make an undo system powerful. So let’s start by considering two big problems most undo systems have:

1. If you undo something, make some changes, then change your mind, what you undid is now lost and unrecoverable,
2. If you make changes in two parts of the same file you cannot undo changes in the first part without undoing changes in the second part too.

Emacs comes with solutions to each of these out of the box. Read on to understand how it works and how we can improve upon the defaults even more.

When you work a lot on the command line, history can be invaluable. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve forgotten how I ran some earlier command and used my bash history to find out what it was. This is one of the big advantages of using CLIs over GUIs.

For as long as I’ve been a Firefox user—almost 20 years at this point—it has featured a “quick find” bound to the venerable / (forward slash) key.

Following a pattern established by other software like less, man, and vi the slash key was simple: it finds stuff in the current page.

Common patterns like this are great. It’s why everyone has agreed on what Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V (or very similar) should do across all operating systems. The / key used to be like this, but not any more.

Org mode supports icons in its agenda views. The icons can be given as either file paths to images (like SVGs), as image data or as a display property. I use a Nerd Font along with the nerd-icons package in my Emacs config, so I thought I might as well enable icons in my org agenda views.

The nice thing about using nerd fonts is this works perfectly in text mode too (assuming you have a nerd font configured for your terminal emulator).

This blog is a static site built with Hugo. Being static means it can be served from a basic, standard (you might say stupid) web server with no server-side scripting at all. In fact, this blog is currently hosted on Github Pages, but it could be anywhere.

Up until now, if you wanted to include an interactive map on a static site you were limited to using an external service like Google Maps or Mapbox and embedding their JS into your page. This would then call to their non-static backend service to produce some kind of tiles for your frontend.

Docker Compose is a brilliant tool for bringing up local development environments for web projects. But working with multiple projects can be a pain due to clashes. For example, all projects want to listen to port 80 (or perhaps one of the super common higher ones like 8000 etc.). This forces developers to only bring one project up at a time, or hack the compose files to change the port numbers.

I use the Unbound DNS resolver built in to pfSense. By default the resolver filters out any results that are private IP addresses. Normally this makes sense: no public domain should have a private address. But sometimes it does make sense. For example there are some useful services like sslip.io that will resolve to any IP address that you like. So 127.0.0.1.sslip.io resolves to to 127.0.0.1. This is can be useful for local development, especially when working with containers and reverse proxies and the like.

Even after using Emacs for 15 years there’s still so much I can learn. I probably should have already known this, but there’s a first time for everything.

It’s rare that Emacs hangs. Exceedingly rare. Which is probably why I didn’t know how to deal with it. Today Emacs started hanging when trying to open files over a remote TRAMP session (SSH).

The most important key of all that everyone who uses Emacs knows is C-g. This is the universal “quit” key and it has the power to interrupt any long running processes. What I didn’t know about is M-x toggle-debug-on-quit. I’ve used toggle-debug-on-error extensively when programming Elisp (I even have it bound to a key in Elisp buffers). toggle-debug-on-quit is similar except the debugger is invoked when you C-g.

This is a little trick I just applied and thought was cool enough to write down.

Let’s say you want to replace a name that is used throughout a project. Due to various conventions/restrictions in use the name might appear in several forms like: MY_COOL_NAME, my-cool-name, my_cool_name etc.

In Emacs you can invoke regexp replace across an entire project by invoking project-query-replace-regexp, by default bound to C-x p r. This will first prompt for the regexp to search for, then what to replace it with.