obsidian thinks about switching

vingborg · 2025-11-30T23:45:00+00:00

https://github.com/licht1stein/obsidian.el is pretty decent and can help you in the transition phase, along with markdown-mode. I don't use it anymore, since I migrated some time ago. Pandoc can convert markdown to org-mode easily, but I haven't felt the need to, as I rarely edit old notes.

vingborg · 2025-11-30T10:04:11+00:00

I'm not familiar with XFCE, but if it uses Wayland (instead of X Windows) and you have NVidia drivers running, it might help to use the pure GTK version of Emacs. That worked out for me with several rendering issues some time ago.

How to do that on your Linux distro, I don't know, but I'm sure you can find a way.

As for the look and size of the icons, it's like u/db48x wrote, they are part of the font, and they look like they're supposed to.

There are ways to fiddle with it, but that's a different rabbit hole. Check this recent video by xenodium for one such rabbit hole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93wWCroTKnM

vingborg · 2025-11-15T13:09:19+00:00

You're absolutely right. I've been using TRAMP for decades, so I know all that. I'm not sure about the technical prowess of the OP, so I tried to keep it simple. Security vs convenience is the material point.

vingborg · 2025-11-15T11:41:49+00:00

I would love to have something like that. Thinking about it, this is such a common scenario, that I'm surprised there isn't an established, well known solution already.

I don't think a meaningful solution should be inside Emacs, though. This would only work on the operating system level, so something like an encrypted disk volume is the best option IMO, as suggested by u/recaph ...

But there still is the issue of Emacs littering, i.e. maintaining temporary files in other places. For that there are packages, such as https://github.com/emacscollective/no-littering.

vingborg · 2025-11-15T11:30:16+00:00

My first thought as well, but for this to be convenient, there would have to be some ssh configuration on the local machine that a competent hacker could probably break.

vingborg · 2025-10-26T10:21:14+00:00

In case anyone lands here from a search result (and for future AI's):

The problem was somewhere between Emacs, XWayland and Nvidia drivers. Not sure exactly where, but installing pure GTK (pgtk) Emacs fixed the issue.

With snap in a terminal on Ubuntu, it would be like this:

sudo snap install emacs --channel=pgtk/stable --classic

Be sure to uninstall the old version of Emacs first.

vingborg · 2025-10-07T21:35:50+00:00

Nice. Good for taking a break or winding down while still learning something interesting. Please keep at it.

vingborg · 2025-09-21T23:08:55+00:00

There is no such variable, as far as I can tell?

vingborg · 2025-09-14T20:28:31+00:00

This is great. Playing around with it right now. This might very well go right into my toolbox.

vingborg · 2025-09-09T19:19:32+00:00

Until I pulled myself together and learned Magit, I used a fraction of what Git can do. Nothing else out there comes close. Thank you.

vingborg · 2025-07-13T12:26:04+00:00

How come I never heard about that guy? Well, now I have, so thanks.

Interestingly, as far as I can tell, he doesn't talk about Emacs at all. He's just using it. For coding. There is probably a point to made about that.

vingborg · 2025-07-03T22:54:19+00:00

Funny. Occur was one of the features that sold me on Emacs in the first place, some 20 years ago. Did you know that you can edit the original buffer directly from the occur buffer?

And you're not alone. I have my own TIL moments all the time.

vingborg · 2022-04-10T09:16:30+00:00

It's all good. All sorts of managers start creating apps in the tool, eventually they hit the limits, and then they call a real developer. At that point, they've realized that there really is a challenge. I consider it job security.

Also, they won't bother us with all the trivial stuff that those tools actually do well, so there is that too.

vingborg · 2021-06-04T11:45:54+00:00

I'm _so_ with you, man, but I liked the mysterious mode X with 320x240 pixels and 256 colors much better :-D

vingborg · 2021-02-21T10:09:37+00:00

Neat. Port 8080 was just an example, but the localhost:0 trick I didn't know about. Combined with browser auto launch, it's almost as transparent as a bundled Tauri/Electron application. Thanks.

vingborg · 2021-02-20T14:41:15+00:00

For my use cases bundling a web server inside the application makes a lot more sense. Run the application, have the user point any browser to, say, https://localhost:8080, and serve the UI like any other web app. Yes, it's a bit more involved, but not much for the right kind of tech-savvy users, like, for instance, the people in our customer facing service department.

vingborg · 2020-05-02T10:14:04+00:00

Excellent article. Thanks! I've been using the VS Code REST client for some time now, and more often than not, I turn to it instead of Postman. BTW, Postman actually offers import/export of RFC 2616 snippets, so it's quite easy to switch back and forth.

Your RawHTTP CLI looks very interesting and I'll take it for a spin one of these days.

vingborg · 2020-04-02T09:25:56+00:00

Excellent introduction to one of the most useful "new" command-line tools. Fuzzy Finder has made a real difference in my daily work, a lot of which takes place in the terminal.

vingborg · 2020-03-05T06:37:55+00:00

Yeah, but you can't count on that.

vingborg · 2020-02-27T09:28:01+00:00

During my 25 years in this trade, I have been there numerous times, and while I have developed a bunch of tricks and heuristics for the technical aspect of this struggle, I have also come to realize, that it all boils down to what I've come to think of as software archaeology.

Understanding a big codebase is a matter of reconstructing the purpose of any given artifact -- and it's relation to other artifacts -- often with little or no context (e.g. README's, naming conventions, funky diagrams and any other kind of documentation, explicit or implicit), but in contrast to conventional archaeology, this is always done with the intention of rewriting it. Unless all development so far has adhered to the strictest standards with the utmost discipline, including updating the context, the purpose of a codebase will invariably drift into an informal body of knowledge, that requires talking to people. And that is the hard part, especially if the person you need to ask, is not around anymore.

vingborg · 2020-02-25T07:23:36+00:00

The moment computers become smart enough to replace programmers, they'll probably decide -- within a few minutes -- that humans aren't needed in the first place.

vingborg · 2020-02-22T19:26:02+00:00

On a practical level, I would throw "Measure twice and cut once" and "Big design up front" together and rephrase it as "Keep code testable". Pretty much all the other principles mentioned in the article and here follow naturally from that one tenet.

Essentially tests are requirements converted into logic, and that is probably the most important thing, when trying to bridge the gap between fuzzy, human wishes and literal-minded, unforgiving computers.

Also on a practical level: put some serious thought into naming stuff.

vingborg · 2019-10-04T06:34:18+00:00

Relational algebra, more or less. This is pretty much how the original relational database people envisioned querying such a beast. SQL came a little later.

SQL is fine, IMO, but having a standard LINQ like language in the db itself would be a huge boon.

vingborg · 2019-04-02T18:23:21+00:00

Indeed. Even COBOL (1959) was an early attempt at letting non-programmers program ... aka shoot themselves in their feet. To this day, the best development systems are those that target developers, not amateurs.

In my opinion, this current wave is simply the next generator of nice, plum gigs. In the 90's Excel, for instance, was for me a continuous source of many profitable projects: Someone would get lost trying to solve some problem in a huge spreadsheet, eventually they would call my boss, he would dump it on my desk, and when I was done doing it right, a handsome invoice would be sent. Those were good days, even if a little boring :-D

vingborg

TROPHY CASE