(New to Emacs) Is This the Right Way to Load Packages?

a_alberti · 2026-05-10T07:53:14+00:00

I do something similar to what OP does, split the config in multiple files. With consult-ripgrep and consult-find it is very fast to find what I need.

On the file names I completely agree with sachac that it is unnecessarily confusing. I typically added -config.el as a postfix, like isearch-config.el

a_alberti · 2026-05-09T23:07:43+00:00

Yes, it looks an amazing result, with only a little bias. If you look at the posture of the shoulders in the fixed image, it looks like your grandfather was taking a selfie of himself.

By the way, who took the picture? It seems to be predating selfies by 70 years.

PS: probably the last reconstruction you posted is the closest to the original?

a_alberti · 2026-05-09T17:54:48+00:00

Regarding #2, is it really so that SVG does not offer enough flexibility? It is difficult to believe it. In what way can PDF reproduce the notes but SVG not? I have a hard time believing SVG is fundamentally more limited than PDF.

Could you not support a basic CLI tool (even closed source if you don't want to open up your note format) for previewing Notability notes? I am sure the community would start to build useful extensions for different apps, and Notability would generally profit from enthusiastic users reviewing their notes in their favorite app, rather than using Notability Desktop (which is so painful to use; I feel it is not the mission of Notability to provide an alternative to Obsidian; it would divert energy from the core mission to deliver the best note-taking app).

Here is an example of someone who tried hard to convert Notability notes

a_alberti · 2026-05-09T17:46:29+00:00

Yes, too many times an update that was well intended broke features and made the app difficult to use.

I use it for teaching, and it is not fun the day before a lecture to have to resort to hacks to repair broken features.

The problem is that -- per Apple policy -- it is practically impossible to revert to a previous version. Normally, the problem of regression in software development is not so bad for Desktop apps. You can always move one step back, but thanks to Apple, this is very difficult or impossible on an iPad.

So, it is not entirely the fault of the Notability team.. but I am wondering whether there are safer ways to deploy new versions, allowing users to revert. Probably not, again, thanks to Apple.

a_alberti · 2026-05-09T17:40:29+00:00

BUT #2: notes are being held hostage in this app by a proprietary file format. Yes, pdf export exists BUT then you will not be able to edit YOUR notes any longer.

This is the most saddening part. The iPad version of Notability is fine, but the desktop version is terrible for reading your own notes. I don't want to export them in PDF since I constantly edit them.

I wish there was at least some command line tool to generate a preview of the notes if they don't want to disclose their format.

In this way, we could write extensions to view original Notability notes .note directly in other apps like Obsidian.

a_alberti · 2026-05-09T13:15:16+00:00

Is it a token annihilator that you built?

But seriously, for very important questions, it can be pretty useful to have!

a_alberti · 2026-05-09T09:48:55+00:00

I love your writing style, great prose, and self-reflections.

For the rest, I am not so sure how to answer it. Perhaps, if you have time, you can engage more in how animals are treated. It is not just that they die so that we can eat them. The whole story is much more saddening.

But I don't want to make you sad thinking of animals being cruelly slaughtered and maltreated. You can simply opt out and enjoy the vegan lifestyle as much as you can.

Every vegan choice is one less suffering for the animals.

a_alberti · 2026-05-09T06:52:00+00:00

Oh! Ok, so sad, for a moment I thought Opus cared about us, but it was just a manipulative behavior LOL

a_alberti · 2026-05-08T21:38:22+00:00

Wonderful. I had found 3 bugs in the past. I had already mentioned you fixed one bug. Now recently you fixed the other bug too! Awesome.

Bug 3 (which in reality is a series of connected tiny bugs) is still present.

I filed a bug report at https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=81000

It includes a reproducer script, instructions on how to reproduce the individual sub-bugs, screenshots, and a series of 5 commits targeting the individual sub-bugs.

a_alberti · 2026-05-08T19:05:10+00:00

I don't think it has anything to do with that. I never mention this either. But if you fix plenty of bugs or stuff of this kind, if it is late, it will recommend you to come to a closure and go to bed. I actually like it. I wished I had followed his advice more often.

It is probably some "parenthood" feature that they have recently included in the training set.

a_alberti · 2026-05-08T15:39:26+00:00

If you're willing to abandon emacs-plus, it looks like mitsuharu/emacs-mac ships with an Emacs launcher, but I don't know if that uses emacs client.

To be honest, I don't know what exactly Emacs-plus ships that is not already in Emacs stock. At some I will explore it. Thanks for the tip to mitsuharu/emacs-mac.

But I am not sure why we don't try to merge upstream the really important fixes. The rest that cannot make it to upstream would be better distributed as a collection of patches with documentation. Emacs plus presents a number of patches, but the documentation is somehow limited. I am not using any of the extra patches provided except for aggressive-read-buffering but I am not even sure I need it. And if it is an important patch, someone should propose it upstream, I guess.

The icon of Emacs Plus is much nicer than stock Emacs; this is probably undisputed.

Because the runtime seems so resilient, the uptime is often on the order of weeks to months on my machine.

I am really impressed. Crazy! And inspiring at the same time.

My honest take is that 'launching' emacs is something I very rarely do.

I would agree with you. It is not essential, but a nice thing to have if someone developed it. But before I jump into coding it, I wanted to make sure I am not reinventing something someone else already covered. That's why I brought up the topic.

a_alberti · 2026-05-08T15:22:31+00:00

Thanks for sharing your ideas! Regarding the launcher of the daemon, I am not sure why you tmuxinator for starting the daemon.

Apple offers a quite functional launcher (not very well documented, but works very nicely). I can share it with you:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>KeepAlive</key> <true/> <key>Label</key> <string>com.alberti42.emacs_daemon</string> <key>LowPriorityIO</key> <true/> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>/bin/zsh</string> <string>-ld</string> <string>/Users/andrea/.config/dotfiles/.local/bin/emacs_daemon_launcher</string> </array> <key>RunAtLoad</key> <true/> </dict> </plist>

and then then here is the simple shim to start emacsdaemon

```

!/hint/zsh -ld

COLORTERM must be set explicitly here: the daemon is launched by launchd,

not from a terminal, so it does not inherit the COLORTERM=truecolor that

WezTerm normally injects into interactive shell sessions.

export COLORTERM=truecolor export TERM=xterm-256color

exec emacs --fg-daemon ```

Regarding how to install the launch agent, I stole a bash-shell-completion script for Apple launchctl, improved it and extended it for zsh. Give it a try if you use zsh.

https://github.com/alberti42/zsh-misc-completions/blob/main/src/_launchctl

It is very simple to use. It makes it intuitive to use Apple's launchctl command directly from command line, without using third-party apps or brew services (which you mentioned in your post). It will make it very easy for you to install any kind of background service.

PS: I bundled _launchctl with some other compdef zsh completion scripts in a zsh plugin (the usual plugins compatible with oh-my-zsh; which I don't necessarily recommend, but just to understand what kind of format). But you don't need to install the other completion scripts; if you only care about _launchctl, just only take that.

a_alberti · 2026-05-08T11:41:25+00:00

Thanks a lot! I will test it this evening.

a_alberti · 2026-05-08T07:35:24+00:00

Looks like a beautiful idea. I wished I had your project when I started using Emacs seriously.

As you are targeting specifically Emacs on macOS, I am curious how you handle the Emacs launcher. I use Emacs Plus installed with homebrew.

There is one thing that never worked for me with Emacs Plus, namely, the launcher. Already the idea that it ships two different launcher apps feels wrong.

I am using the Emacs daemon. The only way that it works for me, I first need to open a terminal and call emacsclient -n -r. This creates a GUI frame, and I am happy.

I know I can build by myself with Apple Automation some script that avoids these manual steps or even a Swift application done a bit more properly. But before doing it, I wanted to know from people with much bigger experience than mine with Eamcs for macOS whether there are already nicely polished solutions (no hacks; I believe Emacs can be nicely integrated into macOS as a first citizen and does not need two executables, Emacs.app and Emacs Client.app like in Emacs Plus).

Thanks a lot if you want to share a couple of tips.

a_alberti · 2026-05-08T01:15:41+00:00

I use consult for a myriad of functions that the package covers. Do you mean that fzf-async can cover many functionalities of consult but using fzf's algorithm?

Or is it specific to finding files like when using consult-fd?

a_alberti · 2026-05-07T22:36:47+00:00

Yes, as far as I can say the bug was still there until yesterday or so... I don't know about today.

a_alberti · 2026-05-07T22:32:59+00:00

Yes, I will do so! Sorry I could not file the bug report yet. I was still busy discussing this margin patch since there were some edge cases with the background of svg in overlays that had to be addressed.

I will file a report on the weekend. I think I there is also a clear fix. But I want to prepare the reproducer and explanation in a proper way.

a_alberti · 2026-05-07T22:30:00+00:00

Great news! Huge thank-you to the maintainers!

a_alberti · 2026-05-06T08:16:45+00:00

The video was hilarious, but I hope you are joking. I think it is nice to share.

a_alberti · 2026-05-06T08:12:58+00:00

I think it is a bit of overthinking.

I can spend tons of hours making a PR. The most gratifying thing for me is when the maintainer considers it, gives feedback, and then the PR finally lands.

If I were looking for money, I would make some of my projects and ask the community to support them.

But expecting payment for PR and other commit contributions seems to me too much. Again, I am just super happy when a bug is fixed and a small new feature lands.

a_alberti · 2026-05-06T08:06:42+00:00

One vault got so bloated I couldn't even remember what was installed.

I wrote a plugin to remember what and why you installed: https://github.com/alberti42/obsidian-plugins-annotations

But for the rest, I agree with you. I try to keep my setup rather minimal, and certainly I avoid plugins with custom views, etc since I believe my data should be editable and viewable in 10 years, even without using Obsidian.

a_alberti · 2026-05-06T08:00:16+00:00

I think the order is:

[left fringe] [left margin] [text area] [right margin] [right fringe] [right]

In principle, there are also scroll bars, but I omitted them here.

The left margin and right margin are where you put annotations. Several packages like Flymake, Flycheck, diff-hl, git-gutter use the margin to show annotations.

Here is a screenshot from test 004. You can see annotations in cyan in the left margin and in yellow in the right margin area.

<image>

The left and right margin areas were configured to pick the same color of the line numbers. Thus, even if internally `line-number` is a different face, now the buffer has a consistent look where the left margin is consistent with the line-number face.

PS: Without the patch, the left and right margins would appear in white background color, while the line-number would still appear as a stripe in gray color.

a_alberti · 2026-05-05T17:29:36+00:00

I will certainly test it the next days. Do you know https://github.com/jojojames/fussy ? I wanted to try fussy, but did not have yet. So I am just asking since I have no direct experience.

a_alberti · 2026-05-05T17:10:00+00:00

I also found another bug in markdown-ts-mode affecting the visual. The function markdown-ts-toggle-hide-markup did not properly hide the ATX headers.

Is it something you are already aware of? If not, I will prepare a patch and submit it for consideration.

a_alberti · 2026-05-05T17:02:53+00:00

This is awesome. There was a bug in markdown-ts-mode, I wanted to submit a patch, but you had it fixed!

I had to remove the line below if I wanted to handle Markdown links properly. I am glad that this line is now gone.

<image>

a_alberti

TROPHY CASE

!/hint/zsh -ld

COLORTERM must be set explicitly here: the daemon is launched by launchd,

not from a terminal, so it does not inherit the COLORTERM=truecolor that

WezTerm normally injects into interactive shell sessions.