Fresh and Crispy

Gotta make progress with emacs

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 10:23:36 +0200

I keep getting stuck! I want to learn and use Emacs for my reading and writing but I keep falling down the configuration rabbit hole. I have made a number of attempts to create a vanilla Emacs configuration but rarely get further than Prot's's recommended decent defaults (Emacs: decent defaults I shared with Sacha Chua, Emacs: a basic and capable configuration and Emacs: organise your init file (outline-minor-mode or Org literate config)).

So my plan is now to spend a few weeks working with Peter Prevos' Emacs Writing Studio.

I hope to tune this to exploit MacOS using some of the advice from Emacs on macOS.

I also plan to focus on using Gnu Hyperbole under the guidance of Charlie Holland's series HyWiki: Zero Markup Hypertext, Hyperbole Implicit Buttons: Build your Hyperverse, and Hyperbole HyRolo: Search, Retrieve and Insert Records, Not Lines. I also want to make use of Charlie's article Annotate-in-Place Notes with Emacs and org-remark.

Let's see how this goes!

Back to the wiki

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:23:51 +0200

Inspired by Charlie Holland's post HyWiki: Zero Markup Hypertext, I have decided to give HyWiki (part of Gnu Hyperbole) a go.

I'll report progress later!

Exploring Emacs' Markdown Mode

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:32:27 +0200

In my second tag-blogmore post (and first category-emacs post), I thought this would be a good opportunity to explore the BlogMore API as well as markdown mode.

I immediately hit a problem because in Emacs on my Mac, M-3 does not enter the "pound" symbol needed to mark a heading/subheading. Is there an "insert heading function" command in markdown-mode? Fortunately there is and it's on the keyboard shortcut C-c C-s 2 (heading 2 because heading 1 is the post title).

This is what I found.

Blogmore commands discovered

blogmore-toggle-draft -- toggles the draft: true tag in the current posts' metadata block.
blogmore-link-tag -- adds a link to a tag page in the current blog.
blogmore-link-category -- adds a link to the category page in the current blog.
blogmore-update-date -- updates the post's save date which is useful if you are writing a large post and you want the date to reflect the actual publication date.

Blogmore documentation

Both written by davep:

BlogMore -- documemtation for the BlogMore tool that I am now using to create this blog.
davep/blogmore.el -- provides tools that help in the creation of blog posts for a BlogMore blog.

Markdown mode commands discovered

C-c C-s 2 (markdown-insert-header-atx-2) -- inserts level 2 heading.
C-c C-c p (markdown-preview) -- previews content of the current markdown-mode buffer in the default web browser.
C-c C-l (markdown-insert-link) -- isert a URL or Reference link.

Markdown-mode documentation

Markdown Mode for Emacs by Jason Blevins.

Fixing the `M-3` issue on a Mac

[I found this fix some time ago but I hadn't gotten around to adding it to my latest Emacs configuration.]

On a Mac with a UK keyboard, the keystroke to generate the "pound sign" (S-3) literally produces the currency symbol £. To get the hashtag symbol # we have to press Option-3 (M-3), but this is intercepted by emacs. This makes it very difficult to deal with markdown and org-mode files that use # extensively.

To fix this, we have to redefine the global key M-3:

;; Allow hash to be entered on Mac UK keyboard
(global-set-key (kbd "M-3") '(lambda () (interactive) (insert "#")))

On my prelude-based configuration, this code has been added to ../prelude/personal/01-settings.el.