Week Notes [2026 #34]

Monday [Aug. 24, 2026]

• Chill day. Spent a bunch of time on Bluesky pinging back and forth about the NY AT Proto community day.

  Did a big refactor on the ways I'm working on NeoDoc. I'd been trying to automate some code generation for Shorthands, but that was too cumbersome and was really only going to cover a small number of them (4 outta 10). A case where I would have been better continuing duplication because I ended up with diverging abstractions.

  Got everything moved back to basic code updates and started making real progress again.

Tuesday [Aug. 25, 2026]

• Did a bunch of work on NeoDoc. That included making a function in the library to output text from payloads so there's no need to add or maintain macros in the templates. The result is that the templates are way cleaner to work with. (And, of course, you can still do things directly if needed)

• Decided to switch back to Emacs. Installed the latest version and latest spacemacs versions.

  Gonna take a bit to figure out how to use it again. But, I'm really liking the idea of having more direct control over making things (even though it's in elisp which I'm not good at yet) compared to Neovim plugins that have always felt a little too disconnected to me for some reason.

• I've been thinking about Emacs for the past few days after a conversation at the AT Proto community day in NY. I was already planning to make the move and then saw a podcast where one of the people who makes one of the Neovim tools I use was dogwhistling fash shit.

  Made me jump faster than I otherwise would have.

• I've updated my keyboard layout so that holding down the caps lock keys does Control to make it easier to hit for Emacs.

Thursday [Aug. 27th]

• Working to refine my emacs config. I'll say that AI search has made it a lot easier. I still don't let it touch my config but it gives me nice, direct answers compared to having to scan search results, pick on (usually on stack overflow) then read through it.

  Often, those answers are close to what I'm looking for by not exact. The AI/LLM results are way more on target virtually all the time.

  It's a dramatic speed up compared to the last time I worked on an emacs config.

• I've had a few folks follow me that have notes about AI in their profiles. Even though I'm using it for search I tend to avoid following back. I'm still not intersted in for actual code generation.

• Looking through the default "DOOM" emacs config I found deft which is notational velocity in emacs. nvAlt (the fork of notational velocity) was the first app I used that I really started taking notes in. It's what I styled my Neovim grimoire after. Love seeing it here.

  But, I'm not installing it. It's designed for plain text notes that read the first line for the title. The way my grimoire works is by parsing Neopolian (the prerunner to NeoDoc) files to find their titles. I'll set that up with NeoDoc when the parser is done.

  I'm increasingly excited about using Emacs for an overall tool. Seeing deft just amplifies that.

Friday [Aug. 28]

• Watched Project Hail Mary.

  Holy shit that's a well done piece of cinema. If I have the spoons I'll write up a little something about it.

Sunday [Aug. 30]

• Been kinda down the past couple days. I think it's because I stayed up too late a few nights ago and it just kind messed with me.

  Feeling better today.

• Spent a bunch of time working on my emacs config. Biggest thing was finding these videos from the System Crafters channel.

  I've got things in a really nice place. And, the videos showed me how I can do I think that I've wanted to do in Neovim for a while where I can use a "leader" key to fire up a menu that lets me different things from the keyboard easily. Not just navigating a doc or using built in stuff, but making and using my own custom commands and functions.

  Thanks again to Kiran for getting me thinking about Emacs again which lead to me to me giving it a try.

• Oh yeah, the other big point there is that I had been using Doom emacs, but I've switched over to using my own hand rolled config.

  The big reason is that I was trying to use tabs to show me what files I'm in. I got the turned on easily in Doom, but couldn't figure out how to get them set up so that if there were multiple files with the same name in different directories each would include the directory name itself.

  There's something built into Doom and one of the plugins it loads that prevents that from working. I spent a few hours trying to figure out how to get it to work. Finally figured out a hack for it, but that was more than I wanted to go through.

  Bascially, Doom installs a ton of stuff to get you started. That can be fine, but adds potential difficulties like I hit when you try to customize more.

  Plus, with Doom, every time you make a change you have to run an external command.

  With a striaght Emacs config you can execute changes directly from inside the config file wihtout even closing it.

  Very cool.

• I used Duck Duck Go's AI search a ton for trying to get the tabs with directory names working. It gave me a bunch of things to try and I saw a bunch of things that taught me more about how config (and elisp) works. It ended up being a web search that got me to the answer, but I wouldn't have been searching for the right thing without the AI search coming before it.

  Used it a little to supplement the stuff I saw in the videos. Overall, I it made setting things up in emacs way easier.

  (I still don't let it touch my code. I either type what it shows me in or copy paste it after putting eyes on it.)

Outro

Overall, a solid week. A little recovery from the trip to NY and good progress on getting set up to make more progress on NeoDoc and jumping back to emacs is very exciting.

-a