Posts on Experimental Emacs

last-rev.pl

Fri, 08 May 2026 13:59:59 -0500

last-rev.pl

As returning readers will know, I produce (or try to produce) regular builds of Emacs for Windows. When things work, these produce pre-compiled binaries as an installer and unpack-and-run zip files. You can find links to the latest set for each branch in the box at the top-left each page on the site.

Today's post is about one program out from the middle of the bucket-brigade of data I have created, generally in an effort to avoid unneeded queries of the upstream (Savannah or Savannah mirrors hosted) repositories.

Cupcakes

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:59:59 -0600

Cupcakes

Poetry (non-Emacs related)

EmacsConf CFP ending and a completing-read example

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 19:17:17 -0600

I updated a simple (but occasional favorite) custom command the other day and it looks like it might be a useful "simple" example for others. Meanwhile, we are coming right up on the closing of the Call for Proposals period for EmacsConf 2025, so I wanted to shout about that.

Fork of restclient guarding uses of eval

Mon, 19 May 2025 14:07:59 -0500

Another IRC user, technomancy, created a fork of restclient today after noticing some evals.

Here's the new repository: https://git.sr.ht/~technomancy/restclient.el

The delta is small, simply guarding these behind options (which can be setup per "trusted" file/buffer). I'm sure he'd be interested in your further thoughts if you happen to be an IRC user; I'm not sure how much work he plans to put into this other than immediately offering "a simple fix" believing the package might be somewhat undermaintained currently.

Emacs 29.2 Windows Binaries

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 22:24:56 -0600

Emacs 29.2 Windows Binaries

Emacs 29.2 binaries for Windows (x64) are available from the GNU FTP Mirror system:

https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-29/?C=M;O=D

Emacs Devel: Design and Architecture

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:19:05 +0000

This is a collection of links pulled together from some interesting discussions on Devel related to making Emacs more multi-threaded.

The Turtle and the Snail

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

People are always talking about how fast they work, either because Emacs or because Not Emacs. That reminds me of this joke…

My build command for Emacs 29 Snapshots

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 23:59:59 -0600

Emacs 29 Build Command

TBH, I've been building emacs "manually" for months.

I have scripts for this, of course. Naturally, they are broken. It turns out not to be all that hard to get me to bail out from fixing (even) my own scripts, and revert to building Emacs by hand. Here's what I ran this evening, to make a new snapshot from the emacs-29 branch:

  (export BIF=/d/emacs-build/install \
	  SLUG=29-$(git rev-parse --short HEAD); \
   (./autogen.sh \
	&& ./configure \
	       --with-modules \
	       --without-dbus \
	       --with-native-compilation \
	       --without-compress-install \
	       --with-tree-sitter \
	       CFLAGS=-O2 \
	&& make install -j 20 \
		NATIVE_FULL_AOT=1 \
		prefix=${BIF}/emacs-${SLUG}) \
   | tee ${BIF}/emacs-${SLUG}.log)

Complexity is a dangerous attractor

I let my various "helper" programs get way too complicated. Pretty soon I didn't feel like playing with them at a time when they did not do what I wanted.

Packaging Emacs for Windows

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 07:03:00 -0600

GNU provides binary releases of Emacs. This post describes how to follow the process used to make such releases for Windows.

Generating README.json

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 04:13:54 -0600

I'm using the README.org as a "container" to structure simple projects as literate programms. The programs for each project are contained in and built by (tangled from) the file that documents them. Meanwhile, I provide documentation in other formats such as Markdown, generated using org-export.

People sometimes offer edits to those generated files.

Naturally, this leads me to try exporting README.org as JSON. Thanks to ox-json (and Jared Lumpe), it's easy!

Creating JSON

When I'm trying to see if something works (meaning does what i need, I assume a given program does what someone wants) I usually prefer the command line, if not an actual script.

Overdozing Rx

Sun, 10 Jan 2021 00:00:04 -0600

Do you ever write regular expressions with 71 capture groups, then toss them out? A conversation earlier this evening on IRC reminded me of a thing in want of "talking" about. If you know a bit about dungeon-mode, or aren't that interested in it, you might want to skip ahead or just grab the tests.

So, there's this game..

Dungeon is a role-playing game I learned as a kid. It features uncomplicated mechanics and a potentially infinite flexibility for dungeon masters to due rude and innovated things to player characters. As of late 2019 I'm working with friends and comrades to create a game engine for Emacs, along with a sample game testing, at long last, the theory that technology has evoloved to the point where this game could be more fun to play using computers – a point hotly debated across decades, perhaps generations.

The Automation Begins

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 23:59:59 -0600

The Automation Begins

Having decided I should make a blog to chronicle my adventures in Emacs, I started looking into hugo a minimal blogging framework written in GO. It turns out that hugo has excellent org integration, incorporating go-org, which is the same library used by Github.

Last edit: 2024-01-20T16:42:59-09:00

Recent edits:

add Condensed section with one-liner versions

Condensed

As of Jan, 2024, I'm most often executing this "one-liner" version:

  c:\\hugo\\hugo.exe -s d:/projects/bla/corwin.bru.st/ && pscp -r d:/projects/bla/corwin.bru.st/public/* dh_aw28jd@corwin.bru.st:/home/dh_aw28jd/corwin-emacs

Hopefully after using this one, which puts it on a local test server:

Experimenting With Emacs

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 20:56:54 -0600

Experimenting with Emacs

A Brief Introduction

I'm Corwin, he/him, 5 kids, it's complicated. I'm a 20 year information technology professional, which has me currently supporting financial services digital and interactive marketing in terms of information security/compliance and data services intersections. By day I spend a fair amount of time in Microsoft Visio but I also use Emacs. At home I use Emacs a lot.

Our firm allows us to bring our own text editor, and I was able to request get Emacs 26 packaged for simple install by myself and colleagues, thanks for 26.3 to Artem Boldariev's MSI Installer and for 27.0.50 to an interested teammate working the packaging requests who spent some time getting each GUI mode DLL past one and another desktop safeguards, employed to protect Employee used Windows laptops, like mine. (In fact, I've had some related problems with my laptop this past year, but that will have to be a separate post.)

Chad - compute heterogeneous asynchronous datagrams

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Daemon to execute commands when data becomes available.

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The system will start Chad automatically when entering a multi-user run-level.

OPTIONS

-f --foreground stay in the foreground
-s --single-user disable individual chadtabs for each user

NOTES

Unless started with the s or single-user option, Chad searches its spool area (/var/spool/chad/chadtabs, by default) for chadtab files (which are named after the accounts in /etc/passwd); valid chadtabs found loaded into memory. The chadtabs in this directory should not be directly accessible by users - the chadtab command should be used to access and update them.