Posts

• Apr 7, 2026

  Stealing from the Best Emacs Configs

  Good artists borrow, great artists steal.

  – Pablo Picasso

  After spending the past couple of weeks updating Prelude and my personal Emacs config, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to see what the competition has been up to. I hadn’t done a proper survey of other people’s configs in years, and the Emacs landscape has changed quite a bit since the last time I looked.

  So I went through Doom Emacs, Purcell’s emacs.d, Centaur Emacs, Prot’s dotfiles, and a handful of others. Here are some of the most interesting things I found – settings and tricks that I either didn’t know about or had forgotten about entirely.

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• Apr 6, 2026

  The Many Faces of flet: cl-flet, cl-labels, and cl-letf

  Way back in 2013 I wrote about the deprecation of flet and how noflet could fill the gap. Thirteen years later, it’s probably time for a proper overview of what replaced flet in cl-lib and when to use each option.

  Emacs Lisp doesn’t have a built-in way to define local functions (the way let defines local variables), so cl-lib provides several macros for this. If you’ve ever been confused by cl-flet, cl-labels, and cl-letf – you’re not alone. The naming doesn’t make the distinctions obvious, and the documentation is a bit dry. Let’s try to fix that.

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• Apr 6, 2026

  Live Regexp Feedback with minibuffer-regexp-mode

  This is the third article in a small series inspired by my recent cleanup of Prelude and my personal Emacs configuration, following the ones on repeat-mode and read-extended-command-predicate. I’ve been going through the Emacs 28-30 changelogs for features I had ignored so far, and this one from Emacs 30 immediately caught my eye.

  Writing Emacs regexps has always been a bit of a dark art. Between the double-escaped backslashes and the various group syntaxes (\(...\), \(?:...\), \(?N:...\)), it’s easy to lose track of what you’re actually matching. You type something into query-replace-regexp, press RET, and hope for the best.

  Emacs 30 added minibuffer-regexp-mode, a minor mode that gives you live visual feedback as you compose a regexp in the minibuffer:

  (minibuffer-regexp-mode 1)
  

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• Apr 4, 2026

  Declutter M-x with read-extended-command-predicate

  This is another article inspired by my recent cleanup of Prelude and my personal Emacs config, following the one on repeat-mode. I’ve been going through the Emacs 28-30 changelogs looking for features I had overlooked, and this small one from Emacs 28 turned out to be a real gem.

  Ever noticed how M-x shows you every command, including ones that make no sense in your current buffer? Org commands while editing Ruby, Magit commands in a shell buffer, that sort of thing. It’s not a huge deal if you know what you’re looking for, but it adds noise to the candidate list – especially if you’re using a completion framework like Vertico or Ivy that shows everything at a glance.

  Emacs 28 added a simple way to fix this:

  (setq read-extended-command-predicate
        #'command-completion-default-include-p)
  

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• Apr 4, 2026

  Repeat Mode: Stop Repeating Yourself

  I’ve been going through the Emacs 28-30 changelogs recently as part of a big update to Prelude and my personal config, looking for features I never got around to trying. repeat-mode is one I wish I’d adopted sooner.

  How many times have you typed C-x o C-x o C-x o to cycle through a few windows? Or C-x { C-x { C-x { to keep shrinking one? All that prefix repetition is pure friction.

  repeat-mode is a built-in minor mode (Emacs 28+) that lets you drop the prefix after the first invocation and just keep pressing the final key. Enable it with one line:

  (repeat-mode 1)
  

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