Another Emacs blog post. If this gets me thinking about blogging and tech I am good with it and I hope you are.

I used Elfeed for a long time. What I didn't realise is Emacs has been shipping with one for a long time. Enter NewsTicker.

It seems OK. Configuration is fairly easy:

(setq newsticker-url-list-defaults nil)

;; Define your custom news feeds
(setq newsticker-url-list
      '(("Spider flock" "https://spiderflock.com/feed.xml")
        ("Null program" "http://prog21.dadgum.com/atom.xml" )
        ("Sacha emacs"  "https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/")
        ("positech"     "http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/?feed=rss2")))

Keyboard shortcuts are quite reasonable. It doesn't feel amazing but it does seem usable enough to just use it and forget about alternatives. It not been heavily tests but I like the idea of having a hassle free rss reader.

A curated set of websites appeals to me. Humans doing human things and writing about them - warts and all. It would be wonderful to kick back and read some great blogs again. I am sure they still exist and as they don't hit the mark when it comes to making money people can just be themselves. Including their typos, spelling mistakes and rambling exposition.

Changing subjects but staying with Emacs. I previously mentioned I had two Emacs packages installed. One is a Tron theme and the other is gptel. Gptel is a package for using LLM, both locally and cloud hosted one.

I played with ollama to have one running locally but it made my machine crawl so moved to the free tier of the cloud one. I pretty much use it as alternative to googling. It lets me stay inside Emacs rather than jumping browser and provides answer quite quickly.

I would like to see self hosted models dominate this area but that's not something that will happen soon, if at all.

Yes I know me talking about wanting to find great human written blogs and then saying I am making use of LLM's may seem a little odd. I guess it is what it is.

I decided I wanted to work out how to create a new window in Emacs and send some text to it. After that I wanted to have it toggle in and out when I pressed a button. Nothing to exciting and I am not exactly sure what I am going to do with it other than put it on this post.

(setq log-window nil)

(defun sf-toggle-window ()
  (interactive)
  (if (not log-window)
      (progn
        (let ((buf (get-buffer-create "log"))
              (win (split-window nil nil 'right)))
          (set-window-buffer win buf)
          (setq log-window win)
          ;;  (select-window win)  ; Optional: moves focus to the new window
          )
        )
    (progn
      (delete-window log-window)
      (setq log-window nil)
      )
    )
  )

(sf-toggle-window)

(keymap-global-set  "<f2>" 'sf-toggle-window)

(defun sf-write-to-log (str)
  (interactive)
  (let ((buf (get-buffer-create "log")))
    (when (not log-window)
      (sf-toggle-window))
    (with-current-buffer buf
     (save-excursion
      (goto-char (point-max))
      (insert str))))

  )

(sf-write-to-log "hello sailor\n")

One thing I have not done is make it use special mode. A mode for read only output. This is meant for output from external tools or things like the Messages buffer.

It has a set key bindings including pressing q to close the window, but not the buffer. I think I will save that little area of Emacs for another adventure.