Case Duckworth's personal web page

May I recommend declaring bankruptcy from time to time

2026-05-10T00:05:00Z

Configuration bankruptcy is someting of a meme in the Emacs community, to the point where there is a dedicated wiki page describing the phenomenon. As a fully-programmable text editor, Emacs configuration tends toward spaghetti over time, at least for many users (including myself). And for many of us, the only remedy for an unintelligible, slow, and tangled Emacs configuration is wiping the whole file and starting again.

I admit that I can be a perfectionist in some things. I also, for some reason, enjoy configuring Emacs, so I tend to tinker with it in my spare time. As a result, I’ve declared .emacs bankruptcy somewhat more than the average bear: when I finally stopped counting, I’d made it up to 12 or 13.

A few years ago—either because I got busier with work, got less interested in perfecting my setup, had a child, or whatever—my Emacs configuration more-or-less calcified. I had a custom macro for installing packages and grouping their configuration; I had plenty of custom functions and macros to mold Emacs perfectly to my needs; I had a system whereby I didn’t overwhelm my configuration with too many packages du jour.

As of April 2026, I have declared .emacs bankruptcy yet again.

As is usual with my bankruptcy declarations, the reasons are many, unfocused, and inchoate, but basically boil down to “I was bored.” Not that I have any reason to be bored: I have a toddler and a one-month-old at home, and I’m feverishly looking for work in one of the worst economies in generations. So maybe bored isn’t the right word.

My ~/.emacs (it’s actually in ~/.config/emacs, but who’s counting) was, despite my best efforts, getting brittle again. I found myself, once again, with the itch to explore and install new packages. I kept having to look up the source of functions I’d written years ago to remember how they worked. So I made a ~/emacs2 directory and ran emacs --init-dir=~/emacs2 in my shell, and was off to the races.

I’m really not changing all that much, though. The main theme of this go-round is that I’m not afraid of using external packages if that means I can have the functionality I want without having to think about it too hard. Thus:

I’m using use-package to declare packages.
I’m using super-save-mode to save buffers without having to think about it.
I’m using snap-indent instead of a complicated auto-indentation/whitespace-cleanup thing (though I might change it back; I think it might be causing a subtle bug in my workflow).

In addition, I’ve refrained from copying and pasting all my old options, which I do every bankruptcy. It’s a good chance to reëvaluate the features I really need while pruning those I don’t (or that I’ve been working around without realizing it for a while). Plus—and maybe I’m just strange for this one—it’s fun!

The theme for this month’s Emacs Carnival is May I recommend…, and my recommendation is tearing out your configuration from time to time and starting over. You’ll never really know who you’ve become until you do.

Skeuomorphic bookmarks

2026-04-26T00:04:00Z

Let me begin by saying that web bookmarks are great. You can just save links that you find interesting or that you think you might need later, and there they are waiting for you when you need them. I hope that whoever came up with that feature got a good raise or bonus or something.

However, they are lacking in one key area, namely: they do not act as bookmarks in books do. When you keep a bookmark in a real book, it moves with your progress throughout the text, so you always know where you are in the larger work. Web bookmarks don’t do that. They stick to the page you marked forever, unless you manually change where they point.

Given the workings of the web—especially the early web—it makes sense. Most pages, even today, are standalone documents that you can read through in one go, so if you want to keep them, you just keep the whole thing.

However, there are many documents online that are part of some larger work. I’m currently reading through Clojure for the brave and true, and it’s one of these: each chapter is a web page, but the whole work spans many of them. Lots of books online follow this pattern, including Texinfo manuals, software instruction books, and web comics. These documents need something more akin to the real-book bookmarks, which in computer-talk is skeuomorphic.

I had this idea for some kind of skeuomorphic bookmarking system a little while ago, and since then I’ve been yearning for it. Since it’s nontrivial, I didn’t think I had the chops to pull it off—but luckily I don’t have to.

I’ve written before about the Emacs Web Wowser, and I’m happy to report that it has wowed me again. I discovered that, as I worked through Clojure in a split view with eww and my code, bookmarking my progress at the end of sessions, Emacs would suggest the same name for each new bookmark, overwriting it and effectively moving the bookmark further in the text.

In other words, Emacs already does exactly what I’ve been looking for! While I haven’t looked into the code to see what heuristics it uses, the sites I’ve tried it on have worked fine.

I’ve written this post to appreciate the Emacs developers for their forward thinking, and to let everyone who reads this (hi mom!) know about a good feature that has given me joy. Try the Web Wowser today if you haven’t yet!

Or don’t, I mean I’m not the boss of you.

EWW fragments: fixing my own mistakes

2026-03-22T00:03:00Z

This month’s Emacs Carnival, my first participating, is titled “Mistakes and Misconceptions.” This story happened over the past few years, behind the scenes, and was just resolved this month when I posted about an annoyance I had with how I thought eww, the Emacs Web Wowser, just worked. Turns out, it was me all along.

the problem

Emacs has a reputation for shipping with, let’s say, questionable defaults, and I labored for some time under the assumption that navigating to a fragment in a URL—say, from https://www.acdw.net/eww-fragments.html to https://www.acdw.net/eww-fragments.html#the-problem—it just was how Emacs worked that it reloaded the entire page.

If you try clicking the second link above in your eww, you’ll probably find that that is not the case at all. I assumed that I’d run into one of the rough edges of Emacs, so I posted about it online to see if anyone had written some elisp to fix the issue. What I found was that no one else had the issue.

the solution

You can read the details of my conversation with Omar and mousebot in the thread linked above. Suffice it to say that, after some posting and learning about the url-debug feature, it turns out that I’d (setopt eww-use-browse-url ".") in my init.el at some point, thinking that it would streamline my browsing. Instead, by unconditionally opening a link in browse-url, I caused emacs to reload the page on every link, regardless of where it was from. A quick fix to (setopt eww-use-browse-url "^[^#]*$")—which matches any url without a fragment—solved the problem.

the takeaway

To sum up:

I made a premature optimization ages ago without fully thinking through the ramifications.
I labored under the false impression that some Emacs developer had failed to think through eww’s code in handling a fairly common case in urls.
I turned to the community looking for a fix (Emacs is endlessly customizable, after all).
I finally realized that the problem had been me all along.

One Emacs/Linux/libre software maxim I love is if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. I have total control over my machine, and that means my mistakes are mine and mine alone. However, libre culture means that we’re all in this together: while the mistake was mine, the fix was a community effort—and the fact that the knobs were there to tweak at all is a result of decades of community building and shared development.

I made a mistake in changing a setting I didn’t truly understand, and another in assuming that Emacs just came that way. This time, I was just “holding it wrong.” But the great thing about Emacs is that, when there is functionality I need that’s not in the base product, I can write it—or ask for help writing it—myself. And of course, contribute it back.

back to package.el

2024-11-07T00:11:00Z

trev over on #systemcrafters was asking about blogs switching from straight.el back to package.el, the built-in package manager for Emacs. I have done this, so here is a blog about switching back.

why straight.el?

First, let’s have some background. Straight has a fairly complex bootstrapping process and requires rewriting much of one’s Emacs configuration, so why use it in the first place?

When I was using straight, the answers were basically:

You can easily install packages that haven’t been released on an elpa, including locally-developed ones
You can specify a particular branch of a package’s repository
You can be sure that only the packages in your init.el are loaded

Basically, straight.el is great for power users that want to specify their configurations exactly. That used to be me, back when I started with Emacs and had my Furious Development period.

Nowadays, though, I’m older and tireder. So I’ve switched back to package.el.

why package.el?

As it happens, package.el is just fine for daily use by casual-to-mid-core users, in my opinion. It installs packages. It updates them. It even lists them out if you want to shop! For most Emacs users, it’s good enough..

What’s more, in recent releases of Emacs package.el has become even more powerful. With package-vc, you can install packages from external repositories, mitigating a major benefit of straight.el.

With package-vc, the only unique benefit remaining to straight is its declarativeness. It’s true that if you install a package using package.el, it will stick around in your .emacs.d and be loaded even if you delete its configuration from your init.el. But is this really a problem? You can mitigate it easily:

Run package-remove on it
Delete its directory from your .emacs.d (or hell, delete the whole elpa directory!)
Just Don’t Worry About It ™

That last point is powerful. So much of the Emacs community online seems to be hyperfocused on shaving down Emacs startup time to nothing, or maintaining a “minimal” config with “no bloat.” I have a lot of opinions on the subject of “bloat” in software, but that’s its own topic that I might write about later.

The point I’m making is, those worries are largely unfounded. So you have 15k of unused elisp files on your hard drive. So your Emacs takes an extra 1/3 second to start up. So what?

what I do

Okay, enough pontificating. Let’s get down to code snippets (that’s what you came here for, right?). My config is on my website, but the cogent part is excerpted here from my early-init.el:

package-ensure wraps package-install and package-vc-install for a unified API, and with-package wraps that to group package configuration together in a form. Notice that I don’t use use-package even though it’s now built-in to Emacs: I find use-package to be too “magical” for me, but that’s probably also another blog post.

do your thing

Of course, you don’t have to do what I do. You can use use-package with :ensure t (it defaults to package.el), or you can just add lines like this to your init.el:

Emacs is endlessly malleable, but that doesn’t mean we have to perfectly shape it to our exacting desires. Sometimes, it’s Good Enough™ to use the kit that comes with the kaboodle, as it were.