Irreal

Alvaro Ramirez has a cute iOS application called ⋆scratch⋆. The idea is that it provides an Emacs-like scratch buffer on your iPhone. If you’re like me, your first reaction is, “why would I want this?” But the use case is those situations where you want to capture a note as seamlessly as possible. One reason you wouldn’t need it is that iOS has the Notes app that’s for exactly that purpose.

I use Notes all the time. In particular I use it for my Memo Book where I record the significant events of my day. But notes has a bit of friction. You have to choose the appropriate note or start a new one. The nice thing about ⋆scratch⋆ is that you just bring it up and write whatever you want. It’s got some simple Org-like formatting but that’s not really necessary.

I wasn’t really convinced I needed it but it was only 99¢ so I bought it on a whim. A couple of days later I was out to dinner with some friends who told me about a wine they really liked. I thought it was worth trying out so I brought up ⋆scratch⋆ to capture its name. It was seamless and easy and just like that I became a ⋆scratch⋆ fan.

I’ve only had the app for a few days so I am by no means an expert on its use but the nice thing is that there’s not much to know. Bring it up and capture your data. You can share it or erase it or start a new scratch buffer but all that is after that fact. When you want to capture some data, you just bring up the app and capture it. I recommend it to iPhone users who occasionally want to capture some data.

We Emacs maximalists are always on the lookout for tasks that we can integrate into Emacs in our never ending quest to stay in Emacs as much as we can. Vivek Haldar has added another task to the list of things we can do within Emacs. He has a short video demonstrating his code to access ChatGPT from within Emacs. His method depends on a Python script to do the heavy lifting and some Elisp to deal with the Emacs interaction. There are links to both pieces of the code with the video.

If you’re an Emacser and interested in experimenting with ChatGPT, this may be a worthwhile app to include in your setup. I still think, perhaps erroneously, of ChatGPT as a sort of magic trick. It seems magical when you see it but if you look under the hood, it’s actually fairly easy to see what’s going on. The key to the results—given how it works—is the training data. If you’ve ever noticed how much nonsense there is on the Web, you’ll also understand some of the anomalous results ChatGPT occasionally produces.

Regardless, ChatGPT can be useful if you keep in mind what’s going on in the background. And, of course, it’s going to get better. Probably a lot better so it’s worthwhile laying down some infrastructure for it in your Emacs configuration.

Haldar’s video is a couple seconds short of 4 minutes so you can watch it pretty much at will. It’s definitely worth a watch if you have any interest at all in the intersection of Emacs and ChatGPT.

Andrew Hyatt has a new video that describes the changes to EKG version 0.2. I wrote about EKG back in February. The TL;DR is that it’s a note taking app that links notes similar to, say, org-roam but with some interesting differences in operating principals. EKG is available on Melpa if you want to try it.

Version 0.2 adds a couple more functions, info documentation, and some general bolt tightening. The two most significant additions are

Templating

Templates are a way of adding text to any note sharing the tag of the templates. The implementation is different from other templating systems you may be used to. Take a look at the video for the details.

Embddings

This is the most interesting change. Embeddings are a way of capturing similarities among notes. It’s more general than notes sharing terms. Hyatt gives the example of noodles and pasta. The embedding functionality will consider these similar even though noodles and pasta are not the same thing. Generating embeddings is a complex operation beyond the capabilities to Emacs so the chore is outsourced to OpenAI. That fact has some possibly negative consequences that Hyatt discusses in the video.

The video is 17 minutes 27 seconds long so it should be easy to fit in but it won’t make any sense if you haven’t watched the first video that describes EKG and explains what it does.

The minions, ever vigilant for opportunities to engage in another skirmish in the light vs. dark theme war, brought this to my attention and insisted that I run with it.

Maybe it’s time to make another #emacs color scheme. I need to do my part to fight the 20 year olds creating all this low contrast garbage. Code comments should not be low contrast. Nothing should be low contrast for that matter.

— Ryan (@Pixel_Outlaw) February 25, 2023

It’s not really a light/dark theme issue but it is related. It’s possible, of course, to have low contrast text with a light theme but you almost always see it with dark themes. A horrible example is dark gray on black or—even worse—dark blue on black. It’s essentially unreadable but some folks think it looks cool. Those of us with aging eyes are not as enthusiastic.

The minions are jumping up and down with glee about that tweet but maybe we should stop feeding the trolls: quit rendering low contrast text already.