My initial idea for lmno-blog-capture was “for dashing off super small posts in a transient window.” I wanted something org-capture-like so I could be writing about something, have a thought, and keep whatever I was working on in sight.
So it never occurred to me to test what would happen if I had ended up going long and deciding to give myself more screen real estate with C-x 1.
Then I did that and Emacs started squawking about having only one window to close, so even though it was saving my lmno.md file, it was complaining and not closing the posting minibuffer. I thought I fixed it once, but turns out I was fixing the wrong file in the wrong place for another project. Then it complained at me again today so I fixed it for real this time.
The Sublime distraction
While I was In the midst of thrashing around with Emacs configs I wanted to keep working on another project, so I dusted off Sublime Text to just keep moving while I worked through my feelings about Emacs (again). I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with it. I love that it’s fast and smooth and runs on everything in the house, Linux and Mac alike. I love that it’s got a good package ecosystem. I’m not a Python person, though, so if I had an itch to scratch in the form of making my own plugin for it, I’d be back at the bottom of the hill. I liked Textmate back when because I could write my own plugins in Ruby, and I like BBEdit for similar reasons: Text filters can be any scripting language.
But I’m not actually good at Emacs lisp. Not on the level of something like making lmno-blog-capture on my own. Instead I fire up whichever LLM I want to play with and go through a sort of iterative process of describing what I’d like to see happen, then testing it out, then layering on another idea, etc. etc.
That’s time that could be spent getting gud at Emacs lisp, I guess, but when I think about making that investment … it just doesn’t strike me.
I asked ChatGPT to translate lmno-blog-capture to a Sublime Text plugin for me, just to see the code side-by-side, and it was pretty legible. It also took zero iterations to have a working version. Getting an LLM to kick out working lisp on the first go is often hilarious, which makes sense.
Anyhow, nothing to do with it for now. I’ve got this emacs-plus setup in a good place, and there’s usually something that does what I want already in the ecosystem.
Update: I did go ahead and make a package out of the Sublime version because why not. There’s a package file you can download and install in the releases. It’s funny because it is just not my conception of Sublime Text that you’d live in it in this manner, but it seems completely right and proper that the exact same functionality would exist in Emacs.