miniblog.

Today I learnt that Emacs 28 shipped a context-menu-mode! https://oylenshpeegul.gitlab.io/blog/posts/20230129/ This seems quintessentially Emacs: deeply hackable, but building UI features in an order very different to the mainstream.

Claude asked me a question today: was I looking for an Emacs plugin (because I was talking about elisp) or a Rust program (because I have configured Rust preferences)? I'm really impressed, it's rare to see LLMs ask follow-up questions. (I wanted Emacs in this case.)

One interesting design choice in Emacs that I haven't seen in other editors: reserved shortcuts. An Emacs extension shouldn't use F5 through F12, or Ctrl-c LETTER. This lets users configure their own shortcuts. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Key-Bindings.html Does it exist elsewhere? I miss it in VS Code, where e.g. all the Fn keys are already assigned.