It is 11/01/2021. I felt like writing this because I like the look of that number. David Lynch draws numbers from a jar on his youtube channel, daily. Today’s was 8, which I think is also good.
I haven’t been up to a lot recently, just stupefied by the previous week. My brain is melting and coming out my ears. I’ve been putting time into exploring Emacs' features. Found out a little more about XEmacs from jwz, who was tearing his hair out over GnuEmacs' idiosyncracies.
Structural regular expressions are on my mind. They’re a neat feature from the Sam editor that expands on regex. They allow you to pattern match structured text rather than single lines. So, for example, a structural regex would natrually fit into a search-and-replace task where you’re editing the names of a lot of functions or the text of a bunch of comments. Or editing only things at indentation of a certain level. I can do the same thing with an Occur buffer, to an extent.
I’m upset by the author of Icicles being so insistent about his pet project. I found a discussion of structured regex on the emacs-devel mailing list, from a decade ago. He’s still the same way, and it stung to watch him kill the discussion with his long ass posts about how great Icicles is when nobody asked. Most recently he’s turned EmacsWiki into his version control system rather than just using Git.