Dilip's Log

Replenish theme - its Emacsy

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With previous post on revamp my blogs, I finally today went ahead and upgrades the beautiful emacs theme made by Arthur, and locally forked to add goodies.

Reflecting on upgrades since beginning it has received, I'm strictly thinking to settle with this, as it looks good, minimal enough and modern looking, adaptive in mobile, has rss support and I can extend as I want and more than all, I can live in my editor - Emacs.

Initially the itch to setup own blog and personal website starting with rudra.dev (may no longer be active) site which had simple blog listing made using Hugo. Then I moved to org-mode's org-publish, and had setup replacing the same with full html and css from org. I still have the theme in another branch here. But again wanted to extend things and org-publish did not feel clean. So went back to hugo, was exploring plethora of theme and went ahead with Color your world, which looked unique giving color accent for whole page and letting user pick with choice. It had search and katex support, but later realized I dont use any of it and it loaded many JS files. Then began another hunt and was thinking of Mana theme, which seemed cool and was active in development with new features every commit.

Right at this time, magically the Emacs theme came by reddit and the path got clear and jumped the ship.

Enough of history, today I added some improvements to this theme in my fork and hopefully I'll be doing more blogs here with as much information I can spread. I've been enjoying reading Light novels - Apothecary Diaries and Ascendance of Bookworm, and skimming hacker news and blog posts from feedbase, hence its time to give back and share as well.

Its not always of what you can consume, can be what you give as well.

OBTF as Second Brain with Org mode

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One Big Text File is simply writing down mostly everything in single file to organize or manage data. This single file acts as the source of knowledge and holds all notes.

Second brain has been a buzz word, thanks to the sourcing of Zettelkasten method, every productivity freak is on the stance to organize their life and get things done.

But I soon came to the conclusion by reading many blogs and reddit discussions that, searching is far superior than organizing. On internet all we do is search for information, and not organize or build system just to get info. This is how note taking should work as well. Just for efficient retrieval and storage.

Thanks to my introduction to emacs and getting deep into rabbit hole, Org mode has been the great tool to handle plain text file as an Organization platform. Just like emacs (OS), Org mode can also be extended to endless limit (I dare say it). If emacs is OS, Org mode is for me Init system (systemd).

You can read more about my note taking journey in this post.

This context is also written in favor to post it on r/obtf

Org mode is the best tool for managing OBTF

Many popular workflow would go by simple format as bullet points with Time date and info, and regexp based searching via CLI (rg, vim, grep, sed…. bash scripts)

Org mode has many bells and whistles (features) that aid in this method. Tags, integration with commands and rich source of documentation (one of the best things of Emacs or org mode). Thanks to emacs and protesilaos stavrou I learnt how important are documentation and writing sensible notes. It means alot for future self to recognize and re-instantiate the thoughts and state.

Org mode has an datetree method which has file heading hierarchy in the Year > Month > Day and 4th nested heading follows any notes.

 * 2022
 ** 2022-10 October
 *** 2022-10-07 Friday
 *** 2022-10-08 Saturday
 **** <Any notes I'm capturing> :tag1:tag2:

This gives out the leverage of journaling, but also a lazy man's organization. I use tagging extensively to most of the (4th) heading based on context so as to narrow down to filter.

 # learning notes --- l@
 #+tags: l@coding l@emacs l@bioinfo l@nix l@bash l@julia l@rstats l@python l@devnote l@latex l@til

 # generic notes to remember or readme --- n@
 #+tags: n@linux n@shell n@cli n@book n@idea

 # projects --- p@
 #+tags: p@webcli p@cyanate p@scitomep

These tag help to categorize the heading in some (lazy) way

Org mode has org-sparse-tree bound to C-c / which helps to narrow down based on tag or property. Also another emacs package consult helps to take it up further via consult-line and consult-org-heading along with org-ql package. Org mode also has #+select_tags to export headings to file.

 #+select_tags: r@book

With that we can C-c C-e (org-export-dispatch) and press "O O" (make sure org is in org-export-backends) to get temporary Org buffer only with those heading. This logically acts as an individual file with that tag/category, thus being atomic in my sense. Org-sparse-tree might also be same.

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Key takeaways

whatever the system or the tool is, the main takeaways every resource provides is to review the notes and write it for future self. Every capture is to review back and make the fleeting note into and rich information. This OBTF with org mode satisfies that needs given that user reviews the notes and visits back to digest it again.

Literate org config

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Organizing Config

Configuration files as we know are the text to instruct the program to modify and tweak to our needs. Every Open-Source, hack-able software or tool has configuration files provided for the choice of user's needs. Most of the tools provide simple and basic configuration with JSON-like formats, Yaml and Toml. For the word, they are not extensible, as ml stands, they are merely for markup to already defined instructions.

Tools which are really extensible occupy with the power of a simple or real programming language, to which user gets only sky as the limit to configure. Some tools which are in my mind of this matter are Emacs, neovim, NixOS (home-manager).

So eventually with more configurations added and tweaked, it becomes evident that it needs to be organized. Humans cannot read a long mass of codes which does not even have basic design principle in it.

This realization leads to documenting the codes with comments (the grey) and it obviously adds more lines. There after the thoughts lead to modular config, splitting up of files in sensible manner and to import from one stop.

Now, wait.., This sounds like we are down to creating a file hierarchy for config files, good at the initial days, but sooner or later hierarchy might look alien. I bet it!

That's where I'm stopping you can covering up next on writing Literate configuration, like with Org-mode.

Org-mode Config

I won't introduce about org-mode, please do check here, hopefully it gives you an idea (I mean you should have read whole documentation/manual there). Additionally here is a Wikipedia reference which is enough to introduce.

The concept of Literate programming is having the user's natural language written down in correspondence to code blocks. It adds human-ness to the code, and the instructions we need to understand. Over technical work, it can reduce the usage of manual pages and documentation, wait, that is not a good idea to avoid them, but for something to understand that we wrote ourselves, literate programming helps to add notes.

The concept is fairly like maintaining a notebook or documentation guide itself, but it also comes with its power.

Org-mode has tons of features that helps in various categories. Prime use is for maintaining GTD, Notes, Latex, Journaling… infinity?

The main topic is, I tried maintaining modular config for Emacs and Nixos, and after some days, I myself was wondering and wasting time on thinking where did I place some content for this categories and was stuck with file hierarchy for several moments. The main obstacle is file hierarchy might turn out to be complex and redundant.

That's where I decided to move back all to literate config. I came across rasendubi dotfiles and he also used Literate org config for both Nixos and Emacs. Eventually I did too, here is the repo.

The key benefits were, single org file to rule them all. I can integrate well with Emacs, yes, dependency might be Emacs, then too it is plain text format. Org gives us the power to tangle, annotate, add notes, tables, anything with the Source Code Blocks. For many configs or code, we forget why we wrote or why it is uniquely required, and nobody likes to waste time digging on why it is there, of course comments are helpful, but not everywhere to make it more head ache? Also I don't have navigate over the file hierarchy again and again with paths, simple single org is the stop.

Org allows us to write notes there, I do manage lot of TODO and plans over the files, and forget everything. When I revisit or when I want to care, I can see what are the plans and I can execute it timely there after. Org literate config acts the source of truth, for information and understanding for my own level.

As I bestowed this in practice, I noticed that flow of thoughts and expression of it at that time is the crucial thing. Again, for a thought to come and just vanish, its a haze. Even merely sixty seconds is enough to forget. Org could also fill that void, but just capturing the running thought at that time, and later to expand on it.

Managing time is precious and Org-mode help with that, with plans Todo & Schedules. Also, endless customization does not fetch any fruit. Having a cleaning kind of a day every month or twice a year can help on tweaking or fixing the necessary lines over the Org config.

In a recent snippet on Organize File, I was about falling out on maintaining notes. From that scenario also the lesson learned is that, more than maintaining notes, the actual flow of thought and feeling at right time is most important and beats the best organizer anywhere out there. I mean, the goal of note-taking or writing down should be to transcribe the thoughts and knowledge in a approachable manner.

Key Takeaways

Org-mode helps in managing and maintaining configuration files.
Learning can be stressed, and is the key for writing out Literate programming.
Things are easier to forget, annotating it our own words can help in better understanding and retention of information.
Org config is the source of truth.
Notes should be meant to capture the thoughts and feeling at that time of occurence.

Organize File

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

From past few days I have been dabbling in the dimension of how to organize files, notes in effective manner. After jumping deep into the rabbit hole, I went on a spree of digesting several blog posts, articles on maintaining files, organizing notes, getting things done, what not, the list goes on.

With power of org-mode comes the doubt, is it efficient to maintain one big org file or multiple small files. Yes, its personal preference based on users need, there is no set guided rules.

I stumbled across Zettelkasten system which wasn't new, I was aware of it in the likes of org-roam, although I believe I did not have much matter to use it to some potential to form sensible network. So for now, no hard plans of multiple small files.

After many reading, especially Karl voit's posts (site), I was kinda convinced that file system hierarchy does not make sense, as the file system model I have may change over time, and I would not like to remember and know where I placed something and where to place something. The schema of Zettelkasten is also against this, like you maintain small files and just connect them based on UniqueID or with complexity of SQL database. The simpler alternative would be denote emacs package, then too I don't see the light on using it to the potential. I liked denote way of naming files, and it is format agnostic, does not depend on anything. Just pure elisp to do the job.

Thus as a safer approach, I renamed some notes files to denote convention (as there is no harm/changes in that).

Ultimately the fruit to yield is, just go with whatever is easy and that gets the work done. Forgetting people's upfront images, looking at other side proved me that nobody is well organized in every way. Everybody lacks something in one or the other way, like I saw person who maintained file system well organized, but the desk and the room was gross and jam packed. So it depends, but the key takeaway is, if it just works; That's enough. But as time goes, changes and upgrades are required.