Processing is what ignited my passion for programming and Quil has become my favorite way of writing it. It is amazing that you can re-evaluate the draw/update function in a running sketch and immediately see the changes, without having to reload the whole thing. And on top of it you have the beauty of the whole Clojure Stdlib with its immutable datastructures.
I just learned that there is now a tweak mode in Processing that lets you tweak certain parameters in the code (via draggable values, etc.) while the sketch is running, which is pretty awesome for experimenting with values. However, you still have to reload the whole sketch when you want to change other parts of the code, you can’t just eval a function in the editor and get immediate feedback like in Quil.
I am not sure if this is what you mean, but the original UCBLogo (which I think is used in the Turtle Geometry book) is still alive and maintained[1] (not by the original authors, but Brian Harvey seems to chime in every now and then) and it does run well on modern computers.
Now that I think about it, Logo seems to be pretty much a livecoding environment (not surprising given that it is a Lisp, but with less parentheses). You can define and edit functions from the REPL while the program continues with the same state, the same canvas. You can even pause e.g. a running procedure that draws a polygon, rotate and move the turtle and then continue the polygon procedure with that new state (at least this is possible with UCBLogo).
It is indeed what I had in mind, I was amusingly ignorant that this was being maintained. Humble apologies on my end! Edit: And thanks for correcting me!
My Emacs wouldn’t be the same without Prots modus themes[1], which I found to be a great foundation to build my own theme on top of. I am grateful for all the work he did for the Emacs community.
I also enjoy watching his videos where he talks about various philosophical topics from a very clear, pragmatic and down-to-earth perspective. My impression is that he is a really kind and humble person and that he lives by his philosophical insights, without bragging about his lifestyle or judging about how other people live their lifes.
Modus themes are so rad - they look bleak at first, but after a while they grow on you. Then you try some other theme and notice how terrible it is to look at due to lack of contrast. I am convinced now that most theme makers have not the slightest idea what they are doing. Modus and PragmataPro font are two things which spoiled themes and fonts for me.
But, Prot also has other incredible packages - I am a user of denote, his notetaking package. Then there are ef-themes, for those who like themes with more color. There are gems there, but really, one should try modus for a while first.
I like using LLMs more as coding assistents than have them write the actual code. When I am thinking through problems of code organization, API design, naming things, performance optimization, etc., I found that Claude 3.7 often gives me great suggestions, points me in the right direction and helps me to weigh up pros and cons of different approaches.
Sometimes I have it write functions that are very boilerplate to save time, but I mostly like to use it as a tool to think through problems, among other tools like writing in a notebook or drawing diagrams. I enjoy programming too much that I’d want an AI to do it all for me (it also helps that I don’t do it as a job though).
I’ve been considering Parinfer, but my issue was that it is a bit unpredictable where parens end up and I have to be careful to not mess up my code structure. Maybe I should give it another try for a longer time period.
My favourite structural editing tool for about a year now is symex[1], which is an Emacs package (and unfortunately not that well known compared to paredit, lispy, etc.). It takes some getting used to at first but after a while you only move around and think in terms of s-expressions, you don’t even see parentheses anymore. It really feels like you are a squirrel climbing trees (hence the image on the repo, I guess). I just hope the dev(s) will be able to get rid of the heavy dependencies on other packages soon.
Great tip. Exactly what I've needed. I'm heavily vim-based and can't stand editing elisp. I don't mind if it's heavy on dependencies since I'm already overburdened with dependencies, what's a few more.
I believe convenience and actually wanting to give something back to the creators would have many people pay for pro features, since it’s actually “Pay once, use for life”, which is a rare and welcome sight in this subscription-flooded world. And it still leaves people with low income the option to (legally?) circumvent payment. Not sure how sustainable this is as a business model, but I think it’s pretty nice compared to being forced into continuous payment.
It seems like they borrowed heavily from Notion, Obsidian and RemNote, as far as I can tell (wouldn’t call it a knock-off though, since there are sooo many apps in this space that you don’t really know who came up with what anymore). But the app doesn’t feel janky to me at first glance, it definitely feels more responsive than Notion and less “slippy” than RemNote. Although it is quite noisy with all the tooltips popping up immediately.
My first impression is that they really wanted to include everything (even RemNote-like spaced-repetition flashcards, Notion-like Databases and of course there has to be AI too) and it seems like they did a pretty decent job at that. I also appreciate that there are so many export options, even for Org-Mode (preserving internal links, images, code-blocks, etc.).
I like that it provides a solid, feature-rich alternative to all the cloud-first, closed-source apps in this space. But it may be too distracting/overwhelming for my use-cases with all the advanced layout capabilities and features though. Tana is a similar all-in-one solution that is really well done (and more innovative than this one), but I always seem to gravitate toward more focussed apps.
To quickly link to bullet points, just use [[*My bullet point]] (if you omit the *, it may still work but Org also finds non-heading elements like table names with the same text).
Personally, I like to create custom ids for bullet points so that I can easily change the text in the bullet point later without breaking my links:
* My bullet point
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: foo
:END:
This is easier with C-c C-x p (org-set-property).
Elsewhere, I can just write [[#foo]] to create a link to that bullet.
I couldn’t find the command you mentioned “org-insert-radio-target-brackets” in my Emacs and it doesn’t appear to be in the manual[1] either. But of course it is very trivial to write, in case anyone else needs this:
(defun org-insert-radio-target-brackets (start end)
"Wraps a region with angular brackets to create a radio target."
(interactive "r")
(save-excursion
(goto-char end)
(insert ">>>")
(goto-char start)
(insert "<<<")))
(keymap-set org-mode-map "C-c n r" #'org-insert-radio-target-brackets)
Apologies, you're right - this was a function I'd forgotten that I'd defined myself! The main thing I would add to your definition is to finish with org-update-radio-target-regexp which does what C-c C-c would otherwise do in this context.
Here's how I defined it.
(defun org-insert-radio-target-brackets (&optional arg)
"Surround selected text with Org Radio Target angle brackets (eg. <<<arg>>>) and then find and update all radio targets"
(interactive)
(progn
(insert-pair arg "<<<" ">>>")
(org-update-radio-target-regexp)))
I just learned that there is now a tweak mode in Processing that lets you tweak certain parameters in the code (via draggable values, etc.) while the sketch is running, which is pretty awesome for experimenting with values. However, you still have to reload the whole sketch when you want to change other parts of the code, you can’t just eval a function in the editor and get immediate feedback like in Quil.