space-tree: Workspace Management Trees in Emacs: A small Emacs package that organizes workspaces into a tree of arbitrary depth, built on the built-in window-state-get / window-state-put primitives.
svg-line: Better Status Bars for Emacs: A small engine that renders the mode-line, header-line, tab-bar, and tab-line as single SVG images — multi-row bars, per-row alignment, inline icons, and clickable segments, uniformly across all four.
svg-margin: Better Gutters for Emacs: A small engine that renders the window margins as a composable gutter — independent "providers" pack colour shapes, icon glyphs, and clickable markers side by side on one line, with the margin auto-sizing to fit and no provider knowing about the others.
6. Emacs observations
Completion is a Substrate, not a UI: The opening of a short series on incremental completing read — a ubiquitous interaction pattern, a structural shift in cognitive cost, and a uniquely Emacs-shaped opportunity.
A VOMPECCC Case Study: Spotify as Pure ICR in Emacs: Building a Spotify client with zero custom UI by feeding candidates into Consult, Marginalia, and Embark — 493 lines of shim on top of the completion substrate.
VOMPECCC from Scratch: Picking Produce with ICR in Emacs: A from-scratch walkthrough that layers Vertico, Orderless, Marginalia, Consult, Embark, and Prescient on top of stock completing-read to build a ~90-line produce picker.
Emacs Completion Showcase with VOMPECCC: Over a dozen high-impact workflows: multi-file refactor, two-stage ripgrep, M-x by docstring, batch action, mid-prompt pivot, session resume, complex-command replay, and more!
Incremental Suggesting Read: When the Match Isn't in the Characters: ISR is ICR with the candidate source swapped from a corpus to a model — candidates surface by meaning (semantic retrieval) or are generated whole (generative synthesis), all on the same Consult, Marginalia, and Embark substrate.
May I recommend… understanding Emacs's patterns: My entry for the May 2026 Emacs Carnival — a botanical case for why Emacs is an "Effortless Bloom", tracing the fan-in/fan-out patterns (universal buffers, ICR, recognize-dispatch via Embark, language servers) that compose to make computer use effortless.
Annotate-in-Place Notes with Emacs and org-remark: A note-taking pattern where you mark passages in place — webpages, ebooks, RSS, code, anywhere text lives in Emacs — implemented in org-remark. Highlights persist on revisit, and daily review reduces to a grep for today's date link.
Emacs SVG Benchmark Reveals Gaming-Caliber Frame Rates: An empirical benchmark in bare emacs -Q answering the skeptics — rendering a status bar as SVG is several times heavier than the native text engine, yet still holds ~77 fps even on a fully-repainted ultrawide bar (and 200–750 fps for a live inline animation), far above the 60 fps games target. Cost scales with pixel area, not with what's drawn.
Juneau Something? Emacs Teaches You How to Fish!: My entry for June's Emacs Carnival on underappreciated built-ins — a tour of Emacs's self-documenting machinery (the C-h help family, apropos, Info, xref, describe- and friends) organized around the questions a curious beginner asks, culminating in fishing a built-in game out of Emacs and reading its source with those very tools.
Emacs Teaches Emacs: The Missing README: The short version of the Emacs Carnival post — just two keys (M-x and C-h) and a handful of auto-discovery prefixes (describe-, find-, xref-, Info-, apropos-, customize-), plus the 'prefix trick' that lets you enumerate every command in a family with TAB instead of memorizing any of them.
HyWiki: Zero Markup Hypertext: A tour of HyWiki, a truly unique second brain system from Hyperbole. HyWiki is unique for it's zero markup wiki links, and it's subsequent propagation of wiki words throughout your entire Emacs. In many ways, it provides an "omniscient" second brain.
A Tree and a Server Walk Into a Core…: My entry for July's Emacs Carnival on programming — how two language-agnostic technologies, tree-sitter for syntax and LSP for semantics, turned the M×N editor-support problem into M+N and made it into Emacs 29.1's core. Features interactive visualizations of real tree-sitter parse trees, a grid of Combobulate demos, and Eglot expressing LSP through decades-old built-ins.
7. Literary Criticism
Gödel, Escher, Bach, Wallace: the "o's, d's and p's" in Infinite Jest: A typographic close-reading of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest that reads the darkened 'o's, d's, p's' of a single Subject's note as Wallace's Hofstadterian signature of Orin Incandenza's hidden trauma.
Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket: Reading Infinite Jest through the two ways to construct a Sierpinski Gasket — Wallace built the gasket top-down by placing three institutional vertices (ETA, Ennet, AFR) around the lethal absent center; readers fill in the same Gasket bottom-up by playing a chaos game on each reread.
8. Experiments in Visualizing Publicly Available Healthcare Data
The Geography of Medicare Spending: How Medicare spending per beneficiary varies by more than 2.5x between states, with higher spending predicting neither better outcomes nor lower readmissions.
Your Neighborhood's Health Profile: The CDC measures 40+ health indicators at ZIP code level – exploring how health outcomes are hyperlocal.
The Telehealth Revolution: How COVID-19 forced a telehealth experiment, taking Medicare from essentially zero to 47% adoption in a single quarter.
What Medicare Pays for Your Surgery: How hospitals bill Medicare 3-7x what Medicare actually pays, with billed charges varying 10x between hospitals for the same surgery.