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@knapjack@vivaldi.net @jack@social.baty.net Aha. I am desperately trying to grab as many internet presences as you have. I must try harder ! :-)
Like @jack@social.baty.net I can resist anything but temptation.
I now have a test #GoToSocial instance - mainly to irritate @basil@sarcasm.stream - but also to test interoperability with #LittleFedi.
Oh God. Can I now resist the lure of GoToSocial or should I just quit while I'm ahead ?
@paul@paulwilde.uk Many thanks. That wasn't immediately obviously when you're as lazy and impetuous as myself ! #snac is yet another lovely open source software package for ActivityPub.
@jac@404brain.boo I've used #Emacs for many years but still occasionally revisit the built-in tutorial (C-h t) and have all menus enabled :-)
Don't rush it, spend time getting comfortable with the basics of text editing, moving, scrolling, search, replacing, copy, kill, paste, buffers, commands etc.
[ If you're used to a modal editor (vi), maybe consider the Evil package to provide a familiar environment. ]
You've already had several excellent recommendations for useful resources. I can certainly recommend yet again Prot's videos, Emacs packages and the excellent Modus themes.
I have used starter kits for Emacs (Prelude, Bedrock, Doom) but am in two minds about them. They provide an excellent, polished experience for newcomers but also may include packages you don't want or need. Also, they tend mask the Emacs lisp needed to make configuration changes. Now I prefer to maintain my own Emacs configuration file.
You must also follow @sacha@social.sachachua.com - https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/04/working-on-the-emacs-newbie-experience/
From your requirements, I would certainly investigate orgmode. Again, just don't rush it and get comfortable with the org markup syntax and then maybe experiment with tasks and ToDo lists.
The org-roam and denote packages may well prove to offer similar functionality to Obsidian for knowledge management, journaling and notes.
Chris Maiorana's Emacs for Writers might be of interest - https://chrismaiorana.com/the-emacs-for-writers-handbook-is-available-now-and-ever/
Similarly, Peter Prevos' Writing Studio - https://lucidmanager.org/productivity/configure-emacs/
My favourite Emacs packages that I really miss when using vanilla Emacs on a new machine:
- dired (file manager)
- a marvellous set of packages for completion framework (Vertico, Consult, Marginalia, Orderless)
- jinx - spell checker
Good luck and have fun with Emacs !
Forced to deleted my Mastodon.me.uk account and uninstalled Tusky.
Tomorrow I have will to reinstall fedi yakshaving.co.uk purely to formally delete that test sandpit.
All of this thanks to the looming spectre of @basil@sarcasm.stream. Thanks a lot.
@justine@snac.smithies.me.uk @utrenkner@mastodon.green @stefano@bsd.cafe Surprised Snac can't talk to #LittleFedi as I am sure Stefano says that is one combination almost guaranteed to work. Good luck.
@basil@sarcasm.stream I have deleted the sdf and.org.uk accounts and keeping .me.uk as a backup but the others are on non-existent domains. I naively assumed that after N years producing errors, they would somehow magically disappear.
Sitting down to enjoy Man United play Tottenham. I promise to use the #football tag so you can easily block these tedious posts.
On the subject of being a serial, persistent experimenter, I thought I had completely broken my precious, embryonic #LittleFedi instance by trying to configure Postfix for email notifications.
I had LittleFedi backups but that was worrying so that's absolutely last time I mess about with DNS on this domain.
@hl@social.lol Joking apart, I think this statement re. 'serial experimenter' is very true.
I think that's called 'learning'
Not everything I pursued and investigated was necessarily useful for my day job but it was all knowledge accrued. Not all of it was immediately useful. Some of my investigations (eventually) worked and some had to be discarded but it was all useful information.
There were many times when colleagues/customers told me 'Setting up a load balanced Web server in the cloud with SSL would take 4 months' when I knew damn fine it would take 5 days (even allowing for change control, network, security, corporate overhead etc).
I knew this because I had done it myself. Never blag a blagger :-)
@hl@social.lol Yes. Thankfully I was aware of but somehow managed to resist the lure of org-publish.
@andyc @hl@social.lol Oh now. I remember. It was flipping footnotes. In 20 years I had never used footnotes on my blog.
However, I became obsessed by the stupid thought I might absolutely need to add a footnotes one day in the dim and distant future so that's why I adopted ox-hugo.
Serial experimenter. Serial idiot.
@hl@social.lol Originally I used the native orgmode functionality in Hugo but found it missed something I happened to use once (tables maybe) so I just mindlessly joined the crowd and adopted ox-hugo.
Now I just use Markdown in Blogmore. Makes switching blogging platforms easier. Two markup languages and pesky syntax to remember but sometimes, less is more.