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Emacs + Hugo Blogging Refactored

I discovered this link in my Vercel Analytics. It refers my post Blogging using Denote and Hugo, which mentions the author’s Blogging using Emacs Org Roam and Hugo.

I switched to Denote for one reason: simplicity. What I actually need is just a file name convention.

[…]

Then why am I even using such a package you might ask. The answer is the tagging mechanism, and the dired goodies it provides. With those, a flat file structure is now more useful to me than any GUI-based note-taking system.

Denote truly is straightforward and allows you to write notes immediately without any additional setup. I’m really grateful to its creator Protesilaos Stavrou (also known as Prot). I learned a lot about Emacs and philosophy from his code, posts and videos. It’s great to know his videos are mirrored on the Internet Archive.

Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025

Always be part of the loop by moving code by hand from your terminal to the LLM web interface: this guarantees that you follow every process. You are still the coder, but augmented.

It reminds me the future of programming in Lex Fridman’s podcast with DHH. While coding with AI can maximize outcomes, expressing yourself through code remains more important.

Emacs: make ‘save-some-buffers’ show diff on demand

The command save-some-buffers, which is bound to C-x s by default is helpful when you need to save lots of buffers efficiently. Instead of figuring out which ones are modified and visiting each of them to decide what to do, you invoke save-some-buffers. It prompts for an action, one buffer at a time.

– Prot

I just know from Prot that it is the save-some-buffers command that ask me to save changes when doing operations such as magit-status. It prompts whether each buffer should be saved and provides the corresponding actions. I didn’t notice there is a d action to display the difference between the buffer and its target file, which is very handy as sometimes I don’t remember what I’ve changed so far.

Working with smaller chunks of thoughts; adding anchors to paragraphs in Org Mode HTML export

If the section has a heading, then it’s easy to make that linkable with a custom name. I can use org-set-property to set the CUSTOM_ID property to the anchor name.

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If the part that I want to link to is not a heading, I can add an ID by using the #+ATTR_HTML: :id … directive.

[…]

Text fragments are even more powerful, because I can link to a specific part of a paragraph. I can link to one segment with something like #::text=text+to+highlight. I can specify multiple text fragments to highlight by using #::text=first+text+to+highlight&text=second+text, and the browser will automatically scroll to the first highlighted section. I can specify a longer section by using text=textStart,textEnd.

– Sacha Chua

Sacha Chua explains how to add links to different levels of granularity:

1. Heading
2. Paragraph
3. Text fragments

I’m using ox-hugo, and it’s easy to add links for headings, see Transform ox-hugo anchors to links. Using #+ATTR_HTML: :id to link paragraphs and text fragments to link specific text are really powerful, but I haven’t found an easy way to integrate this into my workflow, as it involves manually coding the links.