Something I've noticed about my photographs is that digital photos start out looking all "Wow! so punchy and clean!" but the excitement fades over time. Film photographs start out "Meh, it's soft and grainy" but become increasingly interesting and beautiful.

I use Pandoc to convert markdown files to PDF for my journals and downloaded web content. Today, my usual script stopped working: something about \pandocbounded.

The default.latex Pandoc template had recently been updated to include the new \pandocbounded macro used by Pandoc 3.2.1. Here's the commit. I integrated the diff with my personal template and all is well.

Doom Emacs is pretty great, especially for former Vimmers. I lived in Doom for a long time because it makes so many little things nicer, without having to dedicate one's life to customizing Emacs.

Toward the end of last year I wrote I'm Doomed again when I moved back from my vanilla config. Then, early this year, I rolled my own config again, and spent a lot of time getting things just so. I even removed Evil mode and have been using the usual Emacs bindings. It's the closest I've felt to being comfortable in Emacs in a long time.

Last week I was editing files on a server (via Vim) and I practically started the data center on fire because I had lost years of muscle memory around Vi bindings. Honestly, I miss modal editing.

My vanilla config takes around 4 seconds to launch. That's too long, but I didn't feel like figuring out how to optimize it.

Between slow startup times and nostalgia for Vi bindings, I moved my config aside and re-installed Doom. That was so much fun! It lasted for maybe 10 minutes. I remembered how nice Doom was, but I also remembered that I dislike using Doom's built-in wrappers for things like use-package. I also don't like having to wrap my customizations in (after! ...) blocks so Doom doesn't steal them back.

I spent the time with it so that my stuff worked and Doom's stuff did its magic. Startup time just over one-half a second. Nice! But things were broken. I kept seeing little errors about Org-mode this or that. This could have been a load order thing and maybe I missed and (after! somewhere, but I didn't feel like dealing with it.

The novelty of using Doom wore off quickly and I'm now back to my custom config. I get mad at having to C-c x or C-c c all the time, but at least it all works my way again.

Now, the question is am I even going to continue using Emacs? I'm fun.