Posts in 2026

Managing Changes with ediff

Now that I have the ability to edit the jj log from within Emacs the next thing I wanted to try was reviewing diffs within Emacs and pushing worthwhile changes into the relevant revisions.

I’ve never used it before but the obvious choice of frontend on the Emacs side would be ediff the question is… how to link it up with jj…

Building alc-jj-log-view-mode

When I was first learning git, it wasn’t until I internalised how the various commands manipulated the commit graph did it really click for me. So even though I’m primarily using jj in my personal projects these days, I still find myself staring at the revision graph most of the time, which usually means running jj log after every other command!

But instead, what if I wrote an Emacs major-mode that would display the output from jj log and let me manipulate the graph directly by running the relevant commands in the background? And what if that major-mode was based on tree-sitter?

A Simple jj Integration for eshell

I’m trying to use eshell more and more, it’s very cool being able to seamlessly switch between regular shell commands like cd, ls etc. and calling Emacs functions like find-file or compile. I’m enjoying it so much that I’m starting to feel like the jj commands I typically use need to be tied into Emacs a bit more!

Thanks to this episode of Álvaro Ramírez’s Bending Emacs series, it turns out that it’s trivial to intercept commands before they are invoked as a subprocess - just define a function called eshell/<command name>!

Indexing Info Manuals

I’ve been working around this issue for a while now.

By default, the C-h i binding in Emacs opens the list of available info manuals for you to browse through. Unfortunately, I would only be shown manuals that had been included with third-party Emacs packages like denote. System provided manuals, such as the one for Emacs itself, were nowhere to be seen:

File: dir,        Node: Top       This is the top of the INFO tree

  This (the Directory node) gives a menu of major topics.
  Typing "q" exits, "H" lists all Info commands, "d" returns here,
  "h" gives a primer for first-timers,
  "mEmacs<Return>" visits the Emacs manual, etc.

  In Emacs, you can click mouse button 2 on a menu item or cross reference
  to select it.

* Menu:

Emacs
* Denote Sequence: (denote-sequence).
                                Sequence notes or Folgezettel with Denote.
* Denote: (denote).             Simple notes with an efficient file-naming
                                  scheme.
* Eat: (eat).                   Emulate A Terminal.
* Embark: (embark).             Emacs Mini-Buffer Actions Rooted in Keymaps.
* Forge: (forge).               Access Git Forges from Magit.
* Ghub: (ghub).                 Client library for the Github API.
* Magit: (magit).               Using Git from Emacs with Magit.
* Magit-Section: (magit-section).
                                Use Magit sections in your own packages.
* Orderless: (orderless).       Completion style for matching regexps in any
                                  order.
* Tempel: (tempel).             Simple templates for Emacs.
* Transient: (transient).       Transient Commands.
* With-Editor: (with-editor).   Using the Emacsclient as $EDITOR.

However, I could clearly see files like /usr/share/info/emacs.info.gz on my system and I could access specific info nodes by evaluating expressions like (info "(emacs)Displaying Buffers").

I’ve now reached the point where it’s bugging me enough to actually dig in and try to figure out what is going on.