news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Sacha Chua ☛ Emacs Carnival Oct 2026: Exploring keys and voice input in Emacs
Like Chris Maiorana, I love the way Emacs's M-x (execute-extended-command) allows me to call any command by name. It means that I can call commands or come up with my own commands without worrying about assigning them to keyboard shortcuts or making sense of where to place them in a hierarchical menu. With flexible completion via the vertico and orderless packages, I don’t even need to type in the full name of the command or remember the words in the right order. If I still can’t remember the command, it’s easy enough to use defalias to make my own nickname for it.
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Sacha Chua ☛ Using Emacs to visualize speaking and target words/phrases in real-ish time
When I'm working with a tutor to improve my French, I sometimes need to push myself to provide more details when I'm sharing and ask more follow-up questions in response to what they're saying, instead of falling back to « D'accord » and « C'est cool. » Visualizing the timeline in real-time lets me see if the turn-taking looks good. I might even need to take a more active role in controlling the conversation if I happen to be meeting a tutor who tends to go on monologues.
When I'm talking out loud on my own for practice, this might also nudge me to reduce the pauses and enrich my vocabulary by practising saying things often enough that they become more automatic.
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University of Toronto ☛ What I use Eglot for in GNU Emacs and what good it is
Recently, via Sacha Chua's Emacs News, I saw a Reddit question titled I've used emacs successfully for decades without using LSP or Eglot. Tell me what I'm missing. This started me thinking about what I use Eglot for and how I would answer this question, because in some ways I'm in this situation too. I don't really think of my programming with GNU Emacs as 'Eglot centered', although I have Eglot set up for (some) languages I program in.
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Document Foundation ☛ State of the Project (October 2025 – September 2026)
We are releasing the State of the Project Slide Deck, which is updated quarterly and based on data extracted from the LibreOffice dashboard and the Matomo repository between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.
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Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)
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DJ Adams ☛ Markdown previews in lf with leaf
Today I'm finding I'm working Markdown even more, and the delta is mostly in read-mode, rather than write-mode. Reading agent and skill files, intent summaries, product requirement documents and more, especially in the context of Joule Studio.
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Kiwi TCMS: Kiwi TCMS 16.6
Dear testers, we're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 16.6!
improvements and bug fixes, new API methods and internal refactoring.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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Bioconductor ☛ A Collaboration Fest for research software interoperability
Members of the Bioconductor, Galaxy and nf-core communities came together for a three-day Collaboration Fest to explore research software interoperability, applying the BiocJobs approach to a single-cell workflow and developing ways to make Bioconductor methods more readily reusable across workflow ecosystems.
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Programming/Development
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Steinar H Gunderson ☛ Steinar H. Gunderson: Decompilation patterns, part 4: range comparison
Today, we're looking at a rewrite that rarely differs for matching, but can mean quite a lot for understanding the code. Say that you have a signed variable and the compiler has suddenly decided to make an unsigned comparison: [...]
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Standards/Consortia
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Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Package Management RFCs
Package registries, manifest formats, lockfiles, version ranges and identifiers all have written specifications of some kind, spread across six kinds of venue. Specifications show up in package management mostly as an invisible layer of the dependency tree, where an HTTP library is built against RFC 9110 and a JSON parser against ECMA-404, and the documents covering package management itself are spread just as thinly.
I went looking for the IETF’s share, since wire protocols between independently written implementations are what the RFC series exists for, and found nine documents, most of them concerned with firmware updates on IoT devices. The rest is distributed among Ecma, ISO, CNCF and OASIS, the enhancement proposal processes individual ecosystems run for themselves, and for a couple of registries a service’s own API reference. Which venue a document is published in determines whether a second client, a mirror or an archival reconstruction can rely on it, since each of those requires specified behaviour rather than whatever a given server returns this week.
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Yle ☛ Finnish public broadcaster's teletext service turns 45
Well before the dawn of the internet, Yle's 'Teksti-TV' debuted in 1981 to provide news, sports and weather updates around the clock.
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