It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. – Yogi Berra I’ve been an Emacs fanatic for over 20 years. I’ve built and maintained some of the most popular Emacs packages, contr...

Most programming languages I’ve used have some form of string interpolation. Ruby has "Hello, #{name}!", Python has f-strings, JavaScript has template literals, even Haskell has a few popular inter...

When I started learning OCaml I kept running into code like this: type person = { name : string; age : int; } [@@deriving show, eq] My first reaction was “what the hell is [@@deriving show,...

If there’s one thing that frustrated me early on in my OCaml journey, it was printing stuff. In Ruby I can p anything and get a useful representation. In Clojure, prn just works on every data struc...

Records are one of those things that look almost identical across ML-family languages, so I didn’t expect many surprises when I started using them in OCaml. For the most part I was right – but ther...

Over the past year I’ve been spending a lot of time building Tree-sitter-powered major modes for Emacs – clojure-ts-mode (as co-maintainer), neocaml (from scratch), and asciidoc-mode (also from scr...

A few years ago I wrote about setting up Emacs for OCaml development. Back then the recommended stack was tuareg-mode + merlin-mode, with Merlin providing the bulk of the IDE experience. A lot has ...

Every now and then someone asks me how to learn Vim.1 My answer is always the same: it’s simpler than you think, but it takes longer than you’d like. Here’s my bulletproof 3-step plan. Step 1: Lea...

How to set up auto-saving in Vim, from simple autocommands to plugins, and why you might not need any of it.

Comparing Vim's two main approaches to shell access -- suspending with Ctrl-Z and the built-in terminal emulator.