Coming from a Vim background, I started my Emacs journey trying some configuration frameworks that provided vi-like key bindings, and after a few Emacs bankruptcies, ended up with my current homegrown configuration that I wrote from scratch gradually over the last 7 years, with inspiration from the configurations of some folks who shared theirs publicly. Though my configuration has been mostly stable for a few years now and I consciously keep the number of external packages I use very small, I occasionally add small bits and pieces to my configuration when I’m inspired after learning about a neat feature or package on the blogs aggregated on Planet Emacslife, the messages sent to the Emacs mailing lists, or the videos from the annual EmacsConf conference.

I like getting a glimpse of other people’s worlds through the lens of their creative works such as writings, be it prose or Emacs Lisp. That’s only possible when people share freely, free as in freedom. I’m thankful to Richard Stallman for his foresight to imbue GNU Emacs with that freedom from the very beginning and for his lifelong fight for computer user freedom, and to the many other folks who have joined the free software movement since then and have fought the good fight.

I’ve been inspired and encouraged by many awesome Emacs people through the years. People like Corwin Brust with his joyful creative energy around Emacs and the road to software freedom, Sacha Chua and her philosophy of leading a life of learning, sharing, and scaling, Gopar and his enthusiasm for Emacs and its intersection with the Python world, folks like Protesilaos Stavrou and Greg Farough who discovered Emacs initially as non-programmers yet were enamoured by its embodiment of software freedom in practice and went on to integrate it into their everyday lives, and shoshin of the Cicadas cooperative at the intersection of humanity and technology sharing his passion for the human element and community by developing and contributing input methods for his ancestral language of Lakota to GNU Emacs. I’m deeply inspired by each of these wonderful people, and grateful for having known them and for each of their unique perspectives and life stories with which they have enriched my experience in Emacs and the free software world.

As wonderful and impactful as Emacs has been in the lives of the many who have come to know it throughout the decades that it’s been around, it would not have become what it has been, what it is today, and what it may become in the future without its community of passionate users and contributors. The People of Emacs are all of us. Here’s to many more of us, enjoying many more years of Emacs and software freedom together even if spread far apart.

Take care, and so long for now.

Inspired by the Emacs Carnival theme for this month, The People of Emacs. Thanks to George Jones for hosting.

You can watch the video below, or from the talk’s page on the EmacsConf 2025 wiki: https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/gnus

The above video is provided with closed captions and a transcript — thanks, Sacha!

A commented copy of the init file from the video is provided below. Happy hacking!

;;; emacsconf-2025-gnus.el                  -*- lexical-binding: t -*-

;; This file is marked with CC0 1.0 Universal
;; and is dedicated to the public domain.

;; Note: this file uses the `setopt' macro introduced in Emacs 29
;; to customize the value of user options.  If you are using older
;; Emacsen, you may can use `customize-set-variable' or `setq'.

;;; Init / convenience

;; Initialize the package system.
(require 'package)
(package-initialize)

(setopt
 ;; Explicitly set `package-archives', in part to ensure https ones
 ;; are used, and also to have NonGNU ELPA on older Emacsen as well.
 package-archives
 '(("gnu" . "https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")
   ("nongnu" . "https://elpa.nongnu.org/nongnu/")))

;; Download descriptions of available packages from the above
;; package archives.
(unless package-archive-contents
  (package-refresh-contents))

;; Install the keycast package if not already installed.
(dolist (package '(keycast))
  (unless (package-installed-p package)
    (package-install package)))

;; Enable keycast to show the current command and its binding in
;; the mode line, for the presentation.
(setopt keycast-mode-line-remove-tail-elements nil)
(when (fboundp #'keycast-mode-line-mode)
  (keycast-mode-line-mode 1))

;; Set a font with larger size for the presentation.
;; It requires that the Source Code Pro be installed on your
;; system.  Feel free to comment out or remove.
(when (display-graphic-p)
  (with-eval-after-load 'faces
    (let ((f "Source Code Pro Medium-15"))
      (set-face-attribute 'default nil :font f)
      (set-face-attribute 'fixed-pitch nil :font f))))

;; Inline function for expanding file and directory names inside
;; `user-emacs-directory'.  For example: (+emacs.d "gnus/")
(defsubst +emacs.d (path)
  "Expand PATH relative to `user-emacs-directory'."
  (expand-file-name
   (convert-standard-filename path) user-emacs-directory))

(keymap-global-set "C-c e e" #'eval-last-sexp)

;; Add the info directory from the GNU Emacs source repository to
;; the list of directories to search for Info documentation files.
;; Useful if you're using Emacs directly built from a source
;; repository, rather than installed on your system.
(with-eval-after-load 'info
  (setq
   Info-directory-list
   `(,@Info-directory-list
     ,(expand-file-name
       (convert-standard-filename "info/") source-directory)
     "/usr/share/info/")))

␌
;;; Gnus configuration

;; (info "(gnus) Don't Panic")

(keymap-global-set "C-c g" #'gnus)

(setopt
 user-full-name    "Gnus Fan Emacsian"
 user-mail-address "ec25gnus@kelar.org")

;; Tell Emacs we'd like to use Gnus and its Message integration
;; for reading and writing mail.
(setopt
 mail-user-agent 'gnus-user-agent
 read-mail-command #'gnus)

;; Consolidate various Gnus files inside a gnus directory in the
;; `user-emacs-directory'.
(setopt
 gnus-home-directory (+emacs.d "gnus/")
 gnus-directory      (+emacs.d "gnus/news/")
 message-directory   (+emacs.d "gnus/mail/")
 nndraft-directory   (+emacs.d "gnus/drafts/"))

(setopt ; don't bother with .newsrc, use .newsrc.eld instead
 gnus-save-newsrc-file nil
 gnus-read-newsrc-file nil)

;; Don't prompt for confirmation when exiting Gnus.
(setopt gnus-interactive-exit nil)

;; Configure two IMAP mail accounts.
(setopt
 gnus-select-method '(nnnil "")
 gnus-secondary-select-methods
 '((nnimap
    "ec25gnus"
    (nnimap-stream tls)
    (nnimap-address  "mail.kelar.org")
    ;; (nnimap-server-port 993) ; imaps
    (nnimap-authenticator plain)
    (nnimap-user "ec25gnus@kelar.org"))
   (nnimap
    "ec25work"
    (nnimap-stream tls)
    (nnimap-address "mail.kelar.org")
    ;; (nnimap-server-port 993) ; imaps
    (nnimap-authenticator plain)
    (nnimap-user "ec25work@kelar.org")
    ;; Archive messages into yearly Archive folders upon pressing
    ;; 'E' (for Expire) in the summary buffer.
    (nnmail-expiry-wait immediate)
    (nnmail-expiry-target nnmail-fancy-expiry-target)
    (nnmail-fancy-expiry-targets
     (("from" ".*" "nnimap+ec25work:Archive.%Y"))))))

;; `init-file-debug' corresponds to launching emacs with --debug-init
(setq nnimap-record-commands init-file-debug)

;; The "Sent" folder
(setopt gnus-message-archive-group "nnimap+ec25gnus:INBOX")

;;;; Group buffer

;; Always show INBOX groups even if they have no unread or ticked
;; messages.
(setopt gnus-permanently-visible-groups ":INBOX$")
;; Enable topic mode in the group buffer, for classifying groups.
(add-hook 'gnus-group-mode-hook #'gnus-topic-mode)

;;;; Article buffer

;; Display the following message headers in Article buffers,
;; in the given order.
(setopt
 gnus-sorted-header-list
 '("^From:"
   "^X-RT-Originator"
   "^Newsgroups:"
   "^Subject:"
   "^Date:"
   "^Envelope-To:"
   "^Followup-To:"
   "^Reply-To:"
   "^Organization:"
   "^Summary:"
   "^Abstract:"
   "^Keywords:"
   "^To:"
   "^[BGF]?Cc:"
   "^Posted-To:"
   "^Mail-Copies-To:"
   "^Mail-Followup-To:"
   "^Apparently-To:"
   "^Resent-From:"
   "^User-Agent:"
   "^X-detected-operating-system:"
   "^X-Spam_action:"
   "^X-Spam_bar:"
   "^Message-ID:"
   ;; "^References:"
   "^List-Id:"
   "^Gnus-Warning:"))

;;;; Summary buffer

;; Fine-tune sorting of threads in the summary buffer.
;; See: (info "(gnus) Sorting the Summary Buffer")
(setopt
 gnus-thread-sort-functions
 '(gnus-thread-sort-by-number
   gnus-thread-sort-by-subject
   gnus-thread-sort-by-date))

;;;; Message and sending mail

(setopt
 ;; Automatically mark Gcc (sent) messages as read.
 gnus-gcc-mark-as-read t
 ;; Configure posting styles for per-account Gcc groups, and SMTP
 ;; server for sending mail.  See: (info "(gnus) Posting Styles")
 ;; Also see sample .authinfo file provided below.
 gnus-posting-styles
 '(("nnimap\\+ec25gnus:.*"
    (address "ec25gnus@kelar.org")
    ("X-Message-SMTP-Method" "smtp mail.kelar.org 587")
    (gcc "nnimap+ec25gnus:INBOX"))
   ("nnimap\\+ec25work:.*"
    (address "ec25work@kelar.org")
    ("X-Message-SMTP-Method" "smtp dasht.kelar.org 587")
    (gcc "nnimap+ec25work:INBOX"))))

(setopt
 ;; Ask for confirmation when sending a message.
 message-confirm-send t
 ;; Wrap messages at 70 characters when pressing M-q or when
 ;; auto-fill-mode is enabled.
 message-fill-column 70
 ;; Forward messages (C-c C-f) as a proper MIME part.
 message-forward-as-mime t
 ;; Send mail using Emacs's built-in smtpmail library.
 message-send-mail-function #'smtpmail-send-it
 ;; Omit our own email address(es) when composing replies.
 message-dont-reply-to-names "ec25\\(gnus\\|work\\)@kelar\\.org"
 gnus-ignored-from-addresses message-dont-reply-to-names)

;; Unbind C-c C-s for sending mail; too easy to accidentally hit
;; instead of C-c C-d (save draft for later)
(keymap-set message-mode-map "C-c C-s" nil)
;; Display a `fill-column' indicator in Message mode.
(add-hook 'message-mode-hook #'display-fill-column-indicator-mode)
;; Enable Flyspell for on-the-fly spell checking.
(add-hook 'message-mode-hook #'flyspell-mode)

Sample ~/.authinfo file:

machine ec25gnus login ec25gnus@kelar.org password hunter2
machine ec25work login ec25work@kelar.org password badpass123
machine mail.kelar.org login ec25gnus@kelar.org password hunter2
machine dasht.kelar.org login ec25work@kelar.org password badpass123

Note that for purpose of storing credentials for use by Gnus’s select methods, the machine portions need to match the names we give our select methods when configuring gnus-secondary-select-methods, namely ec25gnus and ec25work in our example.

We also store a copy of the credentials for use by Emacs’s smtpmail when sending mail, where the machine must be the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) of the SMTP server we specify with the X-Message-SMTP-Method header for each account by defining a corresponding rule for it in gnus-posting-styles.

Lastly, I recommend using an encrypted authinfo file by saving it as ~/.authinfo.gpg instead to avoid storing your credentials in plain text. If you set up Emacs’s EasyPG, it will seamlessly decrypt or encrypt the file using GPG when reading from or writing to it. Type C-h v auth-sources RET to see the documentation of the auth-sources variable for more details.

GNU & FSF

• EmacsConf: I recorded the video for my Gnus talk for this year’s conference. The video will be available along with the the other EmacsConf talks from the conference website, but if you’re feeling particularly impatient you can sneak a peek at it. :)

  https://archive.org/details/emacsconf-2025-gnus

• GNU Spotlight: I prepared and sent the November GNU Spotlight to the FSF campaigns team for publication on the FSF’s community blog and the monthly Free Software Supporter newsletter.

Take care, and so long for now.

GNU & FSF

• GNU Spotlight: I prepared and sent the October GNU Spotlight to the FSF campaigns team, who will review and publish it on the FSF’s community blog and as part of the next issue of the monthly Free Software Supporter newsletter.

• GNU Emacs:

  • bug#79629: I noticed that I was unable to customize the holiday-other-holidays variable using the setopt macro: my change did not seem to take effect. As Eli Zaretskii helpfully pointed out, this was because customizing holiday-other-holidays did not recompute the value of calendar-holidays, which is computed once, when the package is loaded.

    So I prepared and sent a patch 500a2d0cc55 to recompute calendar-holidays when its components are set.

  • bbabc1db258: While reading about custom-reevaluate-setting in the Startup Summary node of the GNU Emacs Lisp reference manual I noticed a small typo, so I committed a patch to fix it.

Misc

• The Free Software Foundation celebrated its fortieth birthday on 4 October 2025 online and in person in Boston! I was not able to attend the event in person, so I recorded a video for the FSF40 volunteer panel held at the venue.

• This month at work one of our Elasticsearch clusters experienced partial failure, and we needed to extract document IDs from a backup of one of the cluster’s shards. Elasticsearch uses Lucene under the hood and each shard is a standalone Lucene index, so I used Lucene’s Java API to write a little GetIDS class to query the index for all of its documents, and for each document print its _id field, decoding the binary-valued BytesRef as needed. The gotcha was that all of the BytesRefs seemed to have a -1 byte in the beginning, throwing off the recommended BytesRef.utf8ToString() method, so I had to reimplement that method’s logic in my program and have it use an adjusted offset + 1 and length - 1 instead.

That’s about it for this month’s report.

Take care, and so long for now.

The Free Software Foundation celebrated its fortieth birthday today online and in person in Boston. Forty years of commitment to software freedom and fighting for the freedoms of all computer users.

As part of the FSF40 celebration, the FSF held a roundtable panel with FSF volunteers both in-person and online. I was not able to attend the event in person, so I prepared a video recording for the volunteer roundtable that was played at the venue. In the video I talk about my free software journey and how I first got involved, some of the issues facing the world of free software today, and how you can get involved and contribute to free software projects and help the free software movement.

Happy 40th birthday, FSF, and here’s to 40+ more years of software freedom. Happy hacking!

The video recording is Copyright © 2025 Amin Bandali, and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

GNU & FSF

• GNU Spotlight: I prepared and sent the September GNU Spotlight to the FSF campaigns team, who will review and publish it on the FSF’s community blog and as part of the next issue of the monthly Free Software Supporter newsletter.

Debian

• recutils: Last month, I adopted the recutils package in Debian, and uploaded version 1.9-4 to unstable to fix FTBFS bug #1066370. Today, I uploaded 1.9-4~bpo13+1 to trixie-backports to provide an easy way for users of Debian 13 (Trixie) to install recutils. The upload is currently in the backports NEW queue pending review by the backports team, and will appear in the archive if approved.

Misc

• I had a lovely chat with Prot earlier this month for his ‘Prot Asks’ series, where we talked about free software, free knowledge, the importance of community and the commons, and life in Canada.

That’s about it for this month’s report. I hope to have more to share next month.

Take care, and so long for now.

See the episode’s page on Prot’s website for the video recording, Prot’s summary of our chat, and the links I shared after our call. You can also watch the recording embedded below.

I really enjoyed our chat today and time went by very quickly. Thanks again for having me, Prot!

Take care, and so long for now.

The video recording is Copyright © 2025 Protesilaos Stavrou and Amin Bandali, and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

GNU & FSF

• EmacsConf: I submitted a proposal to talk about reading and writing emails in GNU Emacs with Gnus for EmacsConf 2025. This year marks the 10th anniversary of my involvement in EmacsConf, but I’ve yet to give a talk at the conference, so I thought it would be nice to try and change that. I’m happy that my proposed talk has been accepted by my fellow organizers and volunteers who review the proposals.

• GNU Spotlight: I prepared and sent the August edition of the monthly GNU Spotlight to the FSF campaigns team, who will review and publish it on the FSF’s community blog and as part of the next issue of the monthly Free Software Supporter newsletter.

Debian

• #1070268: I recently noticed that the recutils package is missing in the latest release of Debian, Trixie. Indeed, recutils’ page on the tracker shows that it was removed from testing last year due to FTBFS bug #1066370, and its maintainer requested it be adopted by someone else in this bug. This is unfortunate, because there are other pieces of software (including other GNU packages) that rely on recutils, and the GNU Project also uses recutils extensively for various record-keeping purposes.

  So I reached out to the package’s former maintainer Sven Wick, who gave their kind blessing for me to adopt it. I’ve adopted recutils in Debian with an upload that also addresses the FTBFS bug.

  Many thanks, Sven, for your years of work packaging and maintaining recutils in Debian!

• #1066370: Fixed FTBFS bug in recutils and uploaded to unstable.

Devuan

• devuan/documentation#13: Prepared screenshots of the installation steps for use in the upcoming Excalibur release’s installation guide.

Misc

• doric-themes: I contributed a tiny patch (cea178c) to tweak the appearance of the diary and org-agenda-diary faces to make them stand out more.

You can listen to the recording of the show below, or on screwlisp’s PeerTube.

Thanks, screwlisp, for having me! I had a great time on the show and hope to be back on again at some point with more like-minded friends like Corwin to chat more about Emacs and community.

Take care, and so long for now.

The audio recording is Copyright © 2025 screwlisp and Amin Bandali, and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

To mirror all of Prot’s videos to the Internet Archive is a nontrivial task: as of the time of this writing, there are a total of 298 videos uploaded to Prot’s YouTube channel. Thankfully, Prot makes publicly available the git repository containing the sources used to build his website, and we have several excellent tools at our disposal to help extract the information we need and carry this out.

Note: Prot publishes his works under free/libre copyleft licenses like CC BY-SA 4.0 and GPLv3+, so we do not violate his copyright by sharing or redistributing his work so long as we do it with proper credit, following the terms of the licenses.

The idea is to write a program that would walk through the set of markdown files in the source repository for Prot’s website and for each file that has a mediaid metadata field, download the video with that ID from YouTube using yt-dlp, and upload it along with accompanying metadata to the Internet Archive using the internetarchive Python module. Given that these two key tools are written in Python, I opted to use Python for my own implementation as well. (I initially started the implementation as a POSIX shell script, but then decided that I would like the convenience of a ‘proper programming language’ and being able to interact with these tools through their respective API, so I ported what I had to Python and continued there.)

The full implementation is available at protesilaos_videos_archive.py. Note that some of the required modules are not part of Python’s standard library, namely markdown, yt-dlp, and internetarchive. You can install these using your distribution’s package manager or using pip, the Python package manager.

The script takes several command line arguments. There is a required positional argument for specifying the directory to search through (recursively) for markdown files. Normally, this would be the path to your local copy of the source repository for Prot’s website. There are also two --cookie-file and --working-dir options for optionally specifying the path to a cookie file for use with yt-dlp and the working directory for storing the downloaded videos and the progress file, respectively. Considering YouTube’s somewhat aggressive rate-limiting of IPs, if you will be downloading a nontrivial number of videos, you will probably want to use --cookie-file to specify the file that contains cookies from a YouTube session. (You would log into YouTube using your account, then use an add-on like cookies.txt to extract and save your session’s cookies into a text file.)

Example invocation of the program:

./protesilaos_videos_archive.py --cookie-file=cf.txt ~/src/protesilaos.gitlab.io

Also, considering the large number of videos to be downloaded and uploaded, making this a long-running task, I thought it would be helpful to allow interrupting the work partway through by stopping the program by pressing Ctrl-c in the terminal to send a SIGINT. Upon receiving a SIGINT, the program will stop the work after the current download or upload is finished, and write the progress to a progress file, .pva-progress.jsonl, which it will use on the next run to resume the work where it was left off.

As of the time of this writing, all of the videos published by Prot on his YouTube channel have been mirrored to the Internet Archive, and are available from the Video Publications by Protesilaos Stavrou collection.

I’ll wrap up by thanking Prot for clarifying the license of his video publications and for his blessing for me to mirror them on the Internet Archive. Thanks, Prot. :)

Take care, and so long for now.

P.S. yt-dlp has a --write-description option, which causes it to write a .description file along with the downloaded video containing its description text from YouTube. I still opted to go with the above approach of using each post’s body text as ‘description’ in part because the markdown source file for each video post contains more metadata fields that I was planning on uploading to the Archive anyway.