Dev on Post-Candide

Preventing spurious yas-snippet expanding

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

yasnippet-snippets short keys can expand unexpectedly when completing identifiers with separators. A single yas-buffer-local-condition check fixes it globally.

Pre-launching tmux on macOS: a TCC rabbit hole

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted something simple: a tmux server running at login, with a pre-configured session ready the moment I open iTerm2: just attach and go.

Simple. Right. Right?

The setup #

The initial idea is rather clean: two launchd agents:

com.user.tmux starts the tmux server at login via exec tmux start-server.
com.user.tmux-session-setup runs a bash script that creates a login session with the windows and panes I want — a general shell, a services pane, a monitor window with btop and SSH connections to my servers.

Both plists use LimitLoadToSessionType = Aqua so they run in the GUI session, giving them (in theory) access to the user environment. The session setup script polls for the tmux server to come up, then builds the session.

Locate npm packages

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As supply chain attacks are now a weekly occurrence on widely distributed packages, and we can have these installed as transitive dependencies of tools we use but not develop, here’s a quick fish function for OS X systems to scan for a given package (depends on fd):

function npm_find
    if test (count $argv) -lt 1
        echo "Usage: npm_find <package> [directory]"
        return 1
    end

    set package $argv[1]
    if test (count $argv) -ge 2
        set dirs $argv[2]
    else
        set dirs /Users /opt /usr /Applications
    end

    fd "node_modules/$package/package\.json\$" $dirs --full-path \
        -x jq -r '"\(input_filename): \(.version)"'
end

Also:

Reloading a package under dev with straight

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

While developing an emacs package, I do that from within the straight/repos folder.

If the changes only concern one file, it’s easy to just eval-buffer to check things out.

If the changes impact several files and/or it includes non-elisp files that needs to be copied to the straight/build folder, it’s a pain in the neck: I need to eval-buffer each file and call straight-rebuild-package.

The following is a small function that will, interactively if you want, rebuild the package, handle the autoloads and eval-buffer the other files.

Make Backspace Work in emacs-eat

Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This post details my troubleshooting process for a specific issue I encountered while setting emacs-eat. For those unfamiliar, emacs-eat is a(nother) terminal emulator designed to run directly within Emacs. Even though it was functional for the most part after following the installation instructions, there was one major hurdle: the backspace key wasn’t working.

Now, I’m genuinely confused about terminal emulators and the machinery behind it, so take the following as just a hint of where to look. I have no explanations why the setup wasn’t correct in the first place and why my seemingly incomplete solution works.