As an Emacs user, you've probably found yourself wanting to clean up the indentation of an entire file. The standard approach is to select all (C-x h) and then run indent-region (I think, correct me if I am wrong!), but this has an annoying side effect: it destroys your current mark position, which might have been carefully set for other operations.

As an Emacs user, you're always hunting for ways to shave milliseconds off common tasks and generally noodling around and shaving some more of that yak!. File switching is one of those operations you do hundreds of times a day, so even small improvements compound dramatically. Today, I want to share a workflow that I have been tinkering with that combines the best of Emacs's built-in recent file tracking with modern completion interfaces.

—

---

After months of development and refinement, I'm excited to announce Ollama Buddy v1.0 - an Emacs package that simply interfaces mainly to ollama, for local LLM usage, but can be integrated to the major online players. This project initially started as a simple integration with Ollama and since then has somewhat evolved into a more fully fully-featured AI Emacs assistant. The main focus with this package is a front facing simplicity but hiding (hopefully) all the features you would expect from an AI chatbot - wait I hate that term, I mean, assistant :). There is also the ability to craft a customizable menu system for different roles.

In our ongoing quest to construct a new fully functional Emacs package, in Part 1, we built the foundation and have a very basic package for our cursor heatmap package. Now we're ready to tackle the core challenge, actually tracking where the cursor is and detecting when it moves!

—

---

Not much of a post this week (and in fact this is pretty low effort!), but here I present some fun with image generative AI!

Yes thats right, yet another annotation system!, in this case it is a lightweight annotation system for Emacs that allows you to add persistent notes to any text file without modifying the original content.

https://melpa.org/#/simply-annotate https://github.com/captainflasmr/simply-annotate

For a little while now, I have been developing C# applications at work and on Windows!, possibly the perfect storm for Emacs, but actually, it copes pretty well, especially with eglot and the LSP server OmniSharp.

This is more of a maintenance update. The main headline is the addition of an option to select a curl-based backend for those who may encounter networking issues. By default, ollama-buddy uses built-in low-level networking calls, but if you have network issues, you can now switch to curl!

If you spend any time browsing files in Emacs, you've probably wished for a bit more visual distinction in dired buffers?. While packages like all-the-icons-dired provide beautiful icon sets, they come with dependencies, font requirements, and potential compatibility issues. What if you could get meaningful visual file type indicators with just a few simple lines of pure Elisp? I have adapted the original idea provided by Emacs-solo and focused more on the earlier Unicode characters that are most likely to always be present in an Emacs environment.

While packages like orderless provide flexible “any word, any order” completion, sometimes you want something lightweight and easy to tweak (well I do anyway). In this post, I’ll show you how to implement a simple orderless-like completion style using only Emacs Lisp, and how to integrate it smoothly into your workflow.

I created a new package!, here are the details:

Bank Buddy is an Emacs package that provides financial analysis and reporting capabilities for your bank statements. It processes CSV bank statement data, categorizes transactions using customizable patterns, and generates detailed reports in Org-mode format.

There have been quite a few updates recently. The main highlights include support for attachments, so you can push a file to the chat directly from dired for potential inclusion in your next query.

If you’re an Emacs user (which I know you are), especially one who lives in dired-mode, you’re probably familiar with the quick power of isearch for finding files or directories. But if you’re like me, you might have noticed a tiny speed bump in the workflow: after finding a file or directory with isearch, you would typically have to hit <enter> to exit the search, and then <enter> again to open the entry. That’s two steps for something that feels like it should be one and this has been a very minor annoyance for me for a very long time now.

While exploring Emacs-solo, I was struck by how closely its philosophy aligned with my own Emacs-DIYer project. The parallels were sometimes uncanny, for example, we had independently chosen identical keybindings like "M-s g" for grep functionality. I had been also considering "M-s f" for my find variant and was looking for a home for recentf, potentially at "M-g r". There were also some ideas around using other finding tools such as ripgrep and fd as a callout to some external tools and there were many other similarities.

More improvements to ollama-buddy https://github.com/captainflasmr/ollama-buddy

Several improvements in the latest Ollama Buddy updates (versions 0.9.21 through 0.9.35):

I'm having issues with isearch!

I've been using fido-mode for a while now (I'm one of those weirdos who transitioned from the Vertico/Marginalia/Orderless stack back to an Emacs built-in) and have become accustomed to the flexible matching that fido offers. For example, I often shorten commands to find them, such as:

• Added ollama-buddy-awesome.el to integrate Awesome ChatGPT Prompts.

ollama-buddy-awesome is an ollama-buddy extension that integrates the popular Awesome ChatGPT Prompts repository, allowing you to leverage hundreds of curated prompts for various tasks and roles right within your Emacs environment, I thought that since I have integrated the fabric set of curated prompts, so then why not these!

I’ve added experimental support for Claude AI, aligning its implementation with my support for ChatGPT, to pave the way for external AI templating which should make it easier to integrate new models in the future. Like the ChatGPT implementation, it doesn’t stream tokens in real time but instead outputs the final result all at once. However, after testing it further, I’m actually starting to prefer it. The response speed is so fast that not seeing a real-time “Typing” indicator isn’t a big deal. I think that streaming feels more relevant for local LLMs running through ollama, where token generation is slower, making real-time output more useful.

This week in ollama-buddy updates, I have mostly been experimenting with ChatGPT integration! Yes, it is not a local LLM, so not ollama, hence entirely subverting the whole notion and fundamental principles of this package! This I know, and I don't care; I'm having fun. I use ChatGPT and would rather use it in Emacs through the now-familiar ollama-buddy framework, so why not? I'm also working on Claude integration too.

This week in ollama-buddy updates, I have been continuing on the busy bee side of things.

The headlines are :

• Transient menu - yes, I know I said I would never do it, but, well I did and as it turns out I kinda quite like it and works especially well when setting parameters.
• Support for fabric prompts presets - mainly as I thought generally user curated prompts was a pretty cool idea, and now I have system prompts implemented it seemed like a perfect fit. All I needed to do was to pull the patterns directory and then parse accordingly, of course Emacs is good at this.
• GGUF import - I don't always pull from ollama's command line, sometimes I download a GGUF file, it is a bit of a process to import to ollama, create a model file, run a command, e.t.c, but now you can import from within dired!
• More support for the ollama API - includes model management, so pulling, stopping, deleting and more!
• Conversation history editing - as I store the history in a hash table, I can easily just display an alist, and editing can leverage the sexp usual keybindings and then load back in to the variable.
• Parameter profiles - When implementing the transient menu I thought it might be fun to try parameter profiles where a set of parameters can be applied in a block for each preset.

More improvements to ollama-buddy https://github.com/captainflasmr/ollama-buddy

The main addition is that of system prompts, which allows setting the general tone and guidance of the overall chat. Currently the system prompt can be set at any time and turned on and off but I think to enhance my model/command for each menu item concept, I could also add a :system property to the menu alist definition to allow even tighter control of a menu action to prompt response.