It has been a while since I have written about how I use Emacs/LaTeX to generate lesson notes for my students. Quite a lot has happened during that time. One of the main game changers has been the advancements in “AI” technology. Over the next few articles I intend to describe my journey as I navigate this technology and apply it to my teaching practice.

Chat Bots

Having decided to dip my toe in the water, I signed up to two of the prevalent players in this space, being Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude. My early experiments with ChatGPT had led to some disappointing results, where it emphatically tried to convince me that the value of Euler’s constant is 1.5. Since then, the technology has advanced significantly, and I thought it worthwhile to try again.

My journey into using Hledger with Emacs to track my share investments continues. Last Time I looked at a way to track shares using a plain text file. Since then I have made some tweaks to my workflow as I gain more experience:

• naming conventions that support multiple stock brokers
• booking brokerage fees in a better way to support the Australian tax system.

Naming convention

Over the past month I was not overly impressed with my existing stock broker, which led me to explore other stock brokers that may offer a more reliable service at a cheaper rate. It is expensive to transfer stocks over to a new broker, so I decided to cap further investment at my current broker and instead make any new purchases at a different broker. This meant that I would need an account structure that lets me easily identify which share lots were purchased through which broker.

Following up from my previous article on using Emacs to maintain a plain-text ledger for use with plain text accounting software: I reconfigured my Doom Emacs to use the pre-packaged Ledger mode, and I can confirm that it is much nicer to use than the hledger mode I was using before. This could be because I hadn’t set up the hledger-mode configuration properly, but with ledger-mode I find the autocompletion works much better, and the M-q keystroke can be used to nicely line up the amounts in a transaction.

For a while I have been concerned that I haven’t really been on top of my finances as well as I should be, and I decided to bite the bullet and do something about it. I’ve been looking to get much better visibility into my share portfolio, and make sure I track it properly so that if I sell any shares I can easily calculate captital gains and such at tax time. I am also keen to get a better idea of my spending patterns so that I can see where I may be wasting money.

Recently I was wondering whether I should move on from Doom Emacs/Evil Mode and try a less opinionated setup based on more traditional key mappings. I was looking around for some sort of “starter kit” that provides some basic features that I have grown accustomed to using Doom Emacs. Some of the options I looked at were:

• Xah Lee’s Sample Init File from his online tutorial. This is a name I have come across a number of times as I research Emacs, and I believe he also has a large collection of YouTube videos on the topic. The config is very basic, and doesn’t include any packages. It would take some time for me to work out how to implement features such as syntax highlighting, completion, etc. which, while very educational, is a bigger time commitment than I can currently afford.

I have been so impressed with my ZSA Voyager keyboard that I decided to buy a second one that I could leave set up at work. That meant I needed to think about what configuration to order.

Switches

On my previous Voyager, I ordered it with the Choc Red 50g linear switches, which felt very smooth, but possibly a little on the heavy side for me. So, I decided to try swapping them out with some Ambient Twilight 35g silent linear switches. I love those switches with their light touch and soft padding at the bottom of their travel.