After reading Apple in China and deciding to decouple from Apple, I started asking Google Gemini how to replace my favorite MacOS apps with their Linux equivalents. I have been a vim person from way back but always had Emacs org-mode in the back of mind so a replacement for OmniFocus came first. Replacing MailMate with mu4e — another Emacs addon — was a close second.
Once you learn about the Emacs hammer everything starts looking like a nail, including blog post management. My blogging tool of choice on MacOS is Daniel Jalkut’s MarsEdit, and my experience with mu4e made me think a similar approach could work with micro.blog’s APIs. Now, I know nothing about those APIs nor about Lisp, which is the Emacs scripting language of choice. But Gemini was fluent in both, so it was trivial to instruct it!
It took two tries for each of the main functions I had in mind (full text search, tagging auto-complete, quick copying of the published URL, easy image attachment) but also to get the basic look and feel right, emoji being the most challenging to implement correctly. Even with all that I spent less than 3 hours to have more or less in shape for using and sharing. The single leftover feature, drafts, I don’t use often enough to spend even a few minutes on, but I may get to it at some point.
Microbe.el is available on GitHub. Note that it is completely LLM-generated (Google Gemini) so please approach it with some caution, but also do with it as you please. Many thanks to Manton Reece for creating and stewarding micro.blog and making it as open as it is. Thanks also to Daniel Jalkut for making MarsEdit.