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Big fan of Sacha Chua: much to learn by way of emacs, productivity and org life https://sachachua.com/blog/emacs/
I've been dabbling with emacs for a number of years now, and I felt that my init/config file was pretty hefty at (currently an all-time high of) 186 lines. Then a few years ago I encountered Sacha's and my mouth literally dropped. I've always wanted to ask, and here's as good a place as any. Is her config an outlier in its size and breadth? I feel like it almost has to be.
I've been using Emacs for ~15 years and my configuration is more than 20k lines of code that I've personally written plus
comments. Occasionally, I will factor out parts of my config and release them as Emacs Lisp libraries.
I would expect any heavy Emacs user, fully immersed in the Emacs-is-an-extensible-environment paradigm to operate in similar fashion.
The talk by Sid Kasuvajhula is an absolutely fascinating presentation about extremely flexible object-oriented interfaces, organized in a multi-hierarchial manner -- so very nicely exploiting the compositional structure inherent in the content we operate on.
Epistemic mode, A scalable UI paradigm https://emacsconf.org/2020/talks/07/
Wow. This is so cool. Sometimes you come across concepts that makes total sense once you know it, but then keep asking yourself why wasn't it discovered way before. This a great example of that.
Thanks for the pointer, it was very interesting! Not sure I've come across anything like this before.
Q. Would you mind sharing your Emacs configuration files?
Richard Stallman: Configuration files are personal and will not be shared.
This cracked me up! xD
EMACS was developed on ITS, a multi user timesharing operating system with no security. I developed a complex init file (in TECO of course) which was a compiled module in my home directory.
One day I changed something in an incompatible way and received complaints. Unbeknownst to me there was a community of people who linked (symlinked) directly to my init file and whose workflows were disrupted by my change.
It can be (consider that some Emacs power-users used to do most things in Emacs, including email, Usenet, etc.), but this reminded me of something...
Many years ago, some new founder I knew asked to see my elaborate .emacs file. I was reluctant, because it had some slightly sensitive info in it , as well as unreleased bits I might turn into packages. But he reassured me he just wanted to see how I'd done some things, to inform some non-Emacs thing he was about to build, and he'd keep it private.
Sometime later, one of the developers at his startup happened to mention that "everyone" uses my .emacs file.
Today, that person I let see my very personal .emacs has sold the original startup, and is CEO of a different business you've heard of, but I received nothing from the indiscretion. :)
I simply separate user/machine specific things into separate files, and don’t commit them to public repository (https://github.com/alexott/emacs-configs - it wasn’t updated for a long time, and it needs to be rewritten to modern stuff - first line was written 25 years ago)... But this may allow sharing, and even contributions...
Folks sharing conf files are the reason I was able to switch to linux on desktop (i3wm).
Peaked by "Your life in plain text" -> https://emacsconf.org/2020/talks/09/ I ordered and in the last week watched his udemy class on the same -> https://www.udemy.com/course/getting-yourself-organized-with... . I enjoyed jump starting my org-mode journey and consider it money well spent.
You probably mean "piqued" instead of "peaked", and also probably don't mean you were "piqued", but rather that your curiosity was.
The talk about gaming in Emacs is particularly interesting to me, because I think there are possibilities here that haven't been adequately explored. With XELB, the X client library used by EXWM, it's possible for Emacs to quickly draw arbitrary geometry at screen resolution without a C or dynamic library extension. Some testing I did when I fooled around with it showed that it would be fast enough to use as a simple 2D game engine.
Honestly that "Emacs News Highlights" video is great for non-contributors or just users.
Wow, I had no idea this was a thing. Looks like I have a lot of material to go through. Thank you for posting.
It's great to see there were new Emacs users and developers coming on board, judging by the age of some of the presenters. Emacs has been proclaimed dead many times, I think it has long future ahead of itself. Yes its aged, and dated. But also very powerful. And cools things can still happen (gccemacs as an example).
> State of Retro Gaming in Emacs
I love to see that there is still room for fun in our field.
I never used emacs beyond simple text editing. I’ve seen people do quite a lot of cool stuff with emacs though so I do want to start using it. Are there any good tutorials to look at? I’m mostly interested in the software dev pipeline.
"Extend Emacs to Modern GUI Applications with EAF"
I hadn't heard of this one before, and it's hugely interesting. A shame that it can't ever make it into core because of licensing issues.
Similarly I'd love it if it was more possible to embed Emacs into other applications, like IDEs. That way IDEs could focus on what they do well, and still have a good text editor.
lsp mode has come a long way and that feels like i am embedding and ide inside of emacs. With dap mode I get a debugger too but I havent really gotten around to learning how to set that up.
Thanks for sharing! For anyone that's gone through these, which are most worth watching? I haven't made emacs a regular part of my work yet, but I'm always curious to see what's going on in the community for it.
I haven't watched any myself yet, but there's a thread on r/emacs on just that question: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/k77k6a/what_are_your...
I also discovered this a few days before the event. Great stuff! Following it live was really cool. Special shoutout to `andrea with "Your Code as a Crime Scene/Analyze code quality through Emacs"
Great to see a couple of talks on org. I know a couple people (including myself) who don't use Emacs as a main editor but use org to manage tasks, ideas, projects, etc.
Today's Emacs experience. "I have a lot of stuff I have to study for work.. I wish there was an efficient way to make my notes into an anki deck.” ” oh theres a blog post about org mode captures too export in anki readable HTML” .. half a day and no study later I have something not half as good as the blog described kind of working.. the blog just says look at my init.el of you don't get it.. who has the time
Have you tried org-drill? I believe it's in the org-plus-contrib and it works pretty well, but like all things emacs, requires some setup.
Over the years I have exchanged messages and worked with many of the speakers at this conference, but I have never had the opportunity to meet any of them in real life. It is so nice to finally see their faces and hear their voices. Thanks, Covid, I suppose.
You might like the videos from last year's conference too, then! =) https://emacsconf.org/2019/talks/
Wonderful topics. Lot of videos to watch. - Thanks to all the contributors.
I would like to use emacs and org mode to organise my life. But I think without it being useful on mobile phone, for me is a no go. I will keep using Google calendar for now.
I use Orgzly for my phone.
You can install Termux on Android devices and use Emacs there. I use it on more or less read only on the smartphone and actively on a tablet. Both rsync with my desktop from inside Termux.
And Orgzly has already been mentioned.
I was very much in the same boat. I’m on iOS, and found beorg, and it is simply splendid. Very active development, powerful customization available, etc.
Check it out: https://beorgapp.com/
Do you know about organice? https://organice.200ok.ch/
Some of use use Emacs+OrgMode in Termux. Then synchronize with git+ssh. Works well enough for my needs.
you can use it on your phone. I stored my org files in dropbox, and used Orgzly[0] to do the same in the phone.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.orgzly
I've been a long time emacs user and switched to vscode recently. Seriously, vscode is so much easier to configure and use.
I used vscode since 2015 and have now switched to emacs. Yes, vscode is easier to configure and use right away, but that's not always a good thing. I was fully dependent on so much tooling which I didn't understand in the slightest. When you're cranking out react apps that's probably fine.
With emacs I actually need to read documentation. I need to have some sort of understanding of what I'm actually installing. It's frustrating at first, but overall has made me much more aware of what's going on. I've learned so much throughout the process and it has made me a better developer.
I'm a heavy org-mode user. I'll also pop into emacs for comment formatting, macro-running, and the occasional column-based copy/paste. Plus an auto-numbering function I wrote when I wore a younger man's clothes. Plus a colorful highlight mode (which I wrote) + htmlize for sharing said highlights, also from my callow youth.
Other than that, yeah, 100% VS Code for typescript and regular VS + ReSharper for my regular life.
Oh, also, emacs for Haskell. And whatever other weird language.
VSCode is also a lot weaker in general text editing and extensibility, and doesn’t have a TUI. (I use both extensively.)
Well thats the thing with Emacs, its an extremely good Tool: Editor, browser, file manager, git frontend, notes, calendar, etc.. etc... you call it! but its also extremely old and outdated tool.
I used Emacs for years and one day i realized i had a huge .emacs file and spend lots of time maintaining it, that's when i was conviced it was not the editor for me or I was using it wrong. I moved to sublime, vscode and now im giving vim/neovim a try.
As much as i liked Emacs i dont see myself using it again soon.
It matters a lot to me that several of the interesting parts of vscode are proprietary and not free or open source. In particular the liveshare and remote features are proprietary. Many extensions contain proprietary parts, like the c# debugger.
No talk on lsp-mode / eglot?
What's there to talk about? You install it and suddenly you have the same programming language features that everyone else does, but in an editor that can actually manipulate text.