EmacsConf 2024 Notes

Awwwww, thanks! =)

You know how it is... It's fun to write Emacs Lisp to automate things, smoothen my workflow, reduce the risk of mistakes. 15 minutes here, 5 minutes there... Micro-improvements add up!

Emacs is good because the barrier to entry is so high. Anyone who sees elisp and doesn't run for the hills is the type of person who has interesting ideas.

People can't seem to find an exit.

I dipped into NeovimConf since I like learning from other conferences and other editors. People's workflow videos are always cool. The Emacs community merrily assimilates lots of great ideas from Neovim, and it's great to see ideas flow the other way sometimes. I tuned in last year too, and I particularly liked how they had a number of NeovimConf talks covering other editors like Helix so that people in the NeovimConf community could pick up inspiration. I like the way TJ and ThePrimeagen keep the conversation going through streams throughout the year. Someday the kiddo will let me have more focused talking time so I can try to make more videos and have more conversations. :)

There was an interesting discussion on Reddit after NeovimConf 2024 (https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/s/TSFc3cVGGV) People were happy about the talks. Some seemed a little frustrated by interruptions from ads, getting off schedule, and a chat that might sometimes get a little distracted by meme potential. EmacsConf is a lot smaller than NeovimConf in terms of viewers - twitchtracker says NeovimConf got 3640 (plus more on YouTube) and we got about 400. We're, like, an order of magnitude smaller. That might be why self-hosting via Icecast is manageable for us. We started automating scheduling a few years ago because I wanted to accept more talks than could comfortably fit in a day, and since I was figuring out that infrastructure close to the conference, I needed something that I could handle by myself without going crazy. Even though my co-organizers are now more familiar with the fallback scripts for manual control, they prefer the automatic schedule. And community is a gift beyond anything I can code. I remember watching the IRC logs scroll past and feeling deeply appreciative of how wonderful and thoughtful people are, even during some of the tougher sessions we've had in the past.

Also we like doing captions and transcripts and putting up the videos as soon as possible. :) Text makes things easier to search and skim, especially from within Emacs. And videos, well, we've got them, we might as well have a little bit of code to publish them right away.

I reached out to teej_dv and ThePrimeagen on X to see if I could learn from their NeovimConf notes or in case any of our notes might be helpful. TJ said they don't really write things down. Makes sense because they're more video people. I hope they'll consider doing a postmortem braindump and maybe even sharing that publicly. I think that would be really cool.

For me, I lean heavily on automation, documentation, and incremental improvements partly because it's fun, partly because it helps me make the most of what little time I can squeeze in between interruptions, and partly because it ripples out and helps other people who often end up paying it forward. Emacs is very well-suited to this, of course. Every time we get to do EmacsConf, I learn even more and build up more tools along the way.

I think Vim and Neovim have a way bigger userbase than Emacs does, and I'm glad to see Neovim talks sharing workflows beyond the usual software development things. I do think there's something wonderful about the multiplicity of things that people use Emacs for, and how we've got this culture of both figuring out how to tailor Emacs to yourself and sharing those ideas with other people. I'd love to see what happens as Neovim and other editors build that critical mass of user configuration and community sharing, when people can figure out something for themselves by cobbling together stuff from other people. I think it's kinda cool how people shift from one editor to another, even. If they bring ideas from Emacs to somewhere else, or they bring ideas from somewhere else back to Emacs, things get better.

I'd love it if NeovimConf could also be a smoothly-running way to get stuff out of people's heads, connect people with other people, and inspire more awesomeness. I'd love it if people could do that sort of stuff with all sorts of other mini-conferences about their interests. Could be fun!

People like the organizer.

What is better, from your experience?

I'm a happy Emacs user, but think having more options is great, and I've delved into some Common Lisp and certainly am eager to learn more. So I'm thrilled to see Lem continue to be developed.

I tried it out twice now but it doesn't support multiple frames. So it's a terminal only sorta thing? Or maybe Wayland? Whatever, it doesn't support multiple decade proven workflows. Totally ok, but not superior.