sacha chua living an awesome life

I’m in London for Emacs Conference 2013 (squee!!), which is tomorrow. John Wiegley and I are starting the day off with a whirlwind tour of Emacs’ past, present, and future. The program looks excellent, and I can’t wait to learn from all these wonderful people. Let’s find out what sketchnotes of an extremely geeky conference look like! =D

I’d worked on this presentation about 9 hours before leaving for London. I wrote most of the presentation code on the airplane (functions to go forward and backward, and to process the current slide).

I finished the rest of the content this morning, then headed out with Alex and his wife Tina. Today I got to experience a slice of regular life over here: a walk through the market, a grocery trip, a yummy home-cooked meal. Alex and Tina have been fantastic hosts! =)

After dinner, I worked a little more on the presentation. I made slides and a PDF just in case my Org presentation doesn’t work out, and helped with nametags and the list of people attending.

I’m looking forward to the conference. I think this will be an excellent adventure! I’ll post my presentation afterwards, so subscribe to my blog or follow the #emacsconf hashtag. If you’re attending tomorrow, come and say hi! I’ll be the short Asian girl bouncing around and possibly hyperventilating at all the awesomeness. I’ll also be drawing sketchnotes on a tablet PC, assuming I don’t give up and stick everything into org-capture instead. =)

Quick tip since it was an aha! moment for some people on the #emacs IRC channel.

You can define keyboard shortcuts that are sequences of keys. This is how Emacs can have keyboard shortcuts like C-c C-c. The function keys are great for this, because (a) they often don’t have assigned functions (or have ones that you don’t mind losing), and (b) you don’t have to press two or more keys to start your shortcut sequence, like you would do with C-c.

I like using F8 or F9 because I’m right-handed and my keyboard groups function keys together. On my keyboard, there’s a slight gap separating F5-F8 and F9-F12, which means it’s easy to distinguish F8 from F9 by feel if I happen to land on the edge.

Define those keyboard shortcuts as sequences so that you can add more shortcuts easily without having to rejig your muscle memory.

(global-set-key (kbd "<f9> <f9>") 'org-agenda-list)
(global-set-key (kbd "<f9> <f8>") (lambda () (interactive) (org-capture nil "r")))

If you want to rebind something that was previously bound to a non-prefix map, you can unbind it first:

(global-unset-key (kbd "<f9>"))

In which Carsten shares how he got started with Emacs, the joys of Calc, and other cool things. =)

Carsten Dominik from Sacha Chua on Vimeo.

Want just the audio? Get it from archive.org: MP3, Ogg Vorbis (gosh, archive.org has been automatically converting to Ogg all this time? That’ll simplify my post-production… )

I got to chat with Thomas about Emacs and picking up configuration snippets from EmacsWiki. He’s so lucky – he gets to work with lots of other Emacs geeks! =)

Thomas Kjeldahl Nilsson – Emacs chat from Sacha Chua on Vimeo.

More about Thomas on kjeldahlnilsson.net

Just want the audio? Get it from archive.org

Learning Emacs Lisp can help you really tweak your Emacs environment to fit you, saving time, smoothening out frustrations, and making things easier. Reading code is an essential part of learning how to code. By reading other people’s code, you’ll not only discover interesting syntax and library features, but you’ll also start absorbing the idioms – the ways of doing things. (This is why it’s important to read good, well-formatted code.)

Getting started with Emacs? Need help tweaking your Emacs configuration? Curious about the tools and packages out there? Want to learn more about Emacs Lisp? Working on some open source Emacs code? Just want to talk Emacs with someone?

We can connect on Skype or Google Hangout, or I can ssh into your system if you’ve got that set up. Pay-what-you-can-and-what-you-think-it’s-worth. =) (It’s an experiment!) Student / in between jobs? Reach out anyway!

Comment below, contact me, or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com with the subject “Emacs pair programming”. I’m generally available M-W-F and I’m in Toronto, so Eastern Standard Time (EST). Tell me when you’re available (and what timezone you’re in), what you’re curious about, and other things it would be nice to know about you. Let’s see what we can do! =)

Update 2013-03-16: Get the MP3 or Ogg Vorbis files, or listen to them on archive.org!

Thanks to Matthew Darling’s comment on my post about code coaching, I came across Avdi Grimm’s work with pair programming – and was delighted to find that he uses Emacs too. =) Check out my Skype chat with Avdi about Org-mode literate programming, Ruby, and how he got started with Emacs.

Emacs Chat with Avdi Grimm from Sacha Chua on Vimeo.

If you liked this, you might also like my chat with John Wiegley. Do you use Emacs? Want to share your story and the nifty things you think other people should know about? Comment below or get in touch with me!