It turns out that coaching someone on Emacs goes really quickly when you can sit side by side. I’ve been helping Sean Miller with Org Mode and Emacs Lisp, with the condition that he has to turn those notes into blog posts. Since he happens to live in the same neighbourhood, this is pretty convenient.

E-mailing snippets back and forth would’ve been tedious, and working on only one of the computers would’ve slowed us down. I remembered Christopher Wellons‘ demonstration of impatient-mode, which lets you display your buffer contents on a web page that automatically updates when you make changes. Here’s what I did:

1. Install the impatient-mode package.
2. Call M-x httpd-start.
3. Configure the firewall to allow incoming connections.
4. Put the selected buffer into impatient-mode.
5. Share the link with my IP address (form: http://my.ip.ad.dress:8080/imp/)

Then Sean was able to easily copy text from my screen and try things out on his computer. For example, we dug into org-capture-templates to find out how to create datetree items that were also scheduled on the specified date in the agenda, and we converted his manually-dated headings to include active timestamps so that those would be on the agenda too. It would’ve been a hassle to dictate or re-type the regular expressions, and since we were changing the code rapidly based on our conversation, e-mail would’ve been a hassle. Using impatient-mode worked out well.

What did I like about this two-computer setup? I had access to all my configuration files so that I could easily pick up snippets, and I could demonstrate interesting features as I figured out the code or explained my approach. At the same time, he had access to all of his files and he could take notes in his own buffer. We didn’t have to fuss about with keybindings.

This kind of setup could probably work with a virtual coaching session, too, especially if both people have multiple monitors or if there was an easy way to switch between views.

This is what the webpage looked like:

Neat, huh?