It's definitely more of a meta-discussion (how can we make the newcomer experience better?) than something directly focused on helping newbies, but I hope you're getting something out of it. Think of it like a live coaching session for me so that I can figure out what to prioritize on my TODO list to make the newcomer experience better, with some ideas and questions thrown out there in case other people want to work on things too.

02:20:13 What do I want to do with Emacs? I think, like I've said it before, organize my life a little bit better. Try Org, pretty much. I don't care about Emacs for editing Markdown files. That wouldn't make sense, you know, because I can do that in Neovim quite well. And I don't want to replicate that in Emacs. That's just going to be a waste of time. Something that I don't do in Neovim. This is something that the professor said as well: Just use Emacs for something that you don't do in Neovim right now.

If you want to learn Emacs so you can use it to organize your life, there are more direct paths than my video about newbies/starter kits. You might be just fine with the basic tutorial (Ctrl+h t within Emacs), the Org Mode compact guide, maybe another Org Mode tutorial that matches the way you think, and some time experimenting with the basics until you figure out the kinds of things you'd like to improve. The idea is to quickly get to the point where this is useful, and then start using some of the time/energy saved to learn more. A simple progression might start with something like this:

• Opening: Use Emacs to open and close your todo.org. No keyboard shortcuts needed, just open the file, type, and use the toolbar or menu bar to save. If you're in a console Emacs and you don't want to use the mouse, you can use F10 to open the menu.
• Leaving Emacs open: Realize you can save time by just leaving Emacs open with the file instead of opening/closing it all the time. This is probably more of a mindset change for Vim users. Set up your window manager so that you can switch to Emacs with a convenient keyboard shortcut. I use super+1.
• Themes? If the default theme gets on your nerves, figure out how to change it. M-x customize-themes is a good starting point. If you're not sure what that means, go through the tutorial (Help - Emacs Tutorial).
• Keyboard shortcuts: Get annoyed with using the toolbar or menu bar to save. Get the hang of C-x C-s (save-buffer). Start to get your mind used to the idea of keyboard shortcuts being different in different apps. Try not to give in to the temptation to make this C-s like in other apps. C-s is isearch-forward, which you will probably eventually find really useful, and if you move that you will end up needing to move whatever you are moving it to. Use sticky notes to remind yourself of the handful of keyboard shortcuts you're learning.
• Basic Org Mode tutorial: Read an Org Mode tutorial, maybe this one. Start with * TODO ... headings. You can manually type them. Change TODO to DONE. Again, this can be pretty manual.
• Org markup: Learn how to open links, make subheadings (**, ***), etc.
• Shift: Get annoyed with manually typing TODO keywords. Experiment how to use shift left and shift right. (Might not work on console Emacs, depending on what keyboard shortcuts your terminal supports.)

Feel free to switch steps around depending on where the friction is. Depending on what you want to do from here, you might want to learn about scheduling things and displaying an agenda or setting up capture (which gets even more useful as you do more things within Emacs, since it can automatically pick up links to whatever you're looking at).

Also, along the way, it could be worth flipping through the StarterKits page on the EmacsWiki to see if one of those options matches the way you think (totally optional), or maybe chat with Prot so he can help translate what you want into the keywords you can use to find stuff or the priority to learn things in. Meetups are great too.

• 00:33:20 I need a daddy that holds my hand and guides me through the process. I'm lost. And chat is even way looser. Even more lost, you know, because they're like, try Doom, try Evil and try this and try the other one, you know, and run Neovim inside Kitty and no, run Emacs inside Kitty or no, use the GUI. No. So it's pretty confusing.
• 01:28:45 You know what we should do, okay? We should pay Prot for his coaching sessions. He's in Greece, right? He's in Cyprus. To give something back to him. But I don't know if he's okay in transmitting this live because all of these cheap ass MFers watching that would be watching this live stream will not pay Prot. So that's bad business, brother, because the live streams are just going to stay there. But if I do it for myself, if I pay to him, we have the one-on-ones and I don't post them and I learn Emacs, you know, that is not… That's going to leave you guys behind.

Yup, mentorship/coaching is totally a great way to learn Emacs. Prot is okay with people livestreaming or posting a recording of the coaching session. This livestream is actually one of those instances - I set it up as a coaching session with him! =) Amin Bandali has also posted some of his sessions with Prot (FFS code review and Emacs extensibility with Protesilaos, FFS code review with Protesilaos - bandali). I love your recent livestreams about exploring Emacs. Learning out loud is fantastic. It lets other people help out, and you help lots of people along the way. If you're comfortable with the idea, I think livestreaming or posting a recording of a coaching session with Prot would be wonderful. You've mentioned wanting to use Emacs to organize your life, so it's of course totally okay to chat privately. That way you don't have to worry about leaking any private information. Either way works!

This thing about balancing learning from resources and learning from people is an interesting one to think about. On one hand, we don't want a flood of generic requests from help from people who haven't bothered to look things up for themselves. On the other hand, because Emacs is so large and so many things are possible (and also oddly-named), it really helps to be able to talk to people. It's like the way you could learn how to play the piano or speak a different language by yourself, but a piano teacher could help you pick the right pieces for your level, and a tutor can help you with the nuances and pronunciation feedback that a dictionary or a textbook can't. I think learning how to learn from both resources and people is definitely a good skill worth working on during the early days, which could include:

• taking notes and sharing them - great way to solidify your knowledge and pay it forward
• learning how to skim tutorials and references to pick up ideas and terminology without feeling like you're progressing too slowly
• learning how to break the things you want into bite-sized chunks so that they can actually fit into your brain; use sticky notes and text files to help you
• connecting with people, learning how to ask questions

00:35:32 I'm not an Emacs user. I'm an Emacs, I don't know, tester or trier, whatever. If I come to the Emacs subreddit, for me, it's just a waste of time because I will not be able to find anything. I don't know where to find stuff. Maybe if I go to the about page, but who does that? Okay. Who in their sane mind comes here to the about page?

… Getting started, maybe here. Get Emacs. Emacs resources. Okay, but if I go to the EmacsWiki… How to edit Elisp area. Like there's a thousand links here and that is just the first link, brother. Then I have this other one. WikEmacs. OK, I trust it, so I'm just going to hit continue. WikEmacs.org. That one doesn't even load. Emacs reference. Not found. OK, so you see what I'm saying? This one has a thousand links and I just by looking at the amount of them, I'm like, nope, don't want to look at that. Maybe this one. The book, OK, the book, this is the book that Aaron recommends.

… So I think the suggestion that Prot is sharing there is quite useful, to be honest. Have them pinned here. I have something like that in my subreddit, you know, things that I want people to see when they get there. So when they get to the server, the first thing that I want them to see is this: The Discord information that the podcast has been moved to a different YouTube channel. This is useful as well. … So yeah, this is actual information that I want people to know. If those would be updated on the Emacs subreddit, I think it would be a good idea.

Oooh, good catch. I've messaged the r/emacs mods about the dead links, suggested direct links to Emacs Newbie and Starter Kits on the EmacsWiki, and suggested adding Doom Emacs and Spacemacs if Better Defaults is listed. The sidebar isn't very visible (most people miss it, especially on mobile), but every little bit helps. Usually what happens is a newbie posts about their question on r/emacs and someone replies with some helpful resources. An Automod or a sticky might help. I sent your video + timestamp to the r/emacs mods.

• 44:01 So how does she add those timestamps? … Oh, she typed some magic there. She typed something and then a timestamp was added.
• 01:30:25 We could see what she typed there. Let's see. Is she in normal mode? Does she use modal navigation or something? Let's see. OT. She typed OT and then she… OT and then she presses a key, which probably expands the snippet or something.

I have an abbreviation "ot" that expands to the timestamp after I press space, comma, other punctuation, tab, whatever. This is convenient for me to type because it's home-row on Dvorak. Here's the relevant part of my config:

(setq-default abbrev-mode 1)
(define-abbrev global-abbrev-table "ot" ""
  (lambda () (insert (format-time-string "[%Y-%m-%d %a %H:%M]"))))

Big picture: I added this abbreviation for timestamps because I wanted a quick way to keep track of highlights, things to clip, possible chapter markers, etc. I could calculate it as a relative time using org-timer (there's a built-in feature), but wall-clock time is easier to use in calculations in case I want to adjust it later on. So, for example, I now have a little bit of code (sacha-stream-org-convert-timestamps-to-youtube-offsets in my config) that replaces all the timestamps in a selected region with the offsets based on the start time of the livestream that includes those timestamps. I can export the selection into a plain-text format that I can paste into the YouTube video description for quick chapter markers. Then I can bulk-add comments with those timestamps into the VTT transcription produced by WhisperX (subed-vtt-insert-chapter-comments in subed), move them earlier or later to match the actual times, copy the corrected chapter markers into YouTube (subed-section-comments-as-chapters), and use those chapter markers when publishing the transcript (using Org Mode and a custom link type). This is because I don't usually have the patience to listen to my whole video again and I don't expect people to have the patience to listen to my whole video either, so I want people to be able to quickly jump to the parts that might be interesting for them. =) I'm not sure this is a workflow you can easily pick up if you're starting from scratch (… haven't confirmed that it actually works for anyone other than me…), but I'm mentioning it to give kind of the big picture of why I have that snippet and what else it enables. Because Emacs!

Timestamps are very handy. I even have some code that schedules a YouTube livestream for the Org timestamp at point (sacha-stream-org-schedule-livestream-for-entry-at-point), using the title and body of the Org subtree and uploading the thumbnail from the Org entry :THUMBNAIL: property (or a default property). It inserts the YT embed. I have another function for setting up a Google Calendar entry so I can invite the guest (sacha-emacs-chat-schedule). I mess up times and timezones all the time, so the less I have to manually click on stuff, the better.

1:31:36 Now why is she interested in doing all this, brother? This is a pretty good person, actually. Why is she so concerned about the experience for newcomers in Emacs? On the Neovim side of things, it's like, brother, you're just on your own. "F* yourself, go and watch some videos, and if you get it, awesome." Now, there's really amazing people as well on the Neovim side of things. I'm just talking shit, but I'm honestly curious, like… She's really concerned about new people joining into the Emacs church. Is this a church really? Like, okay, do we have to pay after once we're part of the church? Like, do we need to give like 10% of our income to the Emacs church?

Hah, it's all part of my Evil Plan. (Not to be confused with evil-mode.) Sure, Emacs isn't a good fit for everyone. I think the people who seem to really click with it and with other people who use it are the ones who enjoy tinkering and who can (mostly) find the balance between getting stuff done and tweaking their setup. =) If this might be your jam, I hope you can get past the initial hump and get to the point where it gets to be fun and useful! Sometimes it takes several tries for it to stick. We have lots of stories of people who didn't get Emacs the first time around, but who eventually figured it out later. I love that there are so many people who've used Emacs to make a TODO system that actually works for them. (It's usually Org Mode, but sometimes it's something else, that's all cool.) I love that people can do little tweaks to remove friction or make new things possible step by step.

So, the evil plan:

1. If people learning Emacs can connect with resources and people who can help them enjoy figuring things out, then…
2. they'll get to the point where they can come up with ideas and make things better for themselves.
3. This often turns out to be useful for other people too,
4. and then people can bounce ideas around and make things even better.
5. So, years down the line, I'll want to do something crazy with Emacs and someone will already have written a function for doing it. ;)

See? I'm just planning ahead. Bwahaha! Also, I love seeing the kinds of cool things people come up with and share, even if I might not personally need it (yet). It's fun. I hope you get the hang of it. I think that could lead to lots of interesting conversations. Even if you decide to use something else, that's cool too. The important thing is that you're figuring out stuff that works for you! =)