Next Thursday, I'm going to be chatting with linkarzu about Emacs and life. He's more of a Vim person than an Emacs person, so I'll try to share things that are generally useful. He's called it: "Why Sacha Chua Still Lives in Emacs After 20+ Years."

[2026-10-29 Thu 08:00] (America/Toronto, -0400) = Thu Oct 29 0800H EDT / 0700H CDT / 0600H MDT / 0500H PDT / 1200H UTC / 1300H CET / 1400H EET / 1730H IST / 2000H +08 / 2100H JST

I am not sure my eyebrows have ever done that, but linkarzu does like his thumbnails, so we'll let that pass. =)

I put together some sketches to help me organize my thoughts. His channel uses dark mode, so let's experiment with dark mode in my sketches too. I want to think about things so that the relevant resources are readily available and so that I can express myself more concisely. I can put together a presentation or write a blog post by myself, so I'm more curious about the kinds of things he wants to explore in the conversation.

I'll probably need to do a brief introduction to set the context so that people know where I'm coming from. Let's disclaim my professional irrelevance up front.

It turns out that I've been using Emacs for at least 25 years, which is pretty cool. I am 43, so that's more than half my life.

Let's start with a summary so that we don't worry about running out of time and so that people don't have to listen to two hours before getting to the good stuff. I want people to be able to get something out of this, whether they're a Vim diehard or experimenting with Helix, or even if they're passionate about things other than text editors. Here are some of the things I'm learning about that I think are important.

Let's start with a summary so that we don't have to worry about until uh you go whether not anything else. Going a bit down for that. Perfectly alright. I love it. Ben Renee Ven or healing. Or rap. Or even beyond editing. Ruby and closure and so. Which size, which tools are used, which can make this cycle. This is more about you can. So the fourth thing that I want to come back to tell me about time. We have such a sound culture of cat. Yes, such a sound culture of cat. Yes, it's documenting the manual. Overwhelming. What is he? We have one of the strongest cultures. I'm just going to buy the new general public license. And that's pretty much by the end of the program. Anything you know decided to fight me, psychic roll, I look in the The duck and got in there. They would probably have gone taking a package. I think the root. You can you can look at all that. How are you thinking? And sometimes we learn. What are we doing for it? I love the fact that you're so Sandro lakers, lawyers, musicians. I don't mind the reason. Works because it becomes more and more adaptable and more games. People address them.

• Community:
  • It's really hard to learn Emacs all by yourself. It's obscure, arcane, and overwhelming.
    • Steve Rowe's Blog : Code Editor Learning Curves
    • the learning cliff and the View from the Top
  • Fortunately, we have a strong culture of sharing, starting with the GNU General Public License and continuing through things like literate programming. We have mailing lists, blog posts, videos, meetups, and conferences. One of the best ways to learn Emacs is to learn out loud. Another way is to look over someone's shoulder. It doesn't take a lot of time or money to do the kinds of things that I enjoy doing to connect the Emacs community, and I'd love to see other tech communities experiment with things like that too.
    • Working on the plumbing in a small web community
• Adaptability: You can customize Emacs to really fit the way you want to work. The more people do this, the easier it gets to adapt Emacs to even more workflows.
• Incremental improvements: Even small changes add up, and code turns out to be surprisingly reusable. It often pays off beyond the recommendations of xkcd: Is It Worth the Time?.
• Imagination and play: Tweaking Emacs can be lots of fun. Fun is important.

Here's a brief overview of my history with Emacs.

The details are a little bit fuzzy, but fortunately I've written about some things in previous blog posts. I'd like to flesh this out with an outline and maybe even some sentences or paragraphs later on. I love the way that different themes recur. I find myself building on things that I started exploring years ago. For example, my current interest in hybrid speech interfaces echoes all the way back to M-x doctor and Emacspeak from the beginning.

• M-x doctor:

  • From "Unix Power Tools":

    If you have time to waste (and I mean really waste), Emacs has things to keep you occupied. … If you think you might be in need of a psychotherapist, save your money and try ESC-x doctor RETURN.

    I was not actually looking for a psychotherapist. I think I was seventeen or eighteen, and I was trying to go through all the interesting computer science books in my university's library in the Philippines. I thought it was funny that someone put in that kind of Easter egg. The more I dug around in the source code, the more I was amazed by the things that people had added to Emacs. Anyway, it's interesting how the fun, inconsequential stuff turned out to be the thing that caught my attention.

• Planner Mode: How I got hooked
  • I loved seeing how people customized Emacs in so many different ways to fit the way that their particular brain worked, and getting it to fit my brain too.
  • One time, when I was the maintainer of Planner Mode, I got an email from someone who said something like: "Thank you for maintaining this. By the way, one of your recent changes lost my data and I didn't have any backups, but that's okay, just please fix it, here are some ideas." That kindness mattered a lot to me.
• Emacspeak:
  • In my third or fourth year of university, my laptop screen started glitching. Sometimes it got really low in brightness and contrast, and you could only read it if you tilted it at an extreme angle and looked very carefully. But the Emacspeak folks had figured out how to make it perfectly usable just with speech synthesis, because they needed that as blind or visually impaired users. This turned out to be pretty handy. I not only used that for a fair chunk of my regular writing and coding, but also for my experiments with wearable computing, and for the occasional alert when I was paying attention to something else. Speech synthesis was a lot more discreet than the head-mounted display that I experimented with in 2003.
• flashcard.el:
  • The fun part about this was rigging up my flashcard.el so that it would show me funny cat pictures from ICanHasCheezburger when I answered enough questions correctly. Fun matters.
  • Japanese flashcards
  • More Emacs evangelization: flashcard
• ledger:
  • Keeping (financial) score with Ledger
  • My financial network map and virtual envelope system
• Org Mode: New note-taking workflow with Emacs Org-mode
  • I started using Org Mode as part of research for a book on Emacs. I didn't finish the book, but I stuck with Org Mode. I like the way it fits the way I think and what I want to do.
• Work: Drupal, Rails, blogging, data analysis, literate programming
• Semi-retirement:
  • What did I learn from this experiment with semi-retirement?
  • Continuing my experiment with (semi-)retirement
  • category - experiment
• EmacsConf
  • I helped organize the first one in 2013 in London. I watched the 2015 one remotely. Amin Bandali reached out to me in 2019 to get EmacsConf going again, and we've been organizing it yearly since.
  • Analyzing my Emacs time over the last 11 years or so
• Emacs Chat
• Emacs News: Great way to see all the cool things that people are working on
• Parenting:
  • Braindump from radiostudent.si interview with Lio Novelli and Jurij Podgorsek: Emacs, focused time - parenting, using fragmented time
  • Orgzly Revived helped me stay sane by capturing ideas and making it easy to postpone them for years.
  • Incremental improvements in fragments of time
• Captions: I can even use them to edit videos and audio files in Emacs
  • Editing subtitles in Emacs with subed, with synchronized video playback through mpv
  • category - subed
• SVGs:
  • EmacsConf backstage: scheduling with SVGs
  • Visualizing the balance of speaking in my French conversations with tutors
  • Using Emacs to visualize speaking and target words/phrases in real-ish time
• Minecraft, cubing
  • The kiddo wanted to play Minecraft, but she wasn't comfortable enough with typing yet, so I made her some command books so that she could just click on things in order to teleport back to us or give herself equipment. Now she can type very quickly, but it was helpful back then.
    • Updating my Minecraft command book using Emacs, TRAMP, and mcf.el
    • Using Org Mode tables and Emacs Lisp to create Minecraft Java JSON command books
  • Rubik's cubes:
    • Using Org Babel to learn Rubik's cube algorithms
• Streaming
• French, LLMs
• Speech: speech recognition, speech synthesis, hybrid speech interfaces
  • M-x doctor demonstration
  • Emacs Carnival Oct 2026: Exploring keys and voice input in Emacs

linkarzu mentioned wanting to talk about artificial intelligence. I don't know nearly as much as lots of other people do. Maybe I can just share the things that I've been experimenting with, and also what I care about from a community perspective. I would like to help figure out how to deal with this turbulence and come out the other side happier.

Matt is experimenting with dictating his blog posts. He says:

I write really well. I have very good grammatical skills, for the most part, when I’m typing. But when I speak, I don’t speak like that. My grammar is not very good. I say words out of order a lot. I have filler words. And I say things that don’t make any sense.

This is totally me too! It's one of the reasons why I want to get used to dictation, because it'll give me a lot more practice in saying things, which can only help when I'm making videos or talking to people.

While I’m talking, the text that’s outputted has no punctuation or paragraphs or anything like that.

Oh yeah, no, that's mostly a matter of picking the right speech recognition engine. For example, I'm using a local instance of Orukeet, and it seems to do a reasonable job of dividing my thoughts into properly-capitalized and punctuated sentences in both English and French. In fact, I have some code in Emacs that wraps it to one sentence per line (as part of sacha-whisper-insert which uses sachac/whisper.el). This allows me to use Org shortcuts to move lines around in order to reorganize them into something that makes more sense.

Some people use large language models to clean up raw transcripts and remove false starts or filler words. I don't quite trust large language models to leave my wording alone. I have some code that uses replace-regexp-in-string to take out some of my filler words and fix commonly misrecognized words that I've saved with substitute.el.

I'm not sure if I was ever any good at multitasking, but nowadays at 43 years old, I find that talking and typing at the same time has gotten a little bit harder for me. I type much more slowly if I want to narrate things at the same time, like when I'm recording a video or live streaming. When I'm just thinking on my own, I type quickly enough that my computer sometimes jumbles the keystrokes up because it doesn't handle keyboard interrupts well when it's busy. It's not just my fingers; it sometimes happens even when I was trying to use wdotool to simulate typing. Speech recognition is surprisingly reliable, even though I have to correct it from time to time. The broad strokes are there, and I save the recordings so that I can fix misrecognized words.

I also love the way that speech recognition opens up so many more possibilities for commands I would never be able to memorize keyboard shortcuts for. "Remind me today to…" is now one of my favourite ways to capture an Org Mode task.

Besides, I think it's a good idea to plan ahead just in case I can't type very well in the future. All sorts of things can happen: accidents, disease, old age. I wrote about that a bit more in Emacs Carnival Oct 2026: Exploring keys and voice input in Emacs.

All that to say: exciting times ahead. I think it would be pretty amazing if this sort of thing allows more people to write and share. Looking forward to reading (and possibly listening to) what people have been learning about!

There are a bunch of Eglot-related resources in the Coding category today. Nice to see people working on lots of cool stuff!

• Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed Oct 21 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/UTC - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat Oct 24 0130 America/Vancouver - 0330 America/Chicago - 0430 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/UTC - 1030 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore
  • EmacsSF (in person): coffee.el in SF https://www.meetup.com/emacs-sf/events/317043388/ Sat Oct 24 1100 America/Los_Angeles
  • Emacs Berlin: Emacs-Berlin Hybrid Meetup https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Oct 28 1100 America/Vancouver - 1300 America/Chicago - 1400 America/Toronto - 1800 Etc/UTC - 1900 Europe/Berlin - 2330 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Oct 29 0200 Asia/Singapore
• Beginner:
  • Why Emacs Is For Beginners (04:33)
  • Taller de Configuración de Entorno (25:36)
• Emacs Lisp:
  • A Mode for Every Occasion (@marcin_bielewicz)
  • Randy Ridenour: Finding Unbalanced Parens in Emacs (Irreal)
  • tree-guide.el: short editing demo (20 seconds, no audio) (00:22)
  • Marcin Borkowski: Using timers to perform weekly tasks (Irreal) - updating Org clock tables
  • Deleting variables in code with Emacs Lisp by using the face properties (@zwol@masto.hackers.town)
  • ETAF: a framework and ecosystem for building full text applications in Emacs - music player, RSS and ebook readers, desktop, games (Reddit)
• Appearance:
  • Header-modeline: move your modeline to header-line (top of your window) (Reddit)
  • au-themes: calm, low-glare themes I made because most themes are too loud for me (Reddit)
  • foxglove-themes: academic-inspired modus themes that support e-ink (Reddit)
  • I created a dark modus theme centered around teletype green (Reddit)
  • More fun with modus themes. #emacs (02:08)
  • Protesilaos: Emacs live extracting the Modus themes core at 2026-10-17 14:30 Europe/Athens (YouTube 02:47:00)
  • emacs-init/lisp/modus-vivendi-matrix-theme.el at main · benleis1/emacs-init · GitHub (@benleis@mathstodon.xyz)
• Navigation:
  • bookmark-gt: a module to improve bookmark management (YouTube, Reddit)
• Dired:
  • Quick note on how to edit Emacs Dired buffers (@panmaster@mamot.fr)
• Denote:
  • Protesilaos: Emacs live continuing ‘denote’ maintenance and refinements (2026-10-15 16:30 Europe/Athens) (YouTube 02:14:35)
• Org Mode:
  • Org Mode requests: [TASK] Re: Suggestion: Document `org-extend-today-until` in Clock Table section
  • Org Mode requests: [FR] LaTeX preview between #+begin_equation/#+end_equation
  • Org Mode requests: [RFC] a small patch for the brave on emacs32
  • Quickly Copy Code and Example Block Contents in Emacs Org Mode | Helen Chong, Web Developer (@helenchong@social.lol)
  • org-diff-src: character-level diffs inside Org source blocks (no Ediff) (Reddit)
  • James Cherti: org-ibullets.el - Display Emacs org-mode heading stars as UTF-8 bullets (Irreal)
  • [Package] org-slideboard: An improved interactive presentation tool for Org mode (Reddit)
  • Supertag for Emacs: write first, organize when you need to (09:05, Reddit, Reddit)
  • org-semantic: embedding search for org-mode (Reddit)
  • [EVENT] #5 OrgDevMeetup on Sat, October 17, 19:00 UTC+3 - notes and recording
  • Import, export, and integration:
    • My org-attach config, only place files go (paste / drag / download), with names I can actually read (Reddit)
    • New latex preview merged into org mode! (Reddit)
    • Introducing ical-buddy.el (Reddit)
    • Omarchy Org Agenda Plugin: Your Org Agenda schedule at a glance, directly on the top bar (Reddit)
    • My Personal Intranet to Replace Cloud Subscriptions (30:21)
  • Org development:
    • ox-html: Restore numbering when exporting math with mathml
    • Merge branch 'main' into feature/org-latex-preview
    • org-manual.org: Document compat library installation
• Coding:
  • Auto rename compilation buffer if another process is still running (@stackeffect@social.tchncs.de)
  • Magnus: Emacs salmagundi, 2026-10-11 - compilation commands, git
  • Configuring Eglot to auto format code on save in Emacs (Reddit)
  • New refactor.el: code actions, rename and quickfixes, out of Eglot (Reddit)
  • Emacs: Configuring Eglot for Python with .dir-locals.el and python-lsp-server (Pylsp) (Reddit)
  • kubect: A text focused Emacs interface Kubernetes workflows through kubectl (Reddit)
• Shells:
  • Working with multiple shell buffers (@lispwizard@techhub.social)
  • Ghostel 0.58 released (Reddit)
• Mail, news, and chat:
  • ElNeo - a matrix client for emacs with native e2e encryption support, inspired by telegas architecture (Reddit)
  • emacs-fu: mu 1.14.4 (Irreal)
  • my email setup in emacs (46:24)
• Evil mode:
  • evil-matchit 5.0.0 is published (Reddit)
• Fun:
  • # Emacs Golf #031 The Kill Ring
  • # Emacs Golf #029 Register Roulette
• LLMs:
  • I can't express how happy I am with emacs and LLM-assisted emacs-fu
  • roost: Run coding agents in Git worktrees and tmux, from Emacs (Reddit)
  • Alvaro Ramirez: agent-shell 0.87 updates (Reddit)
  • jdblair/waves-dashboard: bead-waves tooling for beads projects: the wave CLI, an Emacs dashboard (waves-dashboard.el) and the bead-waves Claude Code skill · GitHub (@jdblair@hachyderm.io)
  • Protesilaos: Emacs: all my packages have an AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md to restrict use
• Community:
  • Sacha Chua: Added Javascript time zone translation to the EmacsConf schedule images on the wiki
  • Protesilaos: I will participate in EmacsConf 2026
  • Lars Ingebrigtsen: Hacker News Decoder Ring for Emacs
  • Andros Fenollosa: Org Social: the social network that survives its own infrastructure
• Other:
  • wizard.el: A lightweight suite of useful Emacs functions (Reddit, Irreal)
  • eludom/talk-tools: This is an emacs minor mode for use when giving talks · GitHub
  • wordwise.el - Kindle-style in-line vocabulary hints above words in Emacs Reading Buffer (Reddit)
  • Readq - incremental reading for emacs (Reddit)
  • Emacs Reader submitted to ELPA (Reddit)
  • Introducing Portal (Reddit, lobste.rs) - macOS-only
  • Lars Ingebrigtsen: UX IS US
• Emacs development:
  • Saving and restoring a session will now save and restore 'buffer-list'.
  • Rename 'dired-jump-map' to 'dired-jump-repeat-map' (bug#82052)
• New packages:
  • agent-shell-attention: Mode-line attention tracker for agent-shell (MELPA)
  • devops: Infrastructure as an org file (MELPA)
  • magit-nix3: Nix3.el integration for Magit (MELPA)
  • org-semantic: Search org notes by meaning, or by word (MELPA)
  • supersonic: Music client for Subsonic servers and Music Assistant (MELPA)
  • ttl-ts-mode: RDF Turtle editing mode (MELPA)

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Bluesky #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

Nudged by Ihor Radchenko's suggestion, I added some JavaScript to translate the graphical SVG schedule on the EmacsConf wiki to your local time zone. I'll post the schedule on the wiki next week, but in the meantime, you can take a look at the draft schedule in the organizers' notebook.

Let me test it by setting my local time zone to UTC with sudo timedatectl set-timezone Etc/UTC…

Here's the horizontal view in our backstage index, showing the status of talks so far.

I still need to make sure that my time zone is set to America/Toronto when I'm generating the SVGs, but at least now people can see the times translated to their local time zone.

The Javascript code is in https://emacsconf.org/script.js as addLocalTimeToSVGs. The Emacs Lisp code to generate these SVGs is in emacsconf-schedule.el. emacsconf-schedule-svg is the starting point.

I've been studying French since November 2025 because I want to help my daughter learn it. After about eight months of taking pronunciation tutoring sessions once or twice a week and writing my journal in French, I decided to try conversation-focused tutoring sessions in June 2026. These sessions help me get used to talking and identify the gaps in my active vocabulary.

These tutoring conversations feel quite different from other conversations I have. In real-life conversations with my husband and daughter, we usually leave a lot of space between sentences. When I'm hanging out with other people, I prefer to listen more than I talk. Tutoring sessions are different. I am investing time and money in practising talking. I can get a lot of listening practice from YouTube, so it's less about listening to people, although I still want to practice asking follow-up questions and connecting what the tutor says with my personal experiences.

In those conversation classes with French tutors, I want to get a sense of how much I'm actually talking. I was motivated to visualize this after some sessions with a tutor who tended to go into lecture mode. I found myself needing to be a bit firmer about directing the conversation instead of slipping into a more passive role.

I use OBS to record my sessions (with the tutor's permission, of course). I've configured it so that my microphone goes on one track and my computer audio goes on another track, which makes it easy to analyze my side of the conversation without needing to use speaker diarization.

I used Google Gemini to generate a script that uses Silero voice activity detection to analyze my side of the multi-track MKV recording.

Here's the file it generated. file:///home/sacha/proj/speech/vad-file.py

I call it with:

for FILE in ~/recordings/*conversation*.mkv; do if [ ! -f "$FILE-vad.txt" ]; then python vad-file.py -f "$FILE" -t 2 sacha 3 tutor -s 500 -o "$FILE-vad.txt"; fi; done

Then I can make a table analyzing different recordings:

(sacha-vad-tutor-make-table (directory-files sacha-recordings-dir t "-vad\\.txt\\'"))

Definition: sacha-vad-tutor-make-table

The green bars represent the time that I spent speaking, and the black bars usually correspond to when the tutor is speaking.

One of the things I like about my regular tutor is that he has a technical background (uses Linux and Neovim, experiments with AI), so I enjoy talking about projects and ideas with him. In my conversation classes, he does a good job of asking follow-up questions, suggesting things I could try, and correcting or filling in the occasional thing I'm trying to find a word for in French.

For fun, I decided to make a real-time display of this too: Using Emacs to visualize speaking and target words/phrases in real-ish time. I'm usually too focused on figuring out what to say in French to actually pay attention to that during the conversation itself, but maybe it'll be handy someday.

My next steps could include analyzing the other side of the conversation to find out my average time to respond. People usually start speaking within 200 milliseconds of the end of the other speaker's turn. I take a lot longer because I'm still formulating my thoughts and finding words, but it might be interesting to track my progress.