On Oct 2, we'll chat with Pedro about Org Mode, LaTeX exports and font management including alternatives and things you can and can't do depending on your choices. He'll share some tips on fallbacks and emojis, which can help a lot with presentations and documentation. We might also discuss recent patches and realistic objectives.

<2026-10-02 Fri 06:00-07:00> America/Toronto = Fri Oct 2 0600H EDT / 0500H CDT / 0400H MDT / 0300H PDT / 1000H UTC / 1200H CEST / 1300H EEST / 1530H IST / 1800H +08 / 1900H JST

I put the new typewriter mode in the Fun category, but people might actually find the constraints useful for focused writing.

• Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
  • Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat Sep 26 0130 America/Vancouver - 0330 America/Chicago - 0430 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/UTC - 1030 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore
  • Emacs Berlin: Emacs-Berlin Hybrid Meetup https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Sep 30 1000 America/Vancouver - 1200 America/Chicago - 1300 America/Toronto - 1700 Etc/UTC - 1900 Europe/Berlin - 2230 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Oct 1 0100 Asia/Singapore
  • EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/316464079/ Thu Oct 1 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto - 2300 Etc/UTC – Fri Oct 2 0100 Europe/Berlin - 0430 Asia/Kolkata - 0700 Asia/Singapore
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Oct 2 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/UTC - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore
• Emacs configuration:
  • Repeat mode finally made Emacs navigation click
  • J.e.r.e.m.y B.r.y.a.n.t: New from Emacs 31.1 - Upgrade packages without breaking other Emacsen
• Emacs Lisp:
  • Raymond Zeitler: A Niftier Way To ASCIIfy An Emacs Buffer - replace-char-fold
  • Livecoding for emacs: supersonic.el (08:06)
• Appearance:
  • Protesilaos: Emacs: spacious-padding version 0.9.0
• Navigation:
  • Protesilaos: Emacs: beframe version 1.6.0
• Dired:
  • Protesilaos: Emacs: dired-preview version 0.7.0
• Writing:
  • markup2html: aesthetic renderer of markdown and org-mode documents (Reddit)
• Org Mode:
  • Org Mode requests: [RFC] Org markup inside comments (was: [Bug] Confusing appearance of bracket link in comment)
  • Ashish Panigrahi: An upgraded workflow on reviewing finished tasks with org-agenda
  • Org Mode, Marked, and Workflows
  • I Migrated My Obsidian Vault to Org Mode - Emacs Everywhere #2 (01:12:35)
  • Org Roam Dashboard (10:01)
  • Org development:
    • org-id: Standardize UUIDs to lowercase and use built-in uuid.el
• Completion:
  • Bumbling my way through the Consult docs to build an async completer (Reddit)
• Coding:
  • TIL magit wraps around smerge so you can discard one side of a hunk with an unresolved conflict (@slackline)
  • Python settings for Flycheck in GNU Emacs (as of September 2026) (@chris_siebenmann@robot.villas)
  • Pinned Tree-sitter grammars for Emacs treesit (emacs-treesit-grammars flake) (Reddit)
• Shells:
  • Why Your Emacs Terminal is Slow and How to Fix It (vterm, eat, ghostel, term, and ansi-term) (Reddit, Irreal)
• Mail, news, and chat:
  • Microsoft outlook OAuth authentication with mu4e (Reddit) - updated to use Thunderbird client ID
  • Using an existing Microsoft 365 MCP login to get Outlook mail into mu4e
  • andros/presence.el: See when your friends are online, away or offline, and send and read simple messages, right from Emacs
• Doom Emacs:
  • ¿Por qué Doom Emacs es el secreto de los expertos? (22:25)
• Multimedia:
  • Images with Emacs (19:00)
• Fun:
  • New package: Typewriter (Reddit)
• LLMs:
  • envoy: hand an org heading or email from Emacs to a coding harness in tmux (Reddit)
  • gptel: Emacs y la IA
  • moe-microscope/docs/literate/moe-microscope.org at main · sw-ml-study/moe-microscope · GitHub
  • AI Tools #7: A Coding Agent Small Enough to Understand | Software Wrighter Lab Blog
• Other:
  • Tip: C-u C-y yanks but leaves the cursor at the beginning of the string (@lispwizard@techhub.social)
  • Create beautiful diagrams in Emacs using d2 (11:08, code, Reddit, Irreal) - also Org support
  • How to Prevent Emacs from Freezing on Files files with Very Long Lines (e.g, minified JavaScript, compiled CSS, SQL dumps, large JSON files…) (Reddit, Irreal)
• Emacs development:
  • ; * etc/NEWS: Announce underline styles support on Windows Terminal.
  • Add TTY support for overline (Bug#80208)
  • use-package-ensure.el: Don't install during compilation (bug#81710)
  • ; Some followup Tramp changes of sync with 2.9.0
  • Update to Unicode 18.0 (bug#81880)
  • Document tramp-tolerate-tilde
  • * lisp/vc/diff.el (diff-switches): Include "-r".
  • Populate 'pcpu' and 'pmem' attributes on Darwin
• New packages:
  • amber-mode: A major mode for the Amber programming language (MELPA)
  • git-modeline: Show the git status of the current file in the modeline (MELPA)
  • latex-to-svg-for-org: Preview Org LaTeX math as SVG (MELPA)
  • magit-standup: Collect recent git commits for standup notes (MELPA)
  • nightpanel-theme: Saab instrument cluster colorscheme (MELPA)
  • org-roam-stats: Personal Knowledge Management Dashboard (MELPA)
  • remoto: Browse GitHub repos without cloning (MELPA)
  • restlib: Utility library for building REST clients (MELPA)
  • testcover-audit: Quantitative coverage statistics for testcover.el (MELPA)
  • typewriter: Turn Emacs into a text adder (GNU ELPA)

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!

Not much commentary this week, but plenty of cool stuff to explore!

• Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
  • Emacs Paris https://emacs-doctor.com/ Tue Sep 15 0830 America/Vancouver - 1030 America/Chicago - 1130 America/Toronto - 1530 Etc/UTC - 1730 Europe/Berlin - 2100 Asia/Kolkata - 2330 Asia/Singapore
  • PDX Emacs (in person) https://pdx.social/@howard/117147689957341583 - Tue Sept 15 6:00 pm in Portland, OR
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed Sep 16 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/UTC - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore
  • OrgDevMeetup https://bbb.emacsverse.org/rooms/orgdevmeetup Sat Sep 19 0100 America/Vancouver - 0300 America/Chicago - 0400 America/Toronto - 0800 Etc/UTC - 1000 Europe/Berlin - 1330 Asia/Kolkata - 1600 Asia/Singapore
  • EmacsSF (in person): coffee.el in SF https://www.meetup.com/emacs-sf/events/316535239/ Sat Sep 19 1100 America/Los_Angeles
  • Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat Sep 26 0130 America/Vancouver - 0330 America/Chicago - 0430 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/UTC - 1030 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore
• Emacs configuration:
  • Emacs Tip of the Day — Alex Carney (@alcarney) - news entries on splash screen
  • Personalized embark actions (@eslr)
  • Emacs Meow Motions (15:44)
  • Emacs Meow-mode (01:40:58)
• Emacs Lisp:
  • Notes on debugging standard and third-party Emacs code (@chris_siebenmann@robot.villas)
  • musing about the difficulty of doing one-off scripted edits in emacs lisp — paste.sr.ht (@zwol@masto.hackers.town)
  • TIL with-demoted-errors (@beetle_b@mastodon.xyz)
• Navigation:
  • Announcing multi-buf: a generalized buffer multiplexer for shells and other buffers (Reddit)
  • New Package: `modern-tab` (Reddit)
• Writing:
  • Irreal: Jinx Update Number …
• Org Mode:
  • Un-Learning the LMS: Prepping Courses with Org Mode - Output Error (@swrogers@social.lol)
  • org-grid (Reddit)
  • org-timegrid now works on Android Emacs (Reddit)
  • my dream setup (bonus: it’s free) (18:33) - Org
  • [New Release] Whisper Engine v2.0.0 - Org static site generator (@silentarchitect)
  • pjones/org-clock-dbus: Monitor org-clock from outside Emacs · GitHub (@devalot@hostux.social)
  • [notes] #33 bbb:OrgMeetup on Wed, August 12, 19:00 UTC+3 (@yantar92@fosstodon.org)
• Completion:
  • Why Emacs Consult async searches feel slow and how to speed them up? (consult-fd, consult-find, consult-grep, consult-ripgrep…) (Reddit, HN, lobste.rs)
• Coding:
  • Staging and Comitting using Magit (YouTube 12:14, Reddit)
  • James Dyer: Emacs 31 Does Git Worktrees Natively: How My vc Setup Compares
  • Further progress configuring java + eglot + dape (Reddit)
  • Eglot DAPE debugging setup for java (jdtls) in emacs (05:39)
  • maak.el: Lisp machine command runner, infinitely extensible, integrating nicely with Emacs, for Lisp power on your projects and automation at your fingertips (Reddit, HN)
  • More tree-sitter, more neocaml, more elisp · Perpetually Curious (@tsmc@hachyderm.io)
  • Meta Redux: Clojurists Together Update: July and August 2026
  • martianh/fj.el 0.39 - performance boost (@mousebot@todon.nl)
• Doom Emacs:
  • A Tour of Doom Emacs - Emacs Everywhere #1 (01:04:03)
• Multimedia:
  • Lars Ingebrigtsen: Emacs, movies and SQLite
  • supersonic.el Music player v0.5.0 update (YouTube 00:37, Reddit)
• Fun:
  • smear-cursor: a cursor trail for Emacs 32 (Reddit)
  • betweenle.el: an Emacs version of Betweenle (alphabetical word guessing) (Reddit)
• LLMs:
  • Another Claude Code integration for Emacs (Reddit)
  • Lars Ingebrigtsen: Some LLM spell check experiences
  • Lars Ingebrigtsen: Spellchecking Total Eclipse with an AI
• Community:
  • Fortnightly Tips, Tricks, and Questions — 2026-09-08 / week 36
  • Any Emacs users in Tokyo want to meet up? (@xenodium@indieweb.social)
  • September 2026 Emacs Meetup recap. (42:19, HN)
  • Einar Mostad: An apology to Protesilaos Stavrou and David Wilson (Protesilaos)
• Other:
  • Marcin Borkowski: Duplicating lines and other Emacs miscellanea
  • yank-transform-functions (@arensb@ooblick.com)
  • visual-regexp-rx: write regexp with rx notation in visual-regexp (Reddit)
  • Moving the Credentials I Kicked Out of init.el from Plaintext Files to Keychain | Masutaka's ChangeLog Memo (@masutaka@mstdn.love)
  • The Root Causes of Scrolling Lag in Emacs display-line-numbers-mode (Reddit, Irreal)
  • v31 for Windows heavily flagged by AV
• Emacs development:
  • Allow setting font-lock-keyword property using declare form
  • Improve where the replacement is previewed (bug#81583)
  • Use short symbols for query-replace-show-preview (bug#81583)
  • Rename `outline-xref' command to `outline-find-headings' (correction: C-c @ M-o)
• New packages:
  • elfeed-protocol-freshrss: FreshRSS protocol for elfeed (MELPA)
  • latex-to-svg-frontend: Preview LaTeX math in markup buffers as SVG (MELPA)
  • nonogram: Play nonogram (picross) puzzles with SVG graphics (MELPA)
  • org-clock-dbus: Monitor org-clock from D-Bus (MELPA)
  • single-window: Always open buffers in the current window (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!

This is a quick demonstration of using Orukeet as a speech recognition model inside Emacs. I'm recording this in real time on a Lenovo P52 laptop using only CPU. I can replay just one part of my recording. I can switch languages in the middle of recording too. Par exemple, maintenant je parle français. Seems promising.

Links/notes:

• oruk/orukeet · Hugging Face
• file:///home/sacha/vendor/orukeet/orukeet-server.py - I generated this with Google Gemini for a quick POC. It keeps the model in memory for slightly faster processing per segment.
• Run Orukeet locally: Python speech recognition | oruk
  • https://oruk.ai/examples/orukeet-local.py - Python script you can run from the command line to transcribe files.
• file:///home/sacha/vendor/orukeet/orukeet-local.py
• sachac/whisper.el - my fork of natrys/whisper.el
• sacha-whisper-continue - This lets me cue transcriptions of previous segments while continuing to record new ones. I like it because I tend to pause while thinking out loud. I can define the chunk that will get transcribed so that I don't end up with incomplete chunks or lost context.

The Emacs Carnival theme for September is "Games". Enjoy! Other really cool uses of graphics in Emacs: org-timegrid, poimap, canvas-minimap.

Also, public service announcement: doomemacs.com is not affiliated with doomemacs.org (see this Github discussion). Just in case someone reading this happens to be the person who made doomemacs.com, please consider setting up a redirect to doomemacs.org for more awesomeness and less confusion. Thank you!

And a reminder: EmacsConf - 2026 - Call for Participation target date for proposals Sept 18, conference is online Dec 12-13. Hope to see you there!

• Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
  • London Emacs (in person): Emacs London meetup https://www.meetup.com/london-emacs-hacking/events/316294538/ Tue Sep 8 1800 Europe/London
  • Emacs Berlin: In-Person-Only Emacs-Berlin Stammtisch https://emacs-berlin.org/ Tue Sep 8 1900 Europe/Berlin
  • OrgMeetup (virtual) https://orgmode.org/worg/orgmeetup.html Wed Sep 9 0900 America/Vancouver - 1100 America/Chicago - 1200 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/UTC - 1800 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Sep 10 0000 Asia/Singapore
  • Atelier Emacs Montpellier (in person) https://lebib.org/date/atelier-emacs Fri Sep 11 1800 Europe/Paris
  • PDX Emacs (in person) https://pdx.social/@howard/117147689957341583 - Tue Sept 15 6:00 pm in Portland, OR
  • M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed Sep 16 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/UTC - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore
• Beginner:
  • What's in the Emacs newcomers-presets theme? (April 2026, Irreal)
• Emacs configuration:
  • Guide to Deferred Package Loading with use-package (Optimizing Emacs Startup) (Reddit, Irreal)
  • auto-side-windows now on MELPA (Reddit)
  • Emacs Meep-mode Model Editing (57:41) modal editing
  • Casual Suite 3.0 (@kickingvegas@sfba.social)
  • wakib-emacs: Emacs for the rest of us: v2 released! (Reddit)
  • Bedrock 2.0 released! (Reddit, HN, Irreal)
• Emacs Lisp:
  • Extending imenu for elisp (YouTube, Reddit, @benleis@mathstodon.xyz)
• Appearance:
  • Zoom in/out slider on the modeline (Reddit)
  • the emacs theme I use: N Λ N O Theme (06:24)
  • [Theme] Vulkanite: 26 atmospheric dark theme variants for Emacs with Kanagawa-inspired balance (Reddit)
  • Protesilaos: Emacs: doric-themes version 1.3.0 (Irreal)
• Navigation:
  • windmove tinkering (@ljwrites@writeout.ink)
  • auto-tab-groups: tab groups that open and close with your commands (now on MELPA) (Reddit)
  • poimap.el - Visual buffer map with points of interest (Reddit)
  • canvas-minimap: a pixel-based minimap using Emacs 32's canvas image type (Reddit)
• Writing:
  • Lars Ingebrigtsen: Emacs Canz Spell Goodly Know
  • Thysrael/markdown-ts-appear: Reveal Markdown source at point and preview math in Emacs markdown-ts-mode · GitHub (@thysrael)
• Org Mode:
  • My Note Taking Setup With Emacs Org-Mode (33:26)
  • Writing year in review: My 2022 writing habit on Emacs | Semi-author-ized writer (@ljwrites@writeout.ink)
  • A beautiful SVG weekly calendar for Emacs, backed by Org files, with full mouse and keyboard support and an optional day strip for Org Agenda (Reddit)
  • Emacs Org-Mode PDF Quicksheet now available in PEL (Reddit)
  • org-draw is now available on MELPA! (YouTube, Reddit)
  • Improving the styling of emacs tables with tabularray (programming.dev)
  • org-table-widget: I finally found a way to make Org tables easier to read without changing how I edit them (Reddit)
  • Org development:
    • Factor out export-and-show in ox-latex.el and ox-beamer.el
• Coding:
  • James Dyer: Git Worktrees Without Leaving Built-in VC
  • Emacs Redux: Working with Git Worktrees in Magit
  • Dave Pearson: next-gh-pr.el v1.1.0
  • Joar von Arndt: Emacs does not need LSP
  • Magnus: Emacs salmagundi, 2026-09-06 emacs-multi-compile, consult-kith for jumping to tests/etc.
  • Xdebug for PHP on Emacs with Dape | Artful Robot (@artfulrobot@floss.social)
  • gaudy-cl: Colorful semantic font-locking for Common Lisp (Reddit)
• Shells:
  • cooked - a comint based terminal emulator (Reddit)
• Evil mode:
  • evil-twin: key-chords that actually behave under evil-mode (Reddit)
• Multimedia:
  • New package: supersonic.el (Music player for subsonic-compatible servers) (Reddit)
  • Integrating Emacs with Music Player (01:32:18)
  • Bioscoop demo: split screen to visualize color grading - YouTube (@danielsz.bsky.social)
• Fun:
  • andros/nonogram.el: Play nonogram puzzles (also known as picross, griddlers or hanjie) in Emacs (@andros@activity.andros.dev)
  • Raymond Zeitler: Games: The Emacs Carnival Post For September 2026
    • Sacha Chua: Emacs Carnival September 2026: Games
    • Playing with Emacs | Dilip's Log
  • Process Footage: Randomized Greeting from Dipskits Greets Me at My Terminal (05:23)
• LLMs:
  • Pimacs - An Emacs UI for Pi · Anantha Kumaran
  • El Yayster — a resident LLM that inhabits Emacs (HN)
• Community:
  • BEWARE: doomemacs.com is not associated with doomemacs (Reddit)
  • Question about things that surprised you about Emacs.
  • Emacs in fifty keystrokes five years later (2026 edition featuring meow and agent-shell)
  • Sacha Chua: Emacs Chat 30: Fabrice Niessen (en français, partie 2) (YouTube, 01:05:56)
  • Talking About Stuff I Use on Linux (not a dev, just a human perspective) (01:00:02) Doom Emacs at 15:24
• Other:
  • Jeremy Friesen: How I’m Feeling Emacs Command
  • The Emacs Security Settings that might Silently Compromise your System (Reddit)
  • I finally got Emacs to render Markdown tables properly (md-mode 0.4.1) — and I think the same trick can work for Org tables (Reddit)
  • epub-reader: an EPUB reader for Emacs that reflows, breaks CJK lines properly, and keeps highlights across re-layout (Reddit)
  • Marcin Borkowski: Pasting primary selection from keyboard
  • thkoch2001/rau: Emacs/Wayland based Window Manager in pure elisp with the help of River (HN)
  • Building Emacs into a systemd-sysext — Alex Carney (@alcarney@mastodon.social)
• Emacs development:
  • emacs-devel:
    • Re: master e630bc4fd72: ; Fix some recently added docs. - Dmitry Gutov - xref docs?
  • Improve presentation of query-replace-show-preview
  • Let 'query-replace-show-preview' be a function (bug#81583)
  • Make log-edit-headers-separator inherit from separator-line
  • Merge branch 'xref-find-by-kind'
• New packages:
  • agent-shell-math-renderer: Display-math rendering for agent-shell (MELPA)
  • api-credit: AI API balance in the modeline (MELPA)
  • auto-tab-groups: Simple auto tab group creator for specified commands (MELPA)
  • cursorfree: Complex editing through voice (MELPA)
  • material-icons: Material Icon Theme integration (MELPA)
  • metropolis-light-theme: Light theme based on the Metropolis Beamer palette (MELPA)
  • mode-line-path: Abbreviate file paths in the mode line (MELPA)
  • nix3: Frontend to experimental commands of Nix (MELPA)
  • org-roam-gt: Improvements for org-roam (MELPA)
  • pilish: Emacs frontend for pi coding agent (MELPA)
  • surveyor: Survey your code with LLM-generated diagrams (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!

*

One of the things I love about the Emacs community is people's sense of humour and whimsy. There's a grand tradition of people hiding Easter eggs in software, a bit of hidden fun that might make someone smile. But isn't this just bloat and frivolity? One might argue that the code that lets us play M-x tetris, dunnet, or doctor in Emacs is a waste of time and space compared to More Serious Things, but on the other hand, the Tetris source code could be a good jumping-off point if you find yourself wanting to make an interactive real-time simulation that displays graphical results. Want something more modern? Maybe DOOM on Emacs! Besides, the code for games isn't actually loaded until you choose to play it. It's okay for something to be fun by itself instead of needing to be productive. There's something wonderful about a tool that people choose not just for work but also for enjoyment.

Our adventure can start with Fun and Games in Emacs - Mastering Emacs or Emacs Is A Gaming Platform for Windows, Mac and Linux - YouTube, which cover a lot of classic built-ins. Here's a barrage of ideas; skip or explore anything you want: Pretend you're on a typewriter or turn on power mode or make c-c-combos. Go on to draw some ASCII art with artist-mode or with Emacs Lisp, and add some box shadows because why not. Maybe even use it to tell the time. Turn ASCII art into PNGs. Have fun with obscure calendars. Use kaomojis or write weird text. Explore the screensavers in zone and let them sprinkle characters through your buffer, take over your other frames, or teach you something new. Watch snow or a fireplace. Rotate cubes in ASCII or with hardware-accelerated graphics. Why limit yourself to cubes? Still, if you do want to stick to cubes, you can solve them. Go ahead, animate something. Play roleplaying games (also check out Howard Abrams's 2023 talk), rogue-likes, multi-user dungeons, classics, chess, trading, Klondike and lots of other card games, a racing game, Minesweeper, 2048, Boomshine, a Gameboy emulator (this other one handles NES). Simulate cities or physics or pets (here's another one) or life. Have fun with so many cats: timers, scrollcats, screensavers. Not a cat person? There's a parrot version and a fish version. Read comics or make memes. Guess words or find them. Learn other alphabets. Make art. You can even turn your Emacs into a Geiger counter for garbage collection.

Then take a step back and marvel at this community of people who try things out, tinker, follow that crazy idea that won't let go of them, and share what they came up with. If you write Emacs Lisp (or want to learn), rummage around in the source code for ideas on how to do things. See if you have any ideas that tickle your fancy. You might be able to get Emacs to do things text editors don't usually do! =)