Transcript of chat with Matei Candea about Emacs and AI

| emacs, ai

This is an edited transcript of my chat with Matei Candea, an anthropologist who is curious about the Emacs community and AI. Sharing it here with permission so that it becomes a thing I can refer to and in case it sparks further conversations. AI is a bit of a contentious topic, so I hope people will be patient and kind as we figure things out!

Related links:

Expand for the transcript

Matei is an anthropologist; ethnographic research

Matei: I'm an anthropologist. What I actually do for work is to do ethnographic research, to interview people. I've written a lot about scientific communities. For instance, I've written articles on behavioral scientists who work with animals and how they think about knowledge and technology and stuff. Completely independently of that, I kind of got into Emacs and got really excited. About four years later, I was, like, wait a minute, why don't I do an ethnography of Emacs as a community?

Sacha: Really cool people.

Matei: Right? Really cool people.

Curious about Emacs as a community in the time of AI

Matei: I think what I'm really saying is Emacs as a community in the time of AI and how that's shifting or not shifting how people are using it, and what it does. I've spoken to Prot on Monday. That was the first interview I did, and we had a great chat. I basically asked him how he got into Emacs and what it meant to him and what his relationship is to the community and stuff, and then a bit about AI and then a bit about what he feels are the interactions between the two. That's broadly speaking what I would be interested in doing with you. If you think there's a broader conversation, we could live stream and have an actual chat about how people use Emacs. By the way, I'm very happy also to tell you where my own trajectory was that I got into Emacs weirdly and randomly about a year before ChatGPT really hit the mainstream. The thing that you read by me was written because me and Ella together were trying to figure out Cambridge's response to AI as a university. Like, what are we going to do about it? If I'm going to be talking about that, I need to know how it works. But I don't want to use AI in my own actual work or in my teaching, because I think it's a bit dodgy. I don't really like it. Why don't I just do it with this kind of side project I've got, which is learning Emacs, right? And the weird paradoxical thing was that I now basically kind of live in Emacs. My email is mu4e. If you saw my screen now, the notes are basically a narrowed Org buffer with questions. Everything's email. But I don't think I could have got there that fast if it hadn't been for the fact that I started asking ChatGPT, like, "Oh, this isn't working. Can you just write me a defun that does this?" I'm not completely vibe coding. I'm trying to learn Elisp at the same time, but I'm in this weird position where... Anyway, this is why for me it raised these questions of: what does learning Emacs in the time of AI mean? As you can probably gather from the manifesto, I'm not pushing it at all. I'm really ambivalent about the use of AI. Anyway, would you be happy to do an interview like I did with Prot?

Sacha: Yeah, we can certainly do that. In addition to whatever I can share from my personal experiences, I think your interest in understanding and describing the community and the culture and how it's interacting with this AI thing, I think it'll offer a perspective that is different from what you usually see, because Emacs users have had this long tradition of fiddling with things and making it really malleable and fitting it to them and figuring this out in dialogue. It's figuring out in dialogue with themselves as they figure out their workflows, with the software as they learn from the code, with other people, with resources on the internet not necessarily attached to specific people. That's got a really long history. It's really interesting to see how AI both has plus sides and minus sides in this whole mix. It definitely, I think, will offer some insight that you won't hear with the frothy AI hype that other communities have. It's all very interesting.

Matei: Amazing. Let's start with a general kind of interview thing.

How did I first get into Emacs

Matei: How did you first get into Emacs?

Sacha: I was going through all the books in my university library about computer science. One of them was Unix Power Tools. I was like, there's this chapter on Emacs, and it mentions Tetris and other things. What is going on here? I tried it. It was great. I liked it. Then in fourth year or so, my screen stopped working. I didn't want to replace it. But there was Emacspeak. I was amazed. Lots of people had put together Emacs so I could use the computer with a broken screen. I could still read it periodically, if I tilted it and kind of looked at the low contrast thing… The speech synthesis worked just fine. I'm going to program this way. I'll plug into a monitor when I'm back in my room. But if I'm out and about, I have this other way to do it. Something that maybe most programs would not have anticipated, but because somebody had built it for themselves, it was something I could use. Beffore I got into Emacsspeak, I got into Planner Mode because I was a university student and I was taking notes. Planner Mode was an easy way for me to keep track of tasks. It was more flexible than other to-do managers. It's one of the packages that was popular before Org Mode.

Matei: Right, right.

Sacha: I started using that to write my blog. Blogs had just been invented around then. I was figuring out, how do I export RSS out of this? I was able to customize it to do that. I liked it so much I emailed John Wiegley, who had created Planner Mode. I said, hey, I can help you fix bugs. He said, great, you're the new maintainer now. Which was actually very good for me because I was a university student in the Philippines, and Philippines, and normally we don't get to work on anything really cool. Suddenly I was in this global community of people. There was a mailing list. People would send in questions or feature requests. I would share the things that I was working on. They were very, very patient with me. Like that one time, one of my changes accidentally deleted somebody's notes and they were still nice to me afterwards. The community has always been part of how I experience Emacs. Learning in public has also always been part of how I've been figuring out what I can do with it and changing it to fit my needs. It's very idiosyncratic as they are sometimes, has also always been part of my experience of Emacs.

Matei: When did this start?

Sacha: Very shortly after I started Emacs, I started blogging with it. My first blog post from that is 2001.

Matei: Right. You were studying computer science?

Sacha: I was studying computer science, yes.

Matei: Are you a computer scientist now? What do you do when you're not doing Emacs?

Sacha: Most of the time, I'm still focused on full-time parenting, which is why I'm going over to the freezer now to remember to put yogurt in the freezer. I do a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of consulting, but consulting, but for the last 10 years or so, I've just been focused on parenting. Playing with Emacs and being in touch with the Emacs community has been one of the ways that I've kind of kept sane. I've enjoyed the intellectual puzzles of: I have this thing that I want to do, how do I do it with code in ways that I can fit into five minutes here, ten minutes there of my life.

Matei: Do you do any other coding or just Elisp?

Sacha: JavaScript, Python on occasion. Some of my consulting involves making little JavaScript prototypes for ideas that my client has, but it's really just an hour a week, maybe less. But for fun, I still write a bit of JavaScript and Python. Emacs Lisp, however, is what I usually write because it's so much easier to do things when you've got the full editor with you.

Matei: Yes, that makes sense. I've got a million questions, but I'm going to try and do them in order. You've said a little bit about this already, but

What do you love about Emacs?

Matei: what do you love about Emacs?

Sacha: You can come up with a crazy idea and you can actually make it happen. So, for example, I've been doing a lot of conversations, interviewing people or working with my sister's interviews. I always like turning these into text because text is a lot more searchable. Chapters and things like that too, right, so that people can jump to just the part they're interested in. I don't know how other tools do it, but I love the fact that I can modify Org Mode so that I can capture timestamps. Wall-clock time is easier for me to work with. I can say, okay, while I'm typing, I just use an abbreviation to put in the timestamp that's the current time and my rough notes. I have another piece of code that translates that into offsets from the start of the video based on YouTube's live stream or the file name of the video. Then I can paste that into the subtitle file so that it automatically puts the chapters in roughly the right places. As I come up with little workflow ideas, I can actually implement them.

Community

Sacha: I also love the community of it. Looking through the blog posts or as I put together Emacs News every week, there's always all these interesting examples from people who are asking the same questions about about "What is it I want to do?" and "How can I do it 0.5% better?" They write these little functions. I'm like, oh, that is a fantastic idea. I get to absorb that into my life. Because I'm seeing it in the context of their blog post or their video, you get a glimpse of other people's lives as expressed through code, because all of the code is very personal. That is one of the things that is good about the fact that people are using AI sometimes to generate this code. They can make things that things that punch above their weight. A newcomer to Emacs can have customized functions that let you fully appreciate its power. But on the other hand, if the AI is just generating this code, you don't get a sense of like, where's the blog post this is coming from? Or who would I talk to to keep up with other crazy ideas they come up with? You're limited to just your ideas. Then there's the whole thing about license-washing. Most of the people release their code under GPL because it's Emacs, but the large language models never mention that. They never say, you also have the right to go and share this and modify this and build on top of it and contribute back to the community. Sometimes it doesn't feel right, the code. It doesn't quite get the conventions and the idioms yet. So the things that I love about Emacs are generally the fact that it can fit me like a glove and it's got this community of people who are also exploring what is possible as crazy as ideas sometimes get. There's always some way to hack it in.

Do you know how big the community is?

Matei:

Do you know how big the community is?

Sacha: I have no idea. We generally feel like it's a lot smaller than VS Code and probably a lot smaller than Vim. It depends, of course, on if you're talking about percentage, it depends also on... There's a lot of Clojure developers using it, because it's the standard Clojure way of doing things, but there are probably a lot fewer Java or JavaScript people using it because a lot of people are in VS Code instead. I used to do Google Analytics tracking on my website, but I stripped all of that out because cookies and tracking and all of that. When people ask me how many people read this stuff, I have no idea, but I do know that every time I look for Emacs News, I'm delighted by the breadth that I come across. To me, it feels like there's a thriving community that's large enough for my interests.

Matei: Cool. You're the second person I've actually spoken to. The first person was Protesilaos. I'm struck by the fact that from a sample of two, I've got two people who are not based in the US, who are super international, and also who are not developers.

Sacha: That is a fantastic thing about it. I love that we have researchers and sourdough bakers and knitters. Of course, the programming part is still there, but a lot of people end up getting into some kind of programming because of Emacs. Emacs is the only thing they ever code, and they don't even think of it as coding. It's just like, I do this, but I wanted to be able to do this, so I learned how to do Org Mode and source blocks, and that's all I can do, but it's great. I think that's really interesting because when you talk to people about their origin stories with Emacs… Sure, of course, you have the pockets of people who are like, I'm a computer science student and my professor said use this, so I'm using this, and so forth. But then you get these random high school music students who are like, oh, yeah, I just saw this video and I thought it looked really cool, so I taught myself how to do that. I don't know anybody else who uses it in real life, but I like it. Musicians using it live to do performance... Where are these people coming from? But they come across it, and it just strikes a chord with them, deep in their souls. It appeals to a certain tinkerer type, I guess. They just continue with it. They get stuck. Sometimes they leave and they come back, and all that stuff… But the breadth is one of my favorite things about Emacs.

Matei: Do you think that most of the people in the community are probably developers? Because when you were saying the community, you compared it to Vim and VS Code, which is to think of it really as an IDE kind of thing.

Sacha: That's usually what people talk about, right? Because usually when people are thinking, how popular is this, they're stacking it up against developer tools because those are the surveys that the development websites do. Stack Overflow or State of Clojure or whatever. They'll ask people, “What editor do you use?” But given Emacs' surprising popularity among people who are, for example, diagnosed with ADHD and find that Org Mode is the only way they can manage their brains…

Matei: Is that a thing? That's really interesting.

Sacha: In a number of Reddit threads that I've seen, people are like, yeah, I'm not a programmer, but Org Mode is the only way that I've figured out how to manage my brain. Or people will come to Emacs from something else specifically for Org Mode because of the way that it can help them manage their tasks or agenda, because they can sculpt it to fit what their specific workflow could be. It's amazing. Of course, we've got the writers and the researchers who are like, "I love publishing beautifully typeset things, but I don't like working with LaTeX all that much, so let me just figure out the template once."

Matei: Yeah, totally. I really came to Emacs because I was looking for an outliner. I'd been writing in Markdown for a while. I was really getting sick of the heavy Word stuff. And I was, like, Org Mode, omg, it's amazing! Then from there, I was bitten.

Do you have any frustrations with Emacs?

Matei:

Do you have any frustrations with Emacs?

Sacha: I would like to have more time in the day to fiddle with things. In terms of the balance between fiddling with my config and doing the thing that I want to do, if I sandwich it so that I do my 5 to 15 minutes of Emacs fiddling at the start, then I'm motivated to go through the task because I want to test that my improvement works. Then it becomes a good balance for me. I don't spend all the time feeling like I'm yak shaving, and I don't spend the time struggling with workflow because I didn't take the time to automate it. I would like to have more time, because I always come up with more ideas in the middle of something. I know this is possible. I just have to sit down and do it, and it'll be great. But okay, I have to wait till my next 5 to 15 minute window where I can fiddle with it again. The other thing that I've been trying to figure out is: how do you help people develop that intuition for how to do things, how to make Emacs do things? We see a lot of people come into the community. They might get stuck on some things. The tutorial is very useful, but it can be overwhelming. The whole Emacs thing can be very overwhelming for people. How you help people get through that part is something that's of great interest to me. Bringing it back to AI and large language models, the fact that people can sometimes have a conversation with this endlessly patient tutor where they might be too embarrassed to ask their questions on a mailing list or a forum, I think that's fantastic. But also, going to your manifesto's points about learning by doing and education and the eureka moment, we also don't want this quick and easy help to rob people of the understanding that they get from looking at it and tweaking the code or learning how to read through the source code themselves. There's just so much there that I would hate for people to just get stuck in the “please generate this code for me" level rather than be able to learn this is how I start learning from other people's source code so that I can come up with more ideas.

Matei: That's right. That's also what I think basically. Here's an interesting question.

Would you ever leave Emacs?

Matei:

Would you ever leave Emacs?

Sacha: I cannot imagine an editor at the moment that would let me get away with nearly half of the things that I do, but maybe even less. Right now, I've got so many odd little customizations for it. For example, on my phone, I'll use Orgzly Revived to capture a quick note so that I can go back into Emacs later and do it. But even though I'm comfortable programming in JavaScript and Python, and there are lots of tools available there, the interactive interface part of things is something that I don't see any other program give me the same kind of platform of support or building blocks to play with. Who knows? If some day, this thing manages to support all of my hacks built on hacks and gives me that same kind of feedback loop, but it's also multithreaded and graphical and whatever, I might give it a try. But at the moment since I can get away with so much in Emacs and I know that people behind the scenes are working on adding even more to it, it's okay, long term. It's been around for 40 years. It'll be around for... Probably it'll outlive me. I don't have to worry too much about giving up on it.

How important for you is the free software bit of Emacs?

Matei:

How important for you is the free software bit of Emacs?

 I was on Mac when I got into Emacs. I went to GNU Emacs to download it and it said, we made this available to people on proprietary systems in order to teach you to free yourself. I was like, huh? I downloaded it and I'm now running Arch Linux. It definitely worked. Richard Stallman has downloaded himself into my brain. How much is the free software bit of it important to you in using Emacs?

Sacha: I'm not a purist. I will happily be the interface using the non-free things. For example, when we were doing EmacsConf, the first few years before Whisper was around, I was the one doing like, okay, fine, YouTube has this subtitling thing that we can grab the stuff from. Yeah, it's a non-free service, but I will happily take advantage of it in order to make the information more free, and things like that. I use both free and non-free things, but I love the single-minded focus that a lot of people have on freedom and making sure that other people enjoy these rights. For example, in the Emacs community, a surprising number refuse to use JavaScript because a lot of JavaScript is non-free software. I want to make sure that my website still makes sense without JavaScript. EmacsConf, there are ways to participate even participate even without JavaScript. You can use MPV to watch the stream. It's all free software. You can use IRC to chat. All that stuff is very important to people, and that's great. I love the fact that for a lot of people, they really care about making sure other people can continue to enjoy these freedoms to modify things and to build on it. Every so often someone comes into the Emacs community and they're like, oh yeah, I want to make money making packages here. I'm going to put my package behind a paywall. You've got to send me a donation in order to use it. Then they get smacked down so hard. Usually the way it works is someone will then, you know, take a look at their README and say, okay, that looks vibe-coded. I can do it faster and I'll do it for free. That's the usual response to this stuff. Yeah, here's the thing that you're trying to sell, but it's free.

Matei: So that never works. I was struck by this. It seems to be so absolutely immune to takeover by proprietary stuff.

Sacha: I mean, it's a startup hustle mentality in other communities, but in Emacs, it does not fly. Mostly because people are, like, are, like, I know the tools you're using, I can do that better myself. There are people who do get sustained by donations from Emacs community members, but it generally is more of a "I appreciate your work and I will send you this voluntary donation" instead of your paywalling your stuff behind this thing, which feels very much against the ethos of the Emacs community. It's been interesting to see the AI hustle "software as a service or product type" thing try to infiltrate the Emacs community, and they are having none of it.

Matei: Interesting. Why do you think it's so resilient to that?

Sacha: Because we've had such a long tradition of sharing things for free, building on top of things that people have freely shared: not just like free as in beer, but free as in you've got the source code, you've got all the rights to do whatever you want with it, including for free. That's baked into the community. Any time someone comes in and tries to say, oh yeah, I've got this commercial packaging of Emacs, it's all rights reserved, people are like, yeah, there's probably a GPL violation right there, so let's go.

Matei: Cool.

How do you explain your passion for Emacs to non-Emacs users?

Matei: How do you explain your passion for Emacs to non-Emacs users?

Sacha: I don't usually. I love the fact that I can tinker with it, right? If it clicks for people, it clicks. But if it doesn't click for people and they don't necessarily want or need that, then it's okay for them to use something else. I love the fact that people are using or even shifting to other editors. For example, we've had a couple of people announce that they're leaving Emacs recently because vibe coding has made it possible for them to build native applications and they don't have to build it on top of Emacs anymore. They can finally get their Vim config set up the way that they wanted to because the LLM can generate that stuff for them. Whereas in Emacs, it would have been a lot easier to write it themselves, but now they can do it with VS Code or whatever. It's great because the more people are experimenting with interesting ideas, even outside Emacs, the more we get to steal those ideas and then bring them back. You see a lot of this sometimes. You see people re-implementing cool ideas from other editors or other tools. To me, it's totally okay if other people use something else, especially if they tell me the cool stuff that they think only that editor can do. Because I'm like, that sounds like an interesting feature. Do tell me more. There was an interesting talk by Jeremy Friesen in either last EmacsConf or the one before that, about mentoring and how he's no longer trying to push people to use Emacs. He wants to share the general workflow practices he's using. If he's pair programming with someone, he might say, how do you jump to a specific function definition? They might show him something, or they might realize that's a thing. I can go look in my editor how to do that. He might show, this is how I do it. That's the general idea. Sometimes when people start talking workflow, then talking workflow, then talking workflow, then people who are not using Emacs will go, "That looks really cool. How do I do that?" Then that?" Then you send them down the path of: get it installed, go through the tutorial, that sort of stuff. But it always helps to have that specific reason, the thing that they want to be able to do. For me, for example, I love the way that Org Mode lets me have my notes and the code and the links. It's all one big thing. I don't have to think about, oh, okay, I have to do everything in Python because that's what Jupyter does. I can do some of it in Emacs Lisp, and I can do some of it in shell scripts, and I can do some of it in JavaScript or Python. It's like all this big mess Org Babel kind of thing. Yeah, because your brain might not be in tune with all those different languages, but it works for me. If other people see that and they say, I want to do that too, then that's when you help them get into Emacs. But aside from that, I don't talk to people in elevators and say, have you heard the good news?

Matei: I was wondering even more broadly than kind of people who are already coding with a different editor. To tell you a story... My cousin is also an anthropologist. He's an anthropologist in France. I've known for years that he was into Linux and free software and stuff. When I got into Emacs, he said, you know I've been doing Emacs for 10 years. I was like, what? How? What? And he'd never told me. I realize now, having been doing Emacs for four years, I can't talk to my colleagues and friends about it because they look over my shoulder and it's like, what are you doing? This looks like it's from the 1980s. Even trying to explain to people what Emacs is... I don't mean coders, I just mean people. My cousin said, yeah, I talk to people about free software all the time. I've never talked to anyone about Emacs. It's just so weird.

Sacha: I think that's why the community is so important, right? I aggregate a lot of blogs on Planet Emacslife on Planet Emacslife so people can bump into each other. There are a lot of meetups, some of which we host on BigBlueButton... There are meetups, by the way. If you check under Emacs News, there's actually a very active London meetup.

Matei: I haven't yet.

To what extent do people meet in person with Emacs?

Matei: To what extent do people meet in person with Emacs?

Sacha: Apparently, a lot of people meet in person whenever they're lucky enough to get a sense that there are actually other people in their general geographic location who are interested in this. But there are also a lot of people who meet online. Org Meetup has a meetup every month that has about 20 people in it. Emacs Berlin has a meetup that's hybrid, and so it's both in person and online. There's Emacs Asia Pacific. There's a whole list of meetups in Emacs News, which is that newsletter that I do every week. I list upcoming events, and there's also a link there to the calendar as well as to the user groups page which lists by region. There are a lot of people getting together about Emacs because a lot of times, you learn about Emacs by looking over someone's shoulder, physical or virtual, right? This is how you learn about things that you would not have even thought of asking an AI about. They're doing a demonstration or they're doing a video, and you're like, what is that thing that you just did? They had no plans to talk about it because it's just something they take for granted. It's a keyword shortcut or a command. It's just part of the workflow. They don't think about it anymore. Or it's even as simple as "What's that theme? What's that font?" Because people can see it, can see somebody doing stuff with Emacs, they get inspired to learn more and to adopt that into their workflow. That is one of the things that I love about how people learn Emacs. It's very convivial, right?

Matei: Yeah.

Learning in public

Matei: You said the phrase earlier: learning in public. In one sense, that sounds scary. Learning in public, making mistakes in public and stuff. You said it as a really good thing. Tell me more about learning in public.

Sacha: My favorite kinds of blog posts is when I'm proud of myself for figuring out something clever. Like, okay, here's this function function to do this thing. I had to figure it out. It was hard. It took like a day or two to do it. Then someone comes by in the comments and says, oh yeah, that's built in.

Matei: Yeah, I've been there.

Sacha: "You just change this variable." It happens so often. The reason is because Emacs is so big, right? There are variables and functions that I would not think of coming across. Maybe I'm not using the right words to search for them, or whatever. If you add to that the entire package ecosystem and as well as the things that are not people's packaged code, snippets in people's config and whatnot... Chances are someone has come across the same problem that I'm thinking about and has come up with a more elegant solution for it. If I'm not using the same words, I might not find it. One of the things that I like about large language models is that even if I use my words, sometimes it will suggest something that does that translation, right? It's an approximate search. But even if I don't have that, if I'm writing about something, then I have that opportunity for somebody to say, oh yeah, you should check this out. Or several years later, someone might also say, that is exactly what I was trying to do. I'm taking your code. I've built something on top of it to make it even better. For me, writing about what I'm learning with Emacs is a great way to learn even more from the community. I keep trying to convince people, yes, please, even if you're a beginner, write about what you're learning, because it's a great way to crystallize that knowledge for yourself, become part of the community and part of the conversations, and learn about things that you would not have thought of asking about.

Matei: Well, I'm following your example. I'm trying to write my config in Org Babel at the moment, partly as a way to say, wait a minute, what is this thing? How does it work? It's so useful. But one thing I was wondering, and it's partly also just a practical question,

Disclaimers

Matei: I've never tried to contribute or to post anything on anything, partly because I worry that my stuff is crap.

Sacha: If you put a disclaimer, that way they know they're reading it for the idea, but not necessarily the Emacs Lisp style. That's fine with me too. There are a lot of people who are like, you know, it's got too many emojis in it, I'm not going to read that. I'm going to focus my time reading something else that's been handcrafted and all that stuff. That's fine too. There's room for all sorts of people and all sorts of approaches to this. Sometimes even just the idea of something is already valuable, that valuable, that somebody thought of saying, hey, my workflow would be better if it could just do this. If there's a screenshot, even better, right? You can see how it works. Screenshot or video or animated GIF. Because then they can go and write the code that they would have to do anyway. Because of course, they've got their own personalized setup. You know, the code that you write will not mesh perfectly with their particular setup. There's this whole… There's this Lisp curse essay that's sort of related to…

Matei: I was going to ask you about that.

Sacha: We've all got our ecosystems of our own code and absorbing something into it is sometimes hard. But if you start with even just the idea that somebody else has written about, whether or not you take their actual code for it or use their code as a building block, that is already useful and interesting. Again, you don't have to be Bozhidar Batsov or Omar Antolin to be able to contribute at that level. Even at the beginner level, you could just be like, I just need to do this thing and it's driving me crazy to do it manually all the time. Then I'm like, you can do that non-manually? Oh yeah, we should do that.

Matei: Cool. Just to come back to the question about talking to other people about Emacs, do you ever talk to people who are not programmers?

Do you ever talk to family and friends about Emacs?

Matei: Do you ever talk to family and friends about Emacs? Do you ever have to explain what this thing is that you're doing or do you just not?

Sacha: Well, my kiddo is 10, and she's like, can you set me up a kid Emacs? Because she sees me like... Yes! Clearly something of great interest to me. I said, maybe. She does a little bit of vibe coding with Claude as she generates interactive stories. She was trying to track down a syntax error at some point. I was like, can I just install Emacs on your computer so I can do... And she said no. My husband uses Vim. Org Mode at some point, so he found the appropriate Vim plug-in for it. That was amazing. I don't talk to people about editor choices. I just do the stuff that I do. When I write about it, sometimes people will come across it, again, coming from completely different backgrounds. They'll be like, oh yeah, I also need to edit transcripts. What is this Emacs thing? And I'm like, well, it's a very long road, but it's a lot of fun and it's worth it. If you do want to get into it, here's some ways to get started. I don't know. But you can look at the videos first to see whether it might be something that resonates with you.

Matei: Yeah. No, I'm the same. I'm very cautious. I've seen that. The learning curve thing is so cool. My kids are like, your computer used to be so pretty when it was a Mac and now it just looks really ugly. I'm like, oh, if you knew. It's so much more beautiful now, but never mind. Cool. We've talked a lot about AI actually already.

Do you ever use AI in chatbots for anything else?

Matei: Do you ever use AI in chatbots for anything else?

Sacha: Well, I'm learning French at the moment. In this case, the kind of the regression to the mean that AI does is very useful for me because I need to know, what is the common word choice here? How do I get the grammar to do the thing? I don't really want to spend an hour of a relatively expensive tutor's time picking apart my subject-verb agreement or my nouns agreeing in plurality with the verbs and stuff like that. It's reasonably acceptable to use large language models for language feedback. That makes sense. In terms of coding, I'm not there yet. Quite a few people are very enthusiastic about it. Even in Emacs, some people are like, "I don't write my code anymore. I just vibe the whole thing." I love the way that it gets a lot of people to make things that they would not otherwise have the time or effort or experience to do, but on the other hand also, it hallucinates a lot of things. It gets me excited: oh there's a variable or function specifically for this? No! It doesn't exist. I can make it exist, so it's a little less frustrating for me, because I can say, you know, that does make sense. I can write that. I can fill in the blanks for it. But 9 times out of 10, I'll be like, no, no, go back and do the proper search. One out of 10 times, it'll tell me, oh yeah, there is this function and it will exist, exist, then I'm like, okay, great, I want to use that, because I wouldn't have otherwise come across it. But I cannot use it to generate a lot of code because I get this urge to just rewrite things to fit the way I want. I just use it like… it suggests ideas. It acts kind of like a search engine that gets things wrong most of the time. I'll just take the interesting parts of that and do it myself. Aside from that, I haven't really dug into it to the extent that other people have. I am happy to take a step back and see how this all shakes out because with the shake-up in pricing and all the externalized costs that are slowly being factored in, I'm not going to build a house of cards on it.

Matei: Yeah, that's very wise, I think. How do you feel about the fact that these models have been trained on all these free conversations? They just suck up all this stuff that people have been doing for 40 years. Is that a problem in and of itself?

Sacha: It's interesting in the particular case of Emacs. As I mentioned, the vast majority of Emacs Lisp is released under either the GPL or the MIT license or even public domain because people in Emacs really care about sharing stuff and they want other people to do it. It's not like, oh, we've got this proprietary code and it's been stolen away from us, it's us, it's not available for other people. The fact that we're treating AI-generated code as non-copyrightable, it's okay that it's sort of out there. It would be nice to be able to say, hey, this stuff is GPL, so if you're going to build on it, please share it under the same licenses. But in terms of the way that many people use it for personal configuration and learning, I'm okay with that. I know that other people in the community have stronger stances, and that's also okay. Because there's no attribution, there's no link back to the person. The licensing doesn't require [lots of] attribution. You don't have to say, oh yeah, this config was inspired by these people and at these links. You don't have to do that, but it would be nice to be able to follow those links back to the people. That would be nice. The ability for more people to learn from this stuff is good. If we can encourage them to share what they're figuring out with other people, that's also good.

Matei: So is the problem less about kind of taking intellectual property and more about

Not breaking connections to people

Matei: breaking connections to people or like breaking these traceable connections to other people in the community?

Sacha: That's the part that I'm interested in and care about, because I feel the community experience of Emacs is very interesting. All the other stuff, there are people who are far smarter than me and have focused on... This is above my pay grade, right? Actually working out intellectual property, what that means. A lot of people think about copyright and copyleft and that stuff. I will leave that to them to sort all of the ethics after that one. I just care about making sure people can feel like they're learning, feel like they're welcome, and can find the ways forward both with assistance of large language models if they want to, but also connecting with real people who they can learn from too.

Matei: Yeah, super. I think that's sort of the questions I had, really. I'm sure I'm going to have a million other questions. I might email you back about this. Did you have any questions for me?

Education and ethics and eureka

Sacha: I love now knowing that you were writing your manifesto with that experience of being an Emacs user in mind, because the way that the education and ethics and eureka was like, that actually lines up precisely with the Emacs community and what it's like and what we care about. I would love to explore this in future conversations and see how we can help people navigate this time. There's a lot of froth about AI, and the business world is losing their heads over this collectively. The programmers in industry either find it useful but also, in general, seem to have a fairly worse experience. This is not where we should be using this. This is not how this is supposed to be turning out. It should not be leading to more unhappiness, but it is. It would be interesting to sort out both in the society level, but also in the individual level, as people make their own choices about what to use and how much to use it for, and also the impact, even if they're not making those choices themselves. I think the general sense now, for at least Emacs and Org Mode, is "we're not going to accept LLM-generated contributions because we've got to have a person who can stand behind the code." We so far have been safe from the inundation of generated pull requests that are plaguing other open source projects. It's definitely something to watch out for. But there is some tension. People are proud of their vibe-coded projects, but on the other hand, people are like, well, it takes 5 minutes or 15 minutes to generate this, and because it's not really maintainable, people will lose interest in it after their 15 minutes of fame on Reddit with their nice screenshots and all that. It's not going to keep moving forward.

Matei: Is that kind of like a… version of the Curse of Lisp written large? Everyone's just going to write their own programs at home and no one's going to be talking to each other anymore.

Sacha: It is very similar to that. that. It can be a problem. It can be an opportunity. It's not one or the other yet. We're figuring out as a community and as individuals how to navigate this. We have this long history of people not actually being able to adopt to adopt someone else's code off the shelf. It's amazing when someone actually puts together a package that can cut across a large variety of use cases. It takes a lot of work to get there, but things like Magit and Org Mode, how do these things happen? Yeah, it's fantastic. I love the fact that we can look at things like consult and vertico... The fact that they can work for a lot of people is amazing. It's actually pretty rare in the Emacs community. But for the most part, we are in our little fiefdoms and we have to make an effort to do that kind of connection. Whether or not the other person is using vibe-coded code doesn't matter that much. There's still that barrier. Higher barrier if you're dealing with vibe code because they don't understand it and you don't understand it and the code is hard to read. The ideas can be transmitted over blog posts and videos. But at the same time, the fact that more people like you can use this to start to experience the power of Emacs, the customizability of it, and can then go on to imagine, hey, is this what software could be? Can it be personal? Can it be malleable? Can I say, "No company is going to anticipate this particular need, but I can make it for myself."? I think that's really worth it. If the tools will help us get there, and if we can find our own balance of ethics that are okay with this... Some people might say, no, definitely not for me, even if it gives me the power. Some people were like, I just want to get this stuff working. That's cool, too. We get to see how that all works out.

Matei: It's interesting. I've written this paper for which I gave a talk in Oxford a couple of weeks ago about this, really for anthropologists. It's anthropologists. It's very interesting that a lot of the things we were talking about today, I thought that might be the case on some of these things. It's partly thinking about the way in which AI, ChatGPT, whatever, kind of interferes, becomes like a broker between the community and the individual. So the good side of it is that you're never going to be told to go and read the manual, right? It's always going to say, "Yeah, sure, that's great." But the bad thing is, you're never going to go and read the manual. That's the problem, right? But what I said at the end of it and I don't know whether this resonates at all, but I said now that I'm becoming aware that this is a problem, the paradox that I got into Emacs for the community and yet, in a way, I'm being moved away from the community. Increasingly, now, I will ask not "write this code for me" but "explain to me why this code doesn't work" or "explain to me why my problem could be done differently," and even more than that, not even "explain to me this" but "suggest to me how I could post this on a forum." I'm a bit worried about posting on a forum in case someone turns around and says, that's stupid. Claude or someone can say, if you write it like that, some people might find it interesting. Does that feel like a different kind of use of AI maybe?

Sacha: It does, and I encourage the more reflective use of it. For example, you might say, instead of generating this code, you might say, can you help me figure out what it is that I actually want to have in my workflow? Can you ask me questions to help me figure out how to do this or how to break it down into smaller tasks? Then that might be a more useful way of doing it. Sometimes people respond better when something is asking them questions. That is possibly an interesting use of AI.

Matei: Amazing. Sacha, thank you so much for your time.

Future conversations

Matei: Having had this conversation, do you think there's matter here for some kind of live stream or something, maybe with other people who want to talk about this stuff?

Sacha: In fact, if you wanted to take this recording and plop it somewhere public, I am totally fine with that. Learning out loud is how we have these conversations grow, right? The conversation is like this brain dump of ideas, and if we want to start unpacking those ideas and exploring them through all the multifaceted perspectives that we have in the Emacs community, other anthropologists or people who are interested in the philosophy of it, there's people who have so much deep experience in things that I have no idea. I would love for them to be able to say, let's take this facet of this conversation and build on it and explore that one. I am totally okay with both sharing this conversation, if you want to, as well as having other conversations that other people might be able to ripple out from.

Matei: Fantastic. I mentioned to Protesilaos that we're going to have this chat, and he said, you know, if you want to at some point organize a discussion over this kind of stuff, he'd be very happy to be involved.

Sacha: I've been experimenting with making myself ask people for help. Prot has coaching sessions. If our schedules can line up, then I can schedule a three-way conversation. It can be live and we can build on the ideas that you might have or follow-up questions that you might have, and then we can see if other people do as well. So that could be good. I'm looking forward to hearing about your insights. I would love to see where this goes. I think the Emacs community is definitely worth studying. I think that there are insights here that you might not otherwise come across in more specialized, more focused... Like, just developers or whatever, or more focused on closed source. There's something interesting about this mix of Emacs and AI and plain text and all that stuff. I would love to see where this goes.

Matei: Amazing. Thank you very much.

Sacha: All right. Bye.

Matei: Bye.

View Org source for this post
You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
More posts about emacs, ai

Emacs Carnival May 2026 wrap-up: "May I recommend..."

| emacs, community

: Thanks to everyone who participated! I've included the links below.

It's May and I like puns, so I'm going to suggest "May I recommend…" as our Emacs Carnival theme this month, building on lively conversations about people's favourite packages on lobste.rs, Reddit, and Hacker News. Let's go beyond packages and talk workflows, tips, practices, perspectives… whatever you'd recommend!

It was pretty nice having a wiki page that people could edit without needing to wait for me, so if you write about this topic, feel free to edit the wiki page and add your link. If you run into problems doing that, please e-mail me and I can add the link for you.

People have already started sharing their recommendations:

(Still got ideas, just a bit late? Let me know and I can add it here as well as to Emacs News!)

View Org source for this post
You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
More posts about emacs, community

2026-06-01 Emacs news

| emacs, emacs-news

There were 17 posts in the in the May carnival topic "May I recommend", very cool! Looking for something to write about next? Check out the June theme Underappreciated Emacs Built-ins hosted by Ross A. Baker.

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!

View Org source for this post
You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
More posts about emacs, emacs-news

La semaine du 18 au 24 mai

| french

lundi 18

Je me suis réveillée très tôt pour interroger ma sœur qui est très malade d'un cancer. Nous voulons enregistrer des vidéos pour ses jeunes filles et son mari. Sa fille aînée a commencé à l'interviewer, mais bien sûr, il y a des sujets dont elles ne peuvent peut-être pas parler pour le moment. Je l'ai appelée sur Facebook Messenger et j'ai utilisé OBS pour enregistrer l'appel. J'ai un flux de travail pour corriger et formater la transcription, et je suis ravie de l'utiliser pour ma famille.

Il faisait très chaud. C'était notre première vague de chaleur intense cette année. J'ai emmené ma fille au parc Amos Waites pour jouer à la pataugeoire là-bas. Elle a vraiment aimé la robe-maillot que nous avons cousue. Elle adorait tourner dans le siège pivotant que notre parc à proximité n'a pas. Elle a tellement joué qu'elle s'est endormie sur le chemin du retour.

Après le dîner, ma fille et moi sommes allées à un autre parc pour regarder des feux d'artifice pour la fête de la Reine. Il y avait beaucoup de gens, donc je pense que c'était un rassemblement habituel pour les jours de fête où les feux d'artifice sont autorisés.

J'ai terminé la révision de la transcription de ma conversation avec Prot et Philip. Je pense que l'audio de Philip est parfois trop faible, mais je ne suis pas sûre de pouvoir normaliser juste ces segments. Si j'ai une conversation avec un autre locuteur, je peux enregistrer les flux audio séparément, mais dans une conversation entre trois locuteurs (Prot, Philip et moi), je ne peux pas complètement les séparer. En plus, je pense que je ne peux pas remplacer juste l'audio d'une vidéo en diffusion sur YouTube. Peut-être que je peux mettre en ligne une nouvelle vidéo et changer l'ancienne vidéo en une vidéo non répertoriée.

À l'heure du coucher, ma fille et moi avons parlé de la neurodivergence, des mathématiques, et des facteurs humains comme les limitations de la boucle auditive comparée à la visualisation. J'adore lui parler de son cerveau.

mardi 19

J'ai essayé de virer de l'argent aux Philippines via Wise. C'était réussi.

Je me suis entraînée aux virelangues. Oups, j'ai oublié de confirmer l'audio sur OBS, donc je ne peux pas l'analyser.

J'ai réécrit deux transcriptions pour les entretiens de ma sœur.

J'ai emmené ma fille au parc pour jouer avec ses amies. J'ai oublié les glaces à l'eau, donc je suis revenue à la maison pour les retrouver.

Nous avons pratiqué les permutations et la division posée.

mercredi 20

J'ai réécrit encore des transcriptions pour les entretiens de mes nièces avec ma sœur. J'ai configuré un serveur dans notre réseau pour les héberger avec l'authentification basique.

L'école avait un remplaçant aujourd'hui. Il a accidentellement éjecté tous les élèves de la salle de réunion virtuelle et tous ont dû attendre que l'enseignant corrige les permissions.

J'ai ajouté un gousset aux shorts de bain de ma fille.

J'ai emmené ma fille et son amie au parc pour jouer. Elles se sont amusées à me donner des décharges avec l'électricité statique. Après que les autres amies de ma fille sont arrivées, ma fille semblait un peu surstimulée. Elle est partie seule et elle était grincheuse pour le reste de la journée, pauvre chérie.

jeudi 21

J'ai discuté d'Emacs avec Raymond Zeitler sur une diffusion en direct. C'était la première fois que je lui parlais en vidéo même si nous correspondons depuis 18 ans via les commentaires sur mon blog.

Le dentiste a fait deux plombages. Il a proposé un plan de traitement, mais c'est cher, donc je veux bien y réfléchir avant de procéder. Je pense que je veux gagner en confiance avec ce dentiste d'abord. On dirait que la restauration précoce est mieux que d'attendre pour les dents cariées selon les recherches, donc c'est bon, mais on dirait aussi que d'autres dentistes recommandent d'autres niveaux de traitement. J'aime les précautions COVID que ce dentiste prend. Il y a d'autres dentistes (un peu loin) qui prennent aussi ce niveau de précautions, mais ils disent probablement la même recommandation (c'est la même recherche), donc je ne cherche pas particulièrement d'autre conseil. Je ne veux pas passer pour une vache à lait, tu sais?

vendredi 22

Je me suis réveillée tôt pour une conversation sur la communauté Emacs et l'IA avec Matei Candea, un anthropologue. Il pense à faire une étude ethnographique, et je pense que c'est potentiellement intéressant.

J'ai terminé la transcription de ma conversation avec Raymond Zeitler sur Emacs. J'ai remarqué que j'utilisais le mauvais horodatage pour publier les chapitres à partir de la transcription, donc j'ai corrigé l'erreur.

Ma fille n'a pas voulu participer à l'école parce qu'il y a eu un remplaçant, donc elle a fait une pause.

J'étais fatiguée, donc j'ai fait une sieste.

J'ai emmené ma fille au cours de rattrapage de gymnastique. Elle a pris plaisir à apprendre la gymnastique aérienne. Après le cours, ma fille a voulu aller au parc asperge (St. James Park) parce qu'il y a un grand toboggan. Elle s'est entraînée à descendre le toboggan à de nombreuses reprises. Après avoir fait ça, nous avons acheté du sushi. Elle a essayé la tempura de crevettes et elle l'a aimée.

samedi 23

Il a beaucoup plu et c'était très venteux, donc nous sommes restées à la maison au lieu d'aller à la célébration de printemps à la ferme Riverdale.

Ma fille et moi avons joué à Stardew Valley avec le mod Tileman Reworked, qui me demande d'acheter les tuiles auxquelles je veux accéder. J'aime parfois jouer à des jeux avec des limites comme Minecraft Skyblock parce que les limites focalisent l'attention et la progression est très différente. Ma fille préfère notre jeu précédent avec le mod Stardew Valley Expanded.

Pour le dîner, nous avons mangé du sotanghon, qui est une soupe aux nouilles et au poulet. Nous avons aussi essayé le taiyaki congelé. C'était pratique et acceptable, mais bien sûr le taiyaki chez Pat Mart est meilleur.

À l'heure du coucher, ma fille et moi avons discuté de la neurodivergence, de la double exceptionnalité, de l'apprentissage des élèves doués, de la différence entre la récupération d'information et de la synthèse. Nous avons aussi discuté de la faune, des maladies, des vaccins, et d'autres sujets.

dimanche 24

J'ai parlé avec mon mari du TDAH. Il pense que je suis juste préoccupée, et ce n'est pas grave. C'est bon. Je ne veux pas laisser ma vie être perturbée au point d'avoir des problèmes dans deux zones ou plus dans ma vie pour obtenir possiblement un diagnostic, ce qui ne m'aiderait probablement pas beaucoup plus. Quand même, je peux continuer d'explorer comment je peux m'adapter à mon cerveau et ma situation.

Ma fille et moi avons préparé du lait au sucre brun et aux perles boba faites à la main.

Mon mari, ma fille et moi sommes allés aux Stockyards pour faire des courses. Nous avons acheté une boîte de mangues, des perles boba, des haricots azuki, et d'autres aliments. Nous avons préparé une fournée de mochis aux haricots azuki.

J'ai recherché quelques dessins pour les transcriptions. Je pense que je veux inclure les noms des interlocuteurs dans la marge gauche et les horodatages dans la marge droite. Je veux aussi réécrire la transcription pour supprimer les mots de remplissage.

Pour le dîner, nous avons mangé du curry japonais.

Je me suis couchée tard parce que sur Stardew, j'ai finalement accédé à la caisse chez Pierre pour acheter des graines dans la troisième année. La progression est très lente. Heureusement, le mod HibernationRedux me permet de sauter le temps pendant que j'attendais la croissance des arbres.

View Org source for this post
You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
More posts about french

Karthik's notes on Emacs Chat 24: Omar Antolin Camarena

| emacs

Here's a guest post from Karthik Chikmagalur in response to Emacs Chat 24: Omar Antolin Camarena.

  • 16:00 - Omar's embark-on-last-message is gold! I implemented it and have already used it a dozen times in an hour.

  • 17:00 - Omar mentions his tmp package for creating throwaway buffers. I use the scratch package for this. M-x scratch will open up a scratch buffer. If you had a region selected, that will be copied to the scratch buffer. By default, it will use the same major mode as the buffer you calling it from. Calling M-x scratch with a prefix arg will let you pick the major mode you want.

    I have some additional customizations to try to automagically pick a major mode based on what I have selected: https://github.com/karthink/.emacs.d/blob/3deed38c0e02e95fdfab6812c494b1736b945a1e/lisp/utilities.el#L36

    Also related is the edit-indirect package, which I'm sure you're aware of. I think of it as scratch's dual: scratch is for when I want to edit something without regard to its provenance, edit-indirect is for editing the source (exactly like org-edit-special).

    I also try to automagically guess which major mode a piece of text should be edited in. edit-indirect edits something that looks like a lisp form in lisp-interaction-mode, even if the origin is (say) this email composition buffer: https://github.com/karthink/.emacs.d/blob/3deed38c0e02e95fdfab6812c494b1736b945a1e/lisp/utilities.el#L67

  • 21:20 - You mention that you sometimes want to insert something into the minibuffer when you're in the minibuffer, but you end up inserting into the main buffer instead. Omar agreed that there is no easy fix for this.

    Omar, Daniel Mendler and I actually discussed this years ago and came up with a separate command to do this: 

    (defun minibuffer-replace-input (&optional arg)
  "Replace original minibuffer input.

When a recursive minibuffer is active, insert the current string
into the original minibuffer input.  With prefix ARG, replace it
instead."
  (interactive "P")
  (when (and (minibufferp) (> (minibuffer-depth) 1))
    (let* ((replacement (minibuffer-contents)))
      (unwind-protect (minibuffer-quit-recursive-edit)
        (run-at-time 0 nil
                     (lambda (rep)
                       (when arg (delete-minibuffer-contents))
                       (insert rep)
                       (pulse-momentary-highlight-one-line))
                     replacement)))))

    I don't need it every day, but when I do it's very handy.

  • 29:40 - Omar mentions that he prefers to have lots of commands to mark specific text objects instead of hammering expand-region (or expreg-expand). There is a (now) old package called easy-kill which does this, allowing you to define marking commands for different objects at point (e.g. s for sexp, w for word, l for line, d for defun etc). It's easy to add support for more objects because I think it integrates with thing-at-point. The marking command provided by this package is actually called easy-mark.

    But easy-kill / easy-mark is actually the best of both marking styles, because you can use SPC to cycle between marking all the different text objects at point. I've further integrated this with expand-region so that at any point in the easy-kill mark process I can expand the region as well: https://github.com/karthink/.emacs.d/blob/3deed38c0e02e95fdfab6812c494b1736b945a1e/lisp/setup-editing-extra.el#L250

  • 36:00 - Didn't know Omar is the reason vertico-grid-mode exists. That's fortunate, I use it all the time!
  • 44:00 - Omar's point about improving ffap to improve Embark's default action on files is great, really speaks to my sensibilities about composing features in Emacs in a way that provides multiplicative benefits.
  • 48:00 - NOPE! I use CANCELLED as a TODO kwd in Org, but the fact that it's not 4 letters long has bothered me forever. NOPE is much better.

  • 58:30 - Re: Omar's toggle map: this is something I think many users end up writing? Mine is a transient map: toggle-modes-transient.png that grows extra columns in specific major-modes: toggle-modes-full-transient.png

    But I appreciate that Omar uses a regular keymap instead of a visual menu, that's the Embark way. Transient menus are frustratingly non-composable with other Emacs features.

  • 1:00:00 - isearch-delete-wrong is actually built-into ISearch? Pressing C-g once should delete the non-matching part. It's possible he's customized C-g to quit Isearch right away.
  • 1:07:30 - I didn't understand Omar's practice of using embark-dwim to preview the result of any minibuffer command, like org-ql-find. Is this something you were able to reproduce?
    • I've been using dot-mode for almost as long as Emacs, to the point where I've often made the mistake of assuming it was an included feature. It uses simple heuristics, but works surprisingly well at capturing your intent on what the "bounds of an edit" should be in Emacs.

    • Omar mentioned that he stopped using multiple-cursors because the immediate feedback from all cursors inspired false confidence, as off-screen cursors could do something unexpected. I use a personal fork of a package called macrursors that's somewhere in between multiple-cursors and keyboard macros:

      https://github.com/corytertel/macrursors Fork: https://github.com/karthink/macrursors

      It's inspired by both multiple-cursors and meow's beacon-mode. It places cursors at the locations where the keyboard macro will be executed, but executes the full keyboard macro at each location at once, without immediate updates. This addresses the "false confidence" issue, but it does three other things that are very handy:

      • You can bound the region inside which cursors should be placed. The scope can be the paragraph, like in Omar's example, but also any other text object (defun, line etc), and you can cycle between the scopes or expand it with expand-region.
      • You can place cursors from most common actions, like at ISearch or Avy candidates (selectively or all at once), or at all text objects of a certain type inside the bounds.

      • You can "narrow" the buffer to only the cursor locations, fitting and verifying more of them on screen. When the macro runs, the selective display in the buffer persists for a second so you can scan the results:

        https://share.karthinks.com/macrursors-isearch-hideshow-demo.mp4

        Steps:

        1. Start ISearch and search for cl-defmethod
        2. Create cursors from all ISearch matches
        3. Selectively display only the cursors
        4. Show more context around the cursors
        5. Make a change (involving a kmacro counter)
        6. Finish. (The selective display persists for a second.)
        7. Examine the changes.

      It uses undo amalgamation by default so you can undo all the cursor changes except the original one in one step. Of course, your changes are stored in the kmacro ring so you can now apply them as regular keyboard macros too.

      Most of these features are probably present in multiple-cursors at this point, although I'm not sure about bounding cursor ranges with macrursors-select. But this has replaced the usual keyboard macro workflow for me, and not many people are aware of macrursors so I thought I'd mention it.

Thanks to Karthik for his notes! If you have any comments, please feel free to email him.

View Org source for this post
You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
More posts about emacs

Emacs Chat 24: Omar Antolin Camarena

Posted: - Modified: | emacs, emacs-chat-podcast, emacs-chat

: Updated transcript and added a link to Karthik's notes.

I chatted with Omar Antolín Camarena about Emacs, keyboard macros, temporary buffers, Embark, and other workflow tips.

View in the Internet Archive, read the transcript online, watch or comment on YouTube, download the audio or the transcript, or e-mail me.

Related links:

You can add the iCal for upcoming Emacs Chat episodes to your calendar. https://sachachua.com/topic/emacs-chat/upcoming-emacs-chats.ics

Find more Emacs Chats or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat

Chapters

  • 0:00 Ignore this part
  • 0:18 Opening
  • 0:46 How did you get into Emacs in the first place?
  • 6:01 Repeating edits
  • 7:28 dot-mode: repeating commands
  • 9:24 block-undo: undo things as a chunk
  • 10:29 Starting and stopping keyboard macros
  • 12:15 Keycast and Embark
  • 13:33 apply-macro-to-lines-of-paragraph
  • 16:34 embark-on-last-message
  • 18:06 tmp-buffer with a major mode
  • 19:26 placeholder
  • 20:38 enable-recursive-minibuffers
  • 22:57 Overriding embark-select
  • 23:32 quick-calc
  • 26:30 Multiple cursors
  • 27:40 Block-undo and regular undo
  • 28:53 Cycling through Embark targets
  • 31:39 Imenu for navigation
  • 32:51 Collaboration
  • 38:01 Technology adoption and Emacs packages
  • 40:06 Personal packages and naming conventions
  • 42:26 find-file-at-point and directory names
  • 43:49 The value of using Emacs’s APIs
  • 44:56 org-ql and usual files
  • 47:06 Shortcuts for org-ql search syntax
  • 47:43 Org TODO states: TODO, WAIT, DONE, NOPE
  • 48:26 The inserter macro
  • 50:05 luggage: generative art experiments
  • 53:49 Teaching and Emacs
  • 54:53 The print10 generator
  • 56:23 arXiv
  • 58:29 Toggle keymap
  • 1:00:54 isearch-delete-wrong
  • 1:03:14 isearch - continue from the beginning of the match
  • 1:05:12 Using keymaps to remember sets of commands
  • 1:06:04 Other things from the config

Transcript

Expand this to see the transcript and screenshots

0:00 Ignore this part

Sacha: Cut off at, you know, roughly an hour and seven minutes from now. She's going to come out and have lunch. Okay. All right. Going live. Alright folks, we are here a little bit early.

0:18 Opening

Sacha: This is Emacs Chat 24 with Omar Antolin Camarena, whom we know from Embark and Orderless and a lot of other little packages that I personally use on a daily basis. I'm very much looking forward to this conversation.

Omar: Yeah, so am I. Very excited.

Sacha: Of course, before we dive into all these lovely details, tell us a little bit more about your context. You're a researcher at the Mathematics Institute. I can see why Emacs would be a great fit for that.

0:46 How did you get into Emacs in the first place?

Sacha: How did you get into Emacs in the first place?

Omar: I think it's just by virtue of being old. When I started out looking for a text editor, there were not that many great options. When I was a teenager, 30 years ago, I decided to install Linux because I heard about it. That was the era where you went to a newsstand and you bought a Linux magazine that came with a CD, and I installed Linux from that. I think it was Slackware, maybe. I was already a hobby computer programmer. I've been learning programming languages since I was a child, when my father gave me my first computer. I think that was the main reason I switched to Linux. I noticed that people wrote many more interpreters and compilers for Linux than for Windows. That's why I wanted to use Linux. I needed a text editor that handled all sorts of weird programming languages. I was looking for a general purpose one, not an IDE. I used IDEs, younger ones, like Turbo Pascal. Probably that was the main one. I loved that. It was great. I went through the Linux distro, tried a bunch of editors. I settled on Emacs and Emacs-like editors. I tried Jove, which stands for Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs. And there was also an editor called... Oh, I forget. There was one that had its own extension language called S-Lang. I used that for a while. A little later, I remember using Slava Pestov's jEdit. I really like that, too, although Java is not that fun to write extensions in. I was looking for an editor and I wanted it to be extensible, which is funny because I hardly ever extend it. I just wanted there to be the option. I used Emacs for a long time. But when I got serious at being efficient at text-editing, I actually switched to Vim. I switched back to Emacs many years later because of one very specific problem in Vim. The syntax highlighting for LaTeX files is pretty slow. On a normal computer, you won't notice that it's slow. But I had a little netbook that was like 10 years old when I had it. I took it to class to take notes in math courses. I was writing in LaTeX Live with a bunch of macros to insert things. The syntax highlighting meant that Vim lagged behind my typing. I'm not that fast of a typist, so it was problematic. The Vim manual has an entire section on what to do if text highlighting is slow. You can look for it with Vim :help tex-slow That pops up the right section of the manual. I tried everything that it said there and they all made it slightly faster, but none of them really solved the lag, other than turning off syntax highlighting. I turned off syntax highlighting and took notes for like half a semester, and then I decided to try Emacs on that old netbook. Its syntax highlighting was perfectly snappy. This is just a weird thing in Vim that specifically LaTeX syntax highlighting is slow. I never noticed it being slow in any other... I don't know what Vim calls them, what Emacs would call a major mode. It was only ever slow in LaTeX, but that was enough to get me to try Emacs. But by then in Vim, I had learned that you want very granular motion commands to move by word or by sentence, and you want to be able to be placed at the end of the word or at the beginning of the word. All of these higher-level editing constructs that Vim really pushes you toward. In Emacs, I hadn't done any of that before. I moved around with the arrow keys. But when I came back to Emacs after having been in Vim, then I wanted to get serious about editing efficiently in Emacs. I think I actually like it better than Vim now. But yeah, that's why I switched back to Emacs. It's just this quirk that LaTeX syntax highlighting is slow in Vim.

Sacha: Well, their loss. So you tried a whole bunch of other editors. You got into Vim because you wanted to be more efficient. Getting deeply into Vim was great, but you ran into that bug. So you switched to Emacs because it was more efficient, more performant. All that experience with Vim has made you a better Emacs user because now you're like, okay, you appreciate all the navigation and movement. And you were telling me over email...

Omar: Things I missed from Vim.

Sacha: Yeah, You were telling me over email how the kind of the keyboard macros that you got used to in Vim, you've translated some of that over to Emacs and how you use them. We definitely want to get into that.

Omar: Keyboard macro-like things. In Emacs, for a while, I used multiple-cursors. I liked it a lot.

6:01 Repeating edits

Omar: One thing I really missed from Vim is the dot command that repeats the last edit. But in Vim, edits are composite things. You have a command to change a sentence, for example. That will delete the current sentence, put you into insert mode, let you type a new sentence, and when you press escape, that concludes the edit. The whole edit is the operation of deleting the current sentence and replacing it with the specific thing you typed. That is a thing you can repeat. The repeatable edit commands in Vim are much coarser and more conceptually appropriate units than in Emacs. The repeat command repeats the last Emacs command, but everything runs a command in Emacs. You can repeat inserting the last character. That's not very useful. You want to repeat at least the whole consecutive stretch of characters you inserted. Undo in Emacs does do that. Undo coalesces. If you type a bunch of characters and you undo, it doesn't undo them one by one. It undoes them. It clumps them depending on pauses between your typing. That's fine. I want that sort of coarseness. I don't want to undo every single step at a time. Similarly, when you repeat things, you don't want to repeat every single step. I think Vim has like a pretty good unit of things you can repeat. I was missing that in Emacs.

7:28 dot-mode: repeating commands

Omar: There's a package called dot-mode which I used to use and I like a lot. I'm not exactly sure why I stopped using it. So this gives you a more Vim-like experience for repeating commands in Emacs and what it does is that it watches you as you type and it constantly makes a keyboard macro out of the last consecutive stretch of buffer modifying commands. So, for example, in Vim, if you want to change a word, there is a change word command, and you type c w, and then you change the word, and then that thing gets repeated. In Emacs, to change a word, it's not a single unit, right? You delete the word, and then you type in something new, and each character you type is running insert-char. dot-mode will coalesce all of that into a single keyboard macro that you can repeat, right? If you do some motion command that doesn't modify the buffer, and then you delete a word and type a new word, everything from the deletion to the end of the typing would be what dot mode repeats. The experience is actually very similar to using dot in Vim. In my opinion, a little bit better, because in Vim, I often had this problem. It gets you into this competitive video game mentality. How do I do the edit in a single repeatable command? I want to be able to use dot to do this again. So that you have to think ahead. It's kind of distracting. Of course, if a sensible person would not get caught up in that, it would just... do the edit whichever way they can, but I wanted to maximize the repeatability. dot-mode lets you be a little bit more relaxed. It still catches all of the thing that should have been a single edit. So yeah, I like it a lot.

Sacha: So that's dot-mode.

9:24 block-undo: undo things as a chunk

image from video 01:06:05.633Sacha: You also mentioned block-undo.

Omar: That is a package of mine I can show you. That's the entire package. It just uses this with-undo-amalgamate command. Whatever you run inside with-undo-amalgamate undoes in a single step. I use it for executions of keyboard macros. A keyboard macro, if you run it all over the place, if you apply it to every line in a region, or you just repeat it a hundred times, that is a lot of tiny individual edits. If you undo that, you do not want to undo them one by one. This just makes them all undo in a single step, which is what Vim does, actually. This is one of the things that I said, no, Vim has this right. I need this in Emacs.

Sacha: Okay, that makes sense. So dot-mode is more like implicit keyboard macro boundary definitions. This one is like the undo-ness of it.

10:29 Starting and stopping keyboard macros

image from video 00:11:29.533Sacha: I saw in your config, you also have more convenient shortcuts for starting and stopping keyboard macros. It's like a modifier and the keystroke instead of two or like function keys, which are further away. I'm guessing you use keyboard macros a lot.

Omar: Yeah, I do. When I got rid of dot-mode, it was an experiment to see if I could just remember to record keyboard macros. The thing that the dot-mode or the dot command in Vim solves is that you don't always have the foresight to record a keyboard macro. Sometimes you realize, oh, I need to do the same at some other places, but you didn't record it ahead of time. Then you wind up doing it once, realizing you need to do it a bunch of times, then recording the macro, then doing it again. I wanted to see if I could remember to record macros. I decided that I needed to make it as as frictionless as possible. This is the command that is bound by default to F3. I like it better than the thing that's bound to C-x ( because this kmacro-start-macro-or-insert-counter does both things. It could start a recording, or if you are recording, it will insert the keyboard macro counter.

Sacha: For folks who are like, what? Macros? Counters? Yes, you can have your keyboard macro automatically add one to a number, for example. There you go.

image from video 00:12:10.867Sacha: Hello, hello, hello.

12:15 Keycast and Embark

image from video 00:16:44.033Omar: I also activated keycast. I hope people can follow along. I have some small modifications to make embark transparent to keycast. If I use embark, you see embark-act, but then you also see what command I call.

Sacha: I just stole that from your config. I wasn't entirely sure if I was using it correctly, but it definitely looked like something interesting and useful.

Omar: If you don't use that change, then keycast doesn't see through embark and you don't get which actions you called.

Sacha: Yeah, the opacity of some of these kind of key binding niceties... they hide a lot of stuff from the standard Emacs ways of doing things. That's one of the criticisms of transient and other tools. I'm glad that you're finding these ways to make these packages work well with other packages.

Omar: I think this was by request. Somebody requested it. Maybe it was Prot. It's definitely a good idea. The code for that is on the Embark Wiki as well.

13:33 apply-macro-to-lines-of-paragraph

Sacha: The other thing that I wanted to point out that you make a convenient keyboard shortcut for in terms of keyboard macros is apply-macro-to-lines-of-paragraph, which I personally had not been using until I saw your config. And I was like, that is a thing.

Omar: Yeah. Well, that's a command that I wrote. It’s a wrapper around apply-macro-to-region-lines, but it automatically uses the paragraph. That way you don't need to select it. I find that extremely convenient. What would be a good example of that? You want to wrap something. What should I do as an example of this? For some reason, I needed to convert these things to, say, unwrap the parentheses and turn them into an Org Mode table.

Sacha: Yeah, that makes sense.

Omar: I just apply it to the rest of the paragraph.

Sacha: Magic. That's great, because I would normally just start executing the macro and hope I remember to stop at the end, but then I overshoot, and then I have to undo, j and then it's a mess.

Omar: Or you could select the paragraph and then just use the built-in apply-macro-to-lines-in-region.

Sacha: Yes, yes, that's a possibility.

Omar: It just saves you the step of marking the paragraph. I found that I most often when I used apply macro to lines in region, the region was exactly a paragraph. So I figured like there's no point in...

Sacha: All right, all right.

Omar: It's undone in a single step. Like the application. The thing I recorded as a macro, that is not coalesced. Yes, of course.

Sacha: Because that's the actual recording of it. Charlie Baker in the chat says, "Definitely going to add the keycast transparency to my config. I've been wanting that for a while." These little demos of like, oh, this is what this thing in your config does. It's very helpful for people to be able to see its awesomeness.

Omar: Where is that?

Sacha: One of the other interesting things you mentioned was your placeholder package. I can see how the keyword macros help you with text that's already there. Then you've got these placeholders for informal snippets or quick snippets. Show us that. You use it a lot.

Omar: Yeah, I do. Oh, that tmp-buffer is a command I have for popping up temporary buffers in specific major modes. Maybe I can quickly show that first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's see. Oh, yeah. So let me...

16:34 embark-on-last-message

Omar: There I used another little command I have. embark-on-last-message It just calls Embark on the last thing in the messages buffer. Often I want to act on the thing that is the last word in the echo area, so that's what this does.

Sacha: Okay.

Omar: The last thing in the echo area was this symbol embark-on-last-message so I can act on it directly.

Sacha: Which is brilliant because I keep switching to the messages buffer to try to copy something, and by the time I switch, sometimes there are other messages, so it's great to just be able to do something.

Omar: If there are other messages, then I also switch to the messages buffer, but if I want to act on the very last thing, I have that command for it.

Sacha: Yeah. I'm saying this is faster, so I get the chance of just hitting the shortcut before another timer goes in and messes around with my messages. So yes, shortcuts. Okay, temp buffer. Tell us about that.

Omar: You can configure single... Wait, where am I? Transcribing job. I ran Whisper by accident.

Sacha: Which is another thing I wanted to check. Many things I want to talk to you about…

Omar: The idea of using Whisper, I stole from you using it to dictate. I thought, oh, this looks convenient if the model is good. I tried it and it is very good.

18:06 tmp-buffer with a major mode

image from video 00:18:10.233Sacha: Temp buffer.

Omar: Different major modes. It has a customizable list of bindings for specific major modes.

image from video 00:18:19.533Omar: It also has an option to just prompt you for a major mode. It pops up a temp buffer in whatever major mode you chose. I use it all the time to make new scratch buffers.

Sacha: Yeah, I can see that's useful. I switch to a buffer that's got a name that doesn't exist yet, and then I have to press more keys to get to the major mode.

Omar: But if you're doing certain things, just type random letters to make a new buffer, this is much better. They might as well all be called temp.

Sacha: Do you reuse the buffers, or it's always just the one buffer?

Omar: New buffer, then I kill it.

Sacha: Very temporary. Gotcha.

Omar: By the way, kill-current-buffer doesn’t have a default key binding. I don't understand why not. OK. I bind it to C-c C-k, which normally, I think, is kill-buffer, but why would you want to kill a buffer that's not the one you're looking at? Wait, what was I going to show you?

Sacha: You were going to show me placeholders.

Omar: Right.

19:26 placeholder

image from video 00:19:42.100Omar: I often need to send several similar email messages. I'm going to invite you on some day of some month to give a talk, etc. That's the body of an email. I'll write it once. Here I’m using placeholder-insert to insert this symbol. It appears in green, but it doesn't matter. It's just text. You could type that symbol yourself.

image from video 00:20:05.633Omar: Then the placeholder-next and -previous commands will cycle among those and let you fill each one in. You don't have to fill it in right now. If you repeat the command, it restores the placeholder and moves you to the next location.

Sacha: That's one of the things I liked about the implementation compared to yasnippet, because yasnippet, you’ve got to actually remember to fill in the fields before you move on to something else. If you get out of it, you can't tab to the next field. The placeholders will let you go and come back and look up some information and put that in and so forth.

20:38 enable-recursive-minibuffers

Omar: Yeah, there's lots of things I loved about Vim, but one thing I grew to strongly dislike is modal computer programs. Not just modal editing, modal anything. I don't like being forced to finish what I started. I want to be able to get distracted and go off and do something else. For example, in Emacs, I very much dislike the default value of enable-recursive-minibuffers. The default value is nil. They don't let you use the minibuffer if you're already using the minibuffer. Emacs is supposed to be about freedom. Why is that the default value? So I set it to t, which is more sensible. That way you're not stuck in the minibuffer.

Sacha: Actually, one of the things that I've been trying to figure out is when I'm in a minibuffer, sometimes I want to use Embark to insert something into the minibuffer, but then I end up inserting it into the buffer buffer.

Omar: Yeah, there's no... Embark doesn't have any solution to that problem. It doesn't always do that. It does that if you're in the minibuffer in a completion session. If you're in the minibuffer in a non-completion session, then it acts as a regular buffer. So if you're in eval and here you had... You can use embark-insert in the usual way to duplicate stuff.

Sacha: I have a workaround. I just use kill. I copy the text instead of inserting it and that works out fine.

Omar: Yeah, I do too. The behavior of inserting into the previous buffer is so useful that I don't think I would want to change that. But yeah, it is unfortunate that for that specific instance, you can't use insert.

Sacha: I appreciate that Embark allows us to have all of these key bindings that we can do stuff with. I noticed in your config, in addition to Embark, you also modify a lot of the standard key maps to add other shortcuts to rebind things that make sense to you. Key bindings are something that a lot of people struggle with, trying to figure out more places to put more shortcuts that make sense. What are the key shortcuts that work really well for you?

22:57 Overriding embark-select

image from video 00:23:18.367Omar: One thing I don't like about the default Embark configuration is that SPC is used for embark-select, which marks a target for later use. I hardly ever use embark-select, so I would rather SPCbe for marking the region, which is something I do pretty often, and have embark-select on C-SPC, which is not a command I use very often. I swapped those. I think most of this is just adding new actions that feel specific to me.

23:32 quick-calc

image from video 00:24:05.733Omar: quick-calc is the thing usually found to C-x *… calc-dispatch is the command. It’s C-x * q. That’s quick-calc. It's useful as an Embark action. If you have an expression and you... Wait, what am I doing wrong? I forgot what my binding to mark what Vim calls a word in capital letters, which means a consecutive stretch of non-space characters... If you mark this, I can act on it with =, get the result.

Sacha: And specifically this embark-region-map is what you can add in the selected region. Incidentally, I've been playing around with using the Selected package for this because it also gives you the key map.

Omar: Yeah, yeah. I love the Selected package and recommend it often. I don't use it myself just because the only thing it would save me is calling embark-act, because the commands I would put in the selected key map are exactly the commands I have in the embark-region-map. For me, Selected would only save me one keystroke, which is Embark Act, so I don't feel it's worth it, but it's a great idea. For example, I do use the rectangle keymap. Yes. So they're the only difference. It's equally good an idea as Selected is. The only difference is that the rectangle keymap comes with Emacs and Selected is an external package. I decided it's not worth installing an external package when I could just use Embark Act, which I do have to use because otherwise I won't understand people's bug reports. But the rectangle mode there, that one is built in, so I just found a bunch of useful stuff in it.

Sacha: Yeah, and I noticed you have also like you have a narrow-to-point so that you can use your rectangle commands to yank something into it, so I get the sense that you use rectangles a fair bit.

Omar: You've really read my configuration very carefully. This narrow-to-point is subtle. I am very impressed that you figured out the reason for it.

Sacha: I started digging through narrow-extras because I saw your narrow-or-widen-dwim and I said, yes, I need that in my life.

Omar: I don't think... I took it from somebody. Endless Parentheses, probably. The issue with narrow-to-point, the reason you need it, is that if you insert a rectangle somewhere, try to insert it in a blank line, and it'll overlap with what was after it. But if you first narrow to the point and then insert the rectangle and then widen again, it gets its own blank lines. That's the reason I have it.

26:30 Multiple cursors

Sacha: @zor_​org asks, was there a time you wanted multiple cursors? Have you ever been tempted?

Omar: Multiple cursors. I think it gave me a false sense of security which is why I experimented not using it and then the experiment just never stopped. The thing with multiple cursors... Multiple cursors are more interactive than keyboard macros, because if you can see several cursors on the screen, you can visually make sure that what you're doing does apply correctly at each of those locations. But then I started noticing that that made me feel very confident I was doing things the right way in multiple cursors, but there were some cursors offscreen where I wasn't paying attention to what was happening there, and then I got it wrong and was more confused. Just psychologically, a keyboard macro, since I know I don't see the other places where I'm going to run it, I'm more careful when I record the keyboard macro. It's a psychological trick I'm playing on myself. By using keyboard macros instead of multiple cursors, I force myself to pay more attention to what I'm doing.

27:40 Block-undo and regular undo

Sacha: Does the block undo still let you select a region in order to undo just the part that was within it, in case you notice offscreen that it's done something bad in just these entries?

Omar: Yeah, that's completely independent. That built-in Emacs behavior is not affected by undo boundaries.

Sacha: Wait, is it?

Omar: If it overlaps with part of... I don't know. Sorry, sorry. I don't know. So if I have a big change that I amalgamated into a single undo, and then I pick a region that overlaps partially with that but not completely, what would undo and region do? I don't know. I think it... I'm just guessing. I would just think that it sees that the affected region by the big block undo is not completely contained in the region and then it doesn't undo it.

Sacha: Okay, so I'm just going to conclude that you do not make mistakes with your keyboard macros.

Omar: I can easily undo them instead of having to keep running on undo. So it's not that I don't make mistakes, but that I try to fix them right after running the keyboard macro.

Sacha: All right, all right. I had another question.

28:53 Cycling through Embark targets

Sacha: Ou've got a lot of different Embark maps and you've got a lot of different Embark targets. How do you handle going through the different ones that are at the point? At the moment, I've got the label at the top and I just flip through it. I know sometimes I need to hit it twice or sometimes I need to hit embark-act three times for this kind of thing. How do you distinguish between lots of them when you're just going through it?

Omar: I think that's the poorest part of the user experience with Embark Act currently. I don't really like it, but I don't have a good alternative. A lot of people like expand-region and I don’t like it because I feel like I have to hammer it off. I prefer to have a lot of… This is another thing I learned from Vim: have a lot of commands to mark specific things and just memorize all of them. But expand-region says, no, don’t memorize that. Just hammer on expand-region until you get the thing you want. Ffor me, even though it's objectively fast, it just feels very slow. It feels like I have to hit it four times whenever I want to mark something. I get the same feeling from cycling in embark-act. I don't really like it. But if we had come up with a better alternative, and I say we because I discussed this in the GitHub issues with with Daniel Mendler and Prot, and I think @hmelman was also in those discussions, and maybe Clemens Radermacher? I just couldn't come up with a much better alternative, so I put up with it. I don't need to cycle that much. I almost always want to act on the first target. Which is unfair, because I decided what the first target is in the default configuration, so it's sort of tuned so that I hardly ever need to cycle. I apologize if it means other people need to cycle a lot.

Sacha: Nonsense. We can all modify our target list, so we can always tune it to what we want.

Omar: I mean, it's a lot of work, right? I think the default Embark configuration is over half of the source code of Embark. The configuration is... Where does that start? Oh, I wish the autoload cookies were not in the outline.

Sacha: If you do a space, oh, I guess it doesn't do that, right?

Omar: Oh, yeah. For orderless, I use the escapable spaces, so I can do that.

31:39 Imenu for navigation

Sacha: I should also point out that your config uses a lot of imenu also, which was another interesting thing I picked up.

Omar: Yeah, I like imenu, yeah. I should add imenu for this. One thing I did to imenu is I added a section for key maps.

Sacha: I saw that. You have a regular expression so you can see it easily.

Omar: Right. It's not half, but a big chunk of Embark is just the default configuration. It would be a lot of work to configure Embark from scratch. That's why the package comes with an extensive default configuration.

Sacha: Charlie Baker says, “I have embark-act set up to expand in the same way expand-region does, but with Embark’s type awareness, it's easy to add a contract function.” I guess maybe also some highlighting helps with that. Charlie also says, “I also have a completing read interface in the transient menu to jump directly to one of the many types under point that I'm seeking.” Charlie, you're going to share somewhere so I can steal that part of your config, right?

Omar: I mean, that would be something I would consider adding to Embark itself.

32:51 Collaboration

Sacha: You mentioned having all these conversations with Daniel and others through GitHub and other things. I wanted to touch on that because I think in the Emacs community, it's pretty rare to find people who are collaborating on packages and packages that work so well together. The partnership between your packages and Daniel Mendler or Minad's packages with Consult and Vertico and Marginalia is really nice. We don't see a lot of examples of that kind of inter-packaged conversation as much. How did that start?

Omar: I think it was mostly Daniel's initiative. I had started work on Orderless and Embark. I think his first package was Consult, maybe, of this family of packages. I remember Embark was a pretty sad shape when Daniel started raising issues on the Github. He really lit a fire under me to improve Embark. It started with him complaining about things in Embark, and I immediately realized that he was thinking very carefully about the user experience, so I thought he is full of good ideas and I should listen to them. Back then at the start of Embark and Orderless, Prot was also very involved in discussing the design. All of this is on GitHub issues. Some software archaeologists can find all of it. So I think we started working together when we realized we were both writing Marginalia, so we decided to merge those two packages into a single one. I think maybe the name Marginalia was suggested by Prot, I don't remember, but it's a very good name. The collaboration was completely unplanned. We just did it because we had already talked on the Embark issues and Daniel's suggestions improved Embark a great deal in a short amount of time. So then when we both realized we were writing something like Marginalia, we decided to just merge those two packages and write a single one. Since that worked out well, we kept on collaborating. So far, we haven't co-written any other package. One thing like that is that now Daniel is a co-maintainer of Orderless, which is great because Daniel is extremely efficient at fixing bugs. He does it instantly. He figures out what's wrong and has a patch in a few minutes after he looks at the issue. He looks at the issue the day it was posted or the day after. I can't do things that quickly. It's great that he's helping out with orderless. It wasn't planned. It just felt right from the very beginning. I immediately realized he had some great ideas and implemented a lot of them. Then we started doing that the other way around. I started commenting on a bunch of issues in Consult and Vertico. I think I exerted some pressure on Daniel to add features to Vertico, like the grid view and the horizontal view. Or maybe specifically the grid view, because at the time I was... I'm sort of slow to switch basic Emacs infrastructure. I wasn't using Vertico for a long time, even though I was like opining on the Github issues for Vertico, and the reason was that I was stuck with the vastly inferior embark-live. There was this embark-live thing where you could pop up a buffer with the targets in the minibuffer, which just means a completion candidate. So you could use Embark as a kind of completion user interface. It was very slow, but it was very featureful. You could do a vertical list. You could do a grid. In the list, you could activate zebra stripes. Yeah, you can see that's been removed from Embark. But I kept saying to Daniel, I'll switch to Vertico if you add a grid view. He eventually did add the grid view. I kept my word and switched to Vertico, which is much better than the thing in Embark. I was just being stubborn by not switching earlier. But if I had switched earlier, maybe Vertico wouldn't have a grid view.

Sacha: I think it's definitely a good example of a set of packages that has... So all this started in about 2020s or so. So we actually can see how people have gotten into using Vertico and all the other packages compared to, say, looking at more popular packages that have been around for a long time. "Of course everyone's been using Org Mode for a long time." It's there. It's part of the fabric.

38:01 Technology adoption and Emacs packages

Sacha: It's very interesting to see the technology adoption around it. A lot of the things that people struggle with as package authors is getting other people to try out their stuff. With Orderless and Embark probably in the early days, what was that like to put this thing out there in the world and have people start to try it? How did people find it?

Omar: I personally found it very scary. At the beginning, I still thought Embark was a part of my personal Emacs configuration that sort of grew out of control and I decided to publish separately. But then I have all these people telling me how to improve what I still thought of as part of my personal configuration. I think one thing that helped was that people made very good suggestions. So I realized, no, no, it's worth publishing reusable parts of your configuration just for the GitHub issues, just for people finding bugs and suggesting improvements and so on. But yeah, I had to adjust to having some users. At first, it was very few people. But then they got added to Doom. I think they were made the default in Doom. That was a huge influx of users. That was very scary. We were suddenly flooded with new bug reports, like all of the packages in the family. I remember feeling like there's a horde of Doom users running at us.

Sacha: All right. So, starter kit, then everybody gets into it, and then everybody starts talking about it because they're like, yeah, you know, it's great. You can specify things out of order. You don't have to remember what words come in, which order when you're completing things. Those of us who aren't on starter kits are like, yes, we should try that too. That's how it's done.

Omar: Doom helped a lot to raise awareness and adoption.

40:06 Personal packages and naming conventions

Sacha: You've got a lot of other small packages. For something as small as block-undo, which you showed us, it really just fits in one screen. Is that something that you would set up as a different repository or just as a file within your current one?

Omar: No, those are all in my user-lisp directory.

Sacha: I have actually successfully used use package to grab stuff out of your user-lisp directory and use them in my config. Yeah, it works. I just say, all right, my load path is here where I've checked out your source code. It defines these commands. Then I can bind your functions to my shortcuts. Although, because your functions are named the way that I would expect Emacs functions to be named, I've been defaliasing them so that I don't accidentally say, oh yeah, that's totally built in when it isn't.

Omar: Yeah, I'm inconsistent with these little packages in my user-lisp directory. In some of them, I do stick to the convention that the package name is a prefix for all the functions, and for some, I don't. For some, I just try to name them the way exactly what you said. Like, what would these be called if they were built into Emacs? Which means they don't share a consistent prefix often. I should probably make that more consistently use the package name as a prefix so that they're easier to dot.

Sacha: Or I have another suggestion. You could get apply-kmacro-to-paragraph or whatever that is into core Emacs. That would be great for everyone.

Omar: Yeah, maybe that one is useful enough. Some of these I don't use anymore because I think I've substituted them with workflows with Embark. For example, eval-region-advice. It bothered me that none of the evaluate commands are “do what you mean” in the most common sense in Emacs. The most common sense of do what I mean in Emacs is if the region is active, use the region. Otherwise, do the normal thing. All of the evaluate commands should evaluate the region if the region is active. So that's what this does. But I don't use that anymore, because to evaluate a region, I usually use embark-act e. What else is here?

42:26 find-file-at-point and directory names

image from video 00:43:06.133Omar: Oh, some of these things are like tiny things that are almost invisible, like this. In Eshell buffers, By default, find-file-at-point doesn’t realize that if it sees the filename printed in an eshell buffer, it won't look at the prompt to figure out what directory it came from. If you type ls and you're in your current working directory, all of those listed files, the find-file-at-point guesses that they are files in the default directory, and that guess is correct. But if, further above, you had gone into a different directory, called ls there, then those files are no longer in what is now the default directory. So this just adds a little bit of smarts to find-file-at-point. It looks at the prior prompt to see what directory that was run in, and then tries to see if the files it sees there are in that directory. Of course, the only reason I want this is because I sometimes use embark-act on files I see written in the Eshell buffer.

Sacha: I love this. I love how all these little bits of code show that at some point you were annoyed by a tiny, tiny problem and you're like, that's it, I'm just going to write some code and it's never going to be a problem again.

43:49 The value of using Emacs’s APIs

Omar: One thing I like about this is it also shows sticking to Emacs APIs. Embark uses find-file-at-point to guess what things are referred to files. I did this to improve the functionality of Embark in Eshell buffers, but what it really does is improve the functionality of find-file-at-point, which I hardly ever use directly. I almost always use it through Embark.

Sacha: Send it upstream! Okay, so you use Emacs for working with a shell, working with your files, doing math, doing some programming as well. Are there unexpected things that you use Emacs for?

Omar: I don't think so. Mostly I write. It's mostly writing prose. I think I was slightly misled about what a job in academia is like. I mostly write emails. That's the bulk of my job by the time consumed.

44:56 org-ql and usual files

image from video 00:45:18.667Sacha: You have some shortcuts around org-ql for managing your agenda or other things.

Omar: This notion of the usual files. I was often using org-ql to search this set of files: every file mentioned in a refile target, every file mentioned in a capture template, and every file agenda file. Here it is. So I thought that's what I want to search. I want to search every file I mentioned in a refile target, every agenda file, and every file that I mentioned in some template. That's what this does.

Sacha: I don't know if you trust your hiding things enough for us to try that. Since you put so much work into it... Or do you want me to hide the screen first and then you can let me know when it's safe to look?

Omar: No, no, that's fine. I can show you the censorship process. What I thought I would do is I could show you the... Wait, what is this? Why is that not an action? Oh, library. Oh, I have not loaded this. Yes, now it's loaded. Oh, so this should be... Why is this not recognizing org-ql usual files as a variable now that this is loaded?

Sacha: Oh, great. I'm also open to debugging demonstrations live because that is something that a lot of people do.

Omar: Sorry, I think it just hadn't loaded this file. Now I ran a command from here and now I should have a variable. Yes, I have a variable. So we can go to Customize.

image from video 00:46:33.967Omar: The ones that have sensitive information are tasks, home, health, Definitely work. Journal. I don't really mind people seeing my journal, but that's boring. There we go. Yeah. So now I got rid of all of the sensitive files. And so now I can show you. I usually just search through all of these files at once. So I had a list of things I wanted to tell you about.

47:06 Shortcuts for org-ql search syntax

Sacha: I should also point out that your config has some stuff for inserting things into the org-ql search syntax.

Omar: You're extremely prepared for this chat. Yes, C-,has a little key map that will insert stuff like priority. Oh, I don't have, let me remove “Sacha”. Oh, yes, everything that I have with priorities is in one of the files I removed. I only use priorities for work.

Sacha: Okay, gotcha.

Omar: We could use to-dos.

47:43 Org TODO states: TODO, WAIT, DONE, NOPE

image from video 00:47:45.733Sacha: I love that you have a to-do state called NOPE.

Omar: It's for things that are cancelled, but I don't want to delete them yet. Actually, it's mainly there because when I archive them, I want to know that I had that task at some point, but decided not to do it.

Sacha: Well, it's so much less verbose than CANCELLED, so I think I might actually just...

Omar: For a long time, I was using monospace fonts, so I wanted to have everything fit in four letters. So I have... Yeah, all of my, I have TODO, WAIT, DONE, NOPE, and they're all four letters long.

Sacha: Nope. Gotcha. Okay. So that's org-ql and that's your inserting thingy.

48:26 The inserter macro

image from video 00:48:36.667Sacha: The other thing that I wanted to point out that your definition of the inserter was nice because it's a macro. So you have this thing that allows you to just define all these interactive functions. You can add it to the key map because the key map expects interactive functions. If people are watching, yeah, this is something you can do.

Omar: I should tell you that there was actually a serious performance bug previously. What I had before this… This string is a keyboard macro that inserts those letters. It is extremely slow if you do it that way for some reason. I think org-ql searches after the T, after the O, after the D, after the O, after the colon. For some reason, that was extremely slow. So I switched to these lambdas that just call insert. That does it in a single step, and it's instantaneous. But my first instinct was, oh, well, this is a good use of keyboard macros. I'll just assign these to keyboard macros. It's not a good idea in this particular case.

Sacha: I imagine there should be some kind of debouncing on org-ql to make it not do that if you're typing very quickly, but... I don't think there is.

Omar: Let me see if... Maybe also do a longer one so it...

Sacha: That's okay. I take your word for the bug that you ran into.

Omar: I wanted to show you just because it just feels like a really long pause, but it didn't work right now and I don't know why not. That's okay.

Sacha: Curse of the live demo. So that's inserter.

50:05 luggage: generative art experiments

image from video 00:51:32.367Sacha: One thing that I definitely want to make sure we had time for was your little generative art experiment, luggage, because you're having fun with Emacs.

Omar: Yes. Yeah. There are some people doing amazing generative... Oh my gosh. I do not even have it installed. Yeah. Let's... I forgot that we were going to do that. That's okay. But it should be easy. How is :vc used?

Sacha: (:vc (:url …)).

Omar: I have to go to a previous example to figure out.

Sacha: I'm surprised you don't have a consult-line and then just embark-insert.

Omar: I do that. I do that a lot. But I forgot this time.

Sacha: Actually, looking at your config, I learned about consult-multi-occur because apparently there all these multi-buffer equivalents to the commands that I've been using. That is really useful for using stuff from buffers I'm not even looking at.

Omar: Okay, load it.

Sacha: Let's see if it actually can still do the thing. There we go. So you have some Emacs Lisp to generate this SVG. Yeah, and it's just got...

Omar: And which other ones do I have? Luggage. There we go. Tubes. I think this one has some nice other color schemes. Classic? Classic is the one. Oh yeah, stained glasses is the one I wanted.

Sacha: Nice. I wanted to mention it specifically because a lot of times people think, oh, Emacs is a text editor. But because it's also got support for SVG and other types of graphics, you can play around with it. Sometimes it's just doing it for fun like this, but also there might be some other visualizations that you can do with Emacs. That is actually pretty interesting.

Omar: Yeah.

image from video 00:52:26.800Omar: Have you heard of this program?

Sacha: No, I haven't come across it.

Omar: There's an entire book with this title. So it's a single line of BASIC. 10 print. Oh, I'm not, I don't know BASIC, but the idea is like you randomly pick either forward slash or backslash.

Sacha: Oh, yeah, yeah, that makes sense now.

Omar: I'm sure this is not correct BASIC, but, you know, something like that. Yeah, I get the idea. Yeah. And that's what this does. And then you GOTO 10. It's like... It makes these elaborate mazes. It's an extremely simple program.

Sacha: So this is the kind of stuff you do for fun. I mean, you probably do lots of other things for fun, too.

Omar: Yeah. But this... No, that's not the buffer I wanted. Where is... Did I kill it? I killed it. Yeah, one of these I did. What is it? Dominoes. Yeah, this I did for a math talk I gave. It just produces random domino tilings of the board. I gave that talk from an Org file using Prot’s Logos package. I usually use PDF slides, but that time I wanted to use an Org mode buffer because I was going to run code on the computer. Like this, for example, generating random domino tilings.

53:49 Teaching and Emacs

Sacha: So you've given a number of talks. Do you also teach any courses?

Omar: Yeah, I do teach both undergraduate and graduate math courses. Recently, mostly graduate math courses. But yeah, I really like teaching. You always learn something. Even the subjects that you think you know very well, teaching a course always teaches you something new.

Sacha: Have you gotten students into Emacs?

Omar: No, I don't even try. “I use this weird text editor Emacs, it's pretty cool, but it takes a while to learn. I'm not recommending it. I love it. If you do try to use it, you can ask me anything.”

Sacha: Yeah, it's pretty hard. I know some professors are like, okay, this is what we're going to use for the course. But I imagine, depending on your subject matter, you might already have your hands full teaching the subject matter rather than adding it.

Omar: Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. No, no. The students I try to talk to Emacs about are like the students that are writing their thesis with me. No, never in a course. I never mention it.

54:53 The print10 generator

image from video 00:54:56.900Omar: Oh, there it is. In the docstring, I have the correct program in BASIC. The backslash and the forward slash are consecutive ASCII characters. 206 and 207. You add a random number between 0 and 1 to this one and then round to the nearest integer.

Sacha: All right. You can get surprisingly interesting patterns out of it. That is also very cool. Fun with Emacs. This could definitely be like a zone screensaver if you wanted to.

Omar: Yeah. I just thought it was really nice that Emacs displays SVGs natively. Those are very easy to generate by text.

Sacha: Are there other interesting corners of your config that might not be immediately obvious to people who are just reading the source code? What other workflow things are nice for you?

Omar: Sorry, what were you saying?

Sacha: I can also start just occurring through my config for all the things that I've stolen from your config in the last two days.

Omar: I don't think I have any concrete idea of what to show now. I think we've covered most of the ones I wanted.

56:23 arXiv

image from video 00:57:42.967Omar: As an academic, I deal a lot with preprints on the arXiv, so I have a little library that will show me the PDF or copy the URL. I like personalized software because it does exactly what you needed to do. I noticed that there were a bunch of tags on Mastodon that related to archive papers. Often when I was in a Mastodon buffer, I wanted to do something to the paper mentioned at point. That's one of the acceptable inputs for my arXiv library. So, for example, this is an arXiv link and I can ask it to show me. So that's a bug. This should definitely have visual-line-mode activated. I can just quickly read the abstract without visiting the archive website.

image from video 00:57:51.200Omar: Or I can open the PDF.

Sacha: Very cool. Very convenient.

Omar: Yeah, so. I like that in Emacs you can do all these personal things that you'll need but are not likely to be needed by many people. They're just easy to do. Vim is also very configurable, but the Vim script language is sort of awkward, so I never did anywhere close to the amount of configuration in Vim that I do in Emacs. That's why I would never go back to Vim now. I would miss all the stuff I've written.

58:29 Toggle keymap

image from video 00:59:06.133Sacha: One of the little personal customizations that I liked reading in your config was the fact that you have a key map just for toggling various things like the mode line or the header, you know? Yeah. You want to tell us more about your awesome key map for that?

Omar: You don't need them that often, so it's OK if it's under a long prefix. It's just tedious when you want one of them, to have to type the command name. It also helps me remember which things I commonly toggle. I often have to hit C-h here and see what I have available to toggle. I don't know why toggle is a category for commands, because obviously these are very disparate commands that do very different things. But they're things that you occasionally turn on or off, and it's convenient to have them all together. Choosing the letters here was very difficult. Everybody wanted to have the same letters. L was for visual lines. P for variable pitch mode because I think of them as proportional fonts. It took a lot of tweaking. I'm sure if I looked through the GitHub history, you'd see a lot of tiny changes just changing the binding of one of these.

Sacha: I find it difficult to get the hang of new key bindings, especially for things that I'm not using often enough for the key bindings to stick.

Omar: I often forget that I have a key binding for something.

Sacha: So how do you deal with that? I mean, yes, you stick it in an Embark keymap and you just bring it up to the target.

Omar: Yeah, I do use Embark bindings in keymap a lot to just explore keymaps and remind myself. I don't need to memorize a binding. I just need to remember that I have a binding. If I have a binding, I can find it later. But sometimes I don't remember that I have a binding, so when I'm looking at my configuration, I'll just re-scan what things I have bound from time to time. Mostly I stick with just… I know under what the start of the prefix is, and then I'll just use Embark to remind me of what I have there. Which is nice, because you can also see the docstrings.

1:00:54 isearch-delete-wrong

image from video 01:01:32.267Sacha: I like how you try to use some of the conventions to make it somewhat easier to remember. One of the key bindings that you have that I want to point out, because I think it's a useful technique, is you have an isearch-delete-wrong.

Omar: Right. isearch keeps track of where the last portion of the search string that matched is. You can see it highlighted in the buffer, right? So this means it found up to “del”, and then it didn't find "tok". isearch-delete-wrong will just delete that entire part.

Sacha: So that way, you can just restart from what actually exists. Combining that with the fact that you've got your search whitespace regular expression to be a wildcard means you can...

Omar: Oh yes, this I stole from Prot. He recommends this.

Sacha: Yeah, which means you can use isearch to find things, even if there's other stuff in between them. When you can't find something, you can restart.

Omar: I'm not sure... I'm not sure if this is the best setting. I want to be able to search this way sometimes, and sometimes with whitespaces treated literally, so I should keep statistics on how often I actually have to turn this off. It might be that for me the better default is the other way around. You can turn it off with M-s SPC. Match spaces literally. isearch-toggle-lax-whitespace. I don't know. Maybe for me the default would be to treat whitespace literally, because I find that if I have a space in my search string, I often want to turn on the literal matching. But it's probably still this is the better default. I think I do it less than half of the time I have a space. But it's not that far from half, it feels. I don't have statistics.

Sacha: How do you even collect statistics on this? Aside from making a little note every time you're like, oh, I didn't like this.

Omar: I mean, I would instrument isearch somehow, but I haven't thought about that problem.

1:03:14 isearch - continue from the beginning of the match

image from video 01:03:44.400Omar: One nice thing I do with isearch is another one of those things I got from Vim. isearch, by default, leaves you at the end of the match. I almost always want to be at the beginning of the match, because that's what I got used to in Vim. I think it must be here. I have something exit at start. I tell isearch to exit at the beginning of the match. The way you use this is you install it as a hook, I believe. Is that right?

Sacha: You seem to have options.

Omar: Yes.

Sacha: I see. So S-RET lets you exit at the end, and then by default... Yeah, which is Emacs default.

Omar: But I find that the better default is to exit at the beginning. Yes, and that's the whole point of that. For example, if I want to mark until that parentheses, then I would search for the parentheses, and I don't want to include the parentheses. That's not a good example. But with a word, it's often like, I'm looking for a word, but I want to highlight up to the end of the word. It's just like, if you want to mark a region from point to some search term, with the Emacs default, what you have to search for is the thing that is at the end of the part you want to match. But often I want to say until like the thing that starts here. It's just my brain works that way. So for me, it's much better to exit at the start of the search. Which means I don't understand isearch on other people's Emacs. It just leaves the point in the wrong location all the time. If you're going quickly, you won't realize that it's just a mess. It does mean that I can only use isearch if it's configured this way.

Sacha: Well, that's the thing about Emacs, right? Once you've got it set up, you've got to use your config because everything else just feels off. It just feels weird.

Omar: Yeah, that's right.

Sacha: All right.

1:05:12 Using keymaps to remember sets of commands

Sacha: Going back to the toggle keymap, @gcentauri says, I'm not lazy enough. I just M-x orderless consult, find the thing that I'm toggling, which I do a lot also. I just use M-x for all the things because I can just specify parts of it.

Omar: There's some toggles I don't have in the keymap because I use them very rarely, but yeah. What I like also about the keymap is that it's a place to remind myself of the toggle commands. I often just do this. What was the thing? I haven't used that in a while.

Sacha: Having a shorter list, it means you can just use recognition instead of recall, right?

Omar: It's short enough that I can read through it.

Sacha: I like that a lot. I like the fact that with that Embark C-h screen, you can use completion even to select the commands from that subset.

1:06:04 Other things from the config

Sacha: A couple of other things that I picked up from your config: There’s your dired-open-externally, so it makes it very easy to open something in an external application.

Omar: And it just calls Embark open externally. This function moved back and forth from different places. I think embark-open-externally used to be in consult. Daniel said he felt it didn't fit in with consult. Embark consult would put it in keymaps. He was right. Consult didn't have a very clear personality at the beginning. It was sort of like a grab bag of commands. Eventually, what gelled is that a command should be in Consult if there is a useful way to write previews for it. So, preview is the distinguishing feature of what is a good fit for Consult. Now, I hope Daniel would agree with that. That seems to be the criteria now. That's great. I absolutely love preview. That's one thing I miss a little bit with org-ql. I use org-ql mostly to search through Org files, but the preview is kind of manual in that I use Embark to do it. If I want to preview a command, I just use Embark to do what I mean.

Sacha: Yeah, that's a good idea. I should try that.

Omar: So any command that doesn't have a preview, I mean does, you can just use embark-dwim, it'll complete the command for you.

Sacha: Okay, the kid has arrived, so I have to go off to lunch. But thank you so much for the quick peek into your config. I'll put the transcript together and then people can do that. But in the meantime, people can look at your config for all sorts of wonderful goodness.

Omar: Thanks.

Sacha: Thanks to everyone for hanging out. Looks like the isearch tip was popular, so you might see a lot of people getting that from your config. Anyway, thank you so much for this. I’ll see you around.

Omar: Thanks, Sacha. This was fantastic.

Sacha: Alright, nice.

Chat

  • takoverflow: ​​Hello Sacha and Omar, thanks for this chat! :)
  • CharlieBaker707: ​​Definitely going to add the keycast transparency to my config! I've been wanting that for a while!
  • gcentauri: ​​i'm still a minibuffer noob - its been nil my whole Emacs life!
  • CharlieBaker707: ​recursive minibuffers is amazing. biggest win for me is that it lets you select things and paste them in, like from a completing-read's history for example
  • gcentauri: ​haha apparently i do have recursive minibuffers set to t, along with my Vertico config 🤔
  • Zor_org: ​​was there a time you wanted multiple cursors?
  • Zor_org: ​if so, was there any workaround you thought of with embark or kmacro?
  • gcentauri: ​keyboard macros are a fun mini-game
  • CharlieBaker707: ​I have embark-act set up to expand in the same way expand-region does, but with embark's type awareness. It's also easy to add a contract function.
  • CharlieBaker707: ​I also have a completing-read interface and a transient menu to jump directly to one of many types under point that I'm seeiking.
  • CharlieBaker707: ​For sure!
  • CharlieBaker707: ​I was going to create a tiny extension, but I can open a PR in embark!
  • Zor_org: ​even more crazy with elfeed 4.0
  • gcentauri: ​I found Orderless and Embark through Daniel's suggestions in his packages :)
  • Zor_org: ​if emacs gets canvas patch soon, more things can be done in luggage (lik gifs and image frame as well)
  • gcentauri: ​i am not lazy enough, i just M-x orderless consult find the thing i'm toggling
  • PuercoPop: ​​I didn't knew isearch had a built-in way to fix the isearch quirk. Now I can remove the snippet I use the implement it that I cribbed from the internets
  • gcentauri: ​yeah adding something to a keymap you make does help recall
  • PuercoPop: ​​The isearch quirk is a common complaint from what I understand
  • gcentauri: ​yeah i'm gonna use that iserach bit
View Org source for this post
You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
More posts about emacs, emacs-chat-podcast, emacs-chat

Yay Emacs 32: Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs: May I recommend...

| emacs, community, yay-emacs

In this livestream, I chatted with Prot about the May 2026 Emacs Carnival theme "May I recommend". It was a joint braindump of quick recommendations for people at different points in their Emacs journey, building on our conversation about newbies/starter kits and the newcomer experience all the way up to power users, Emacs Lisp coders, and package developers.

View in the Internet Archive, watch or comment on YouTube, read the transcript online, download the audio or the transcript, or e-mail me.

Related links

2026-05-27-03 Emacs skills -- emacs.jpeg
2026-05-27-03 Emacs skills -- emacs.jpeg

You can add the iCal for upcoming Yay Emacs episodes to your calendar. https://sachachua.com/topic/live/upcoming-livestreams.ics

Find more Yay Emacs posts or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/topic/live

Chapters

  • 0:00 Opening
  • 2:27 Tip: Less is more. Start small.
  • 4:07 Tip: Start with what is built in
  • 4:27 Skill: Figuring out the words to look for
  • 6:25 Tip: Be okay with starting over
  • 8:26 Skill: Learning to discover
  • 8:42 Tip: Read manuals for fun
  • 10:16 Tip: Use Emacs bookmarks to save your place in the manual
  • 10:43 Tip: Generally, investing time into navigation and note-taking workflows pays off
  • 12:19 Skill: Keyboard macros
  • 12:53 Skill: Modifying the behavior of code via hooks and advice
  • 13:15 Tip: Learn to think in terms of buffers and windows
  • 14:07 Skill: Reading the source code; Tip: Just jump in
  • 15:33 Tip: edebug is great for exploring code
  • 16:26 Tip: Reading tests can help you understand code, too.
  • 17:02 Skill: Idiomatic Elisp
  • 17:17 Tip: Write tests.
  • 17:52 Tip: When writing Emacs Lisp that expects a list, use plurals
  • 18:59 Tip: When naming, be verbose rather than terse
  • 19:46 Tip: Iterate on your workflow in small steps
  • 20:20 Tip: Make things more automatic, and use context-sensitive clues
  • 24:48 Skill: Thinking in terms of elements
  • 26:16 Skill: Reading other people's configuration and adapting ideas to yours
  • 27:07 Tip: Start with focusing on just one thing
  • 27:33 Blog posts and videos are useful
  • 28:09 Tip: Take notes as you learn, and ideally, share them too.
  • 28:54 Tip: Accept being a beginner.
  • 31:16 Group: Power users
  • 32:13 Tip: Browse through package lists
  • 32:25 Tip: Dive deeply into the packages you have: customization options, code, etc.
  • 32:41 Tip: find-library gets you to the source code, occur can help you browse it
  • 33:29 Tip: You can also browse through Customize
  • 33:48 Tip: Have fun with randomness and serendipity
  • 34:32 Tip: Check out people's workflow descriptions and stories
  • 35:42 Resources: manuals, Mastering Emacs, Emacs Lisp Elements
  • 37:29 Skill: Figuring out what's possible and making a habit of writing tiny functions
  • 37:45 Skill: Being mindful of what you do over and over again
  • 38:26 Tip: Keyboard macros can help you jumpstart custom functions
  • 39:11 Tip: Use C-h k (describe-key) to describe shortcuts or menu items
  • 40:04 Tip: You can set up M-x to show keyboard shortcuts too (Marginalia?)
  • 41:26 Resource: Emacs from Scratch series by System Crafters
  • 41:50 Tip: Old tutorials can still be useful, although don't treat them as the sole source of truth (things may have changed since then)
  • 42:55 Skill: Finding preferred resources
  • 44:12 Tip: If you find your tribe, look for ways to keep in touch with them
  • 45:00 Tip: Manage unequal RSS frequencies with folders or tags
  • 46:33 Tip: Doing more things in Emacs has compounding benefits
  • 48:31 Tip: Learn to think of it as just text
  • 49:46 Tip: Take notes along the way
  • 50:16 Tip: Explore different ways to navigate and act on things
  • 51:09 Tip: Learn to combine different building blocks
  • 52:47 Tip: Get the hang of keybinding conventions
  • 56:06 Tip: Use which-key for keybinding help
  • 57:41 Tip: Figure out your ergonomics

Transcript

Expand this to read the transcript

0:00 Opening

image from video 00:00:38.400Sacha: My typing is still going to be very loud, but that's okay.

Prot: That's part of the charm.

Sacha: Okay. All right. Here we go. Let's go live. Hello, everyone. This is Yay Emacs [32]. I forgot which number. Anyhow, I'm here with Prot because it's Emacs Carnival for May 2026, and the theme is "May I Recommend" because I like puns and couldn't pass up the chance to say "May." So "May I recommend..." is our topic, and our goal for this one is to brain dump a whole bunch of things that people might find useful in their Emacs learning journey. We've already talked about newbies and starter kits in the previous two conversations we've had in Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs. This time, we're going to focus more on *users* who are getting started with... They've decided this is going to be their everyday tool. They want to learn more about keyboard shortcuts and finding their way around, building the habits, finding their preferred resources. *Power users*, maybe, who are starting to look at different packages, these are maybe the people who are saying, okay, maybe let's try this package for working with Org Mode in addition to the basic stuff, or let's try doing email in Emacs. *Customizers*, who are beginning to get into Emacs Lisp to write functions. This is where you start to customize it a lot more to your tastes and your workflows. *Contributors*, people who are sharing their source code, maybe even turning it into packages, participating mailing lists and discussions. So this whole range of people all working on different skills at different levels. What I think we're going to do with this is we're just going to braindump a whole bunch of recommendations. You're welcome to ask questions, and I'll ask you questions as well. We'll just untangle everything and organize everything afterwards.

Prot: That's great.

Sacha: There we go. In this list of skills that people can develop, are you thinking of other skills that aren't on this list yet that do make a big difference to how people use and learn Emacs?

Prot: I need to enlarge my screen a little bit. I think what you have there is good.

2:27 Tip: Less is more. Start small.

Prot: What I had in mind also is more of a meta-point, or more general thing, like an approach style, which is "less is more," if I were to condense it. Start small. Make sure you make it work when it's small. Extend it from there. Don't start big and try to simplify it, because that doesn't work.

Sacha: I grouped that idea under managing time, notes, and attention and also breaking things down, because the overwhelming nature of things is something a lot of people struggle with, both Emacs and elsewhere. Even just that meta-skill of saying, "Okay, this is a small chunk that I'm going to focus on because I know that's what my brain can handle" versus "let's architect this entire thing" and you're six hours down the line and you're nowhere near the thing that you want it to do.

Prot: And of course Emacs invites you for that because it's like, here are like a hundred powerful tools for you to combine in ways that nobody else has thought of before, right? So it's like asking you to do that, but it's a trap. You don't want to go down that route. Or at least don't go there too early.

Sacha: Managing the rabbit hole. Yes, there are going to be a lot of temptations and some of those temptations are quite legitimate. Yeah, you do have to figure this part out in order to get this other thing that you wanted working. But sometimes it's just a trap.

Prot: Yeah.

Sacha: So that's managing. What other meta-skills here should we talk about as a framework so that when we dive into the specifics, we know we're covering a lot of the ground people need?

4:07 Tip: Start with what is built in

Prot: Not so much a meta skill, but consistent with this line of reasoning is as a good heuristic, start with what is built in and extend from there, because usually what is built in will give you a baseline of functionality. It works with a "less is more" approach.

4:27 Skill: Figuring out the words to look for

Sacha: I feel that sometimes figuring out the words to look for, finding out what it might be called in Emacs source or in the built-in packages... That's something that's hard to develop unless you're reading manuals and reading other people's posts because the terminology can be quite arcane.

Prot: Oh yeah, for sure.

Sacha: Getting a sense of what might be built in and what it might be called and where to look for it, I think, is definitely a skill.

Prot: One good way to think of this is, what do I want to do? In the most simple form, if you forget about Emacs for a second, and you're like, what am I trying to do? I'm trying to write a blog, or I'm trying to deal with email correspondence, or I'm trying to manage my TODOs. In its most simplest form, how can I solve this problem? That can already help you formulate the questions.

Sacha: Formulating the questions is actually really hard. Sometimes people don't even notice that there's a question that they can ask, and they don't know what kinds of solutions might address that problem actually. They get distracted by A, but actually it's B that will solve the problem. Considering the different kinds of solutions that can address the same problem, developing a sense of which ways are easier to do the Emacs way versus harder to do. Why make something really complicated when a built-in package or whatever can solve that problem in a more elegant way? All of these things require the development of intuition.

Prot: Yes, yes, and with some experience, of course, that helps, for sure. But then it's the other, which you can also consider as a meta skill.

6:25 Tip: Be okay with starting over

Prot: I believe there was also a point of this, be okay with declaring bankruptcy in Emacs. Bankruptcy, I think... the essence of that is not really much bankruptcy, but be okay with trying something, which is an experiment, and then learning something from it, distilling the essence of that, and then trying something else. I think a sense of experimentation will help you build that skill of, okay, now I can intuitively figure out what works and what doesn't work.

Sacha: I think that's a really interesting point because sometimes you get very attached to "there's this thing that I've started to build" and then you start bolting more and more things onto it, when really, sometimes the prototype is your way of understanding the problem. Then you take it all out and you say, okay, now that I understand a little bit more, what can I make? How do I change my workflow with that new understanding? Sometimes it's as extensive as declaring Emacs bankruptcy and starting again from scratch. Sometimes it's just maybe "The approach that I'm taking is not a fruitful one. I should go try something else."

Prot: Yeah, exactly. You can only have that feedback loop if you try, so trial and error is the way to go.

Sacha: @gcentauri has a question or a comment about discoverability, figuring out how to navigate Emacs in order to discover things. Where would we put that in this skill? This is figuring out the words as well, right? Isn't it?

Prot: Yeah, by the way, I'm in the chat here.

Sacha: Where did you read that?

Prot: I see it here. It was off my screen. I see it now. And of course Christian... I'm reading the temperatures in Western Europe. They are terrible. Yes, I know.

Sacha: Yeah, big heat wave.

8:26 Skill: Learning to discover

Sacha: So, figuring out discoverability, learning how to navigate Emacs. Emacs is lovely. It's self-documented, everything at your fingertips, but you've got to know how to get those fingers on them.

8:42 Tip: Read manuals for fun

Prot: The manual helps. It will present some of that. But of course, you have to read the manual. So you are in a situation where you have to have the skill of reading the manuals in order to discover, but to discover... So yeah, it's a tricky thing. You have to know where the manuals are.

Sacha: Yeah, and you have to be unintimidated by them, I think. I got into it easy because I've always been used to reading books above my level. Even as a kid, I was reading my sister's data structures and algorithms books. I didn't understand anything the first time around. But after nine times through, you start to understand some of the concepts and how they go together. The more you read something, the more of those concepts start to make sense to you. You read it, you read other things around it or related to it, and then the jargon becomes less impenetrable. You begin to understand it. So one of my recommendations is I recommend reading the Emacs manual, the Org manual, all these book-shaped things for fun. Even if you don't think you're going to immediately use 90% of the things, every time you read it, you're going to learn something.

Prot: Yeah. Plus, of course, you will know you are an Emacs user if you are reading manuals for fun.

Sacha: How else are you going to find out about Org spreadsheets and whatnot, right? It's just too big to fit in your brain.

Prot: Correct. Yeah, that's really good. You could even make it a habit of, okay, this day I will read one chapter from the manual.

10:16 Tip: Use Emacs bookmarks to save your place in the manual

Prot: Actually, to say something on this, if you learn about the bookmark mechanism of Emacs, you can bookmark info manuals. So if you are reading the manual from inside of Emacs, you can use the bookmark facility to be like, last point in the Emacs manual. You could have a bookmark that is a rolling bookmark, right? So you could be updating it whenever you go to the next chapter. This way, little by little, you can read the manual.

10:43 Tip: Generally, investing time into navigation and note-taking workflows pays off

Sacha: In general, figuring out your navigation and note-taking workflows so that they're super convenient for you, whether that's Denote or Org Mode Capture or whatever else that you're using... As you read, taking notes on the things that you find interesting in a way that makes it easy to jump back to more information is definitely worth the upfront investment of learning.

Prot: Yeah, 100%.

Sacha: @gcentauri confirms they are actually a true blue Emacs geek. "Was reading the manual right before bed and came across the forms library. No idea it existed." Read stuff, make it easier for you to jump back to the place that you left off or the parts that you found interesting. That's a great recommendation.

Prot: Just to add another metaskill related to this. Don't read it before going to bed because if you discover something useful, you are not going to sleep.

Sacha: I think the idea there is get really good at telling your brain, yes, that's really cool, but if you stay up until 1, you are going to regret it. So just add a TODO and let it go.

Prot: Exactly.

Sacha: This may have happened to me a number of times.

Prot: Yeah, yeah, same. So, only read the manual in the morning or when you wake up.

Sacha: Are there other metaskills that are not yet captured in this or do we start digging into each of these skills?

Prot: I say we dig in and if we think of something we can always add it later.

Sacha: All right. What strikes your attention here? Which of these things?

Prot: No, no. You can go wherever. I don't mind. Anything will do well.

12:19 Skill: Keyboard macros

Sacha: There's a whole lot of stuff here in the customizer, packager thing around modifying or gluing together code that is not something easy for people to pick up because they're just not used to it in other programming languages or platforms or whatever. Things like: you could use keyboard macros to cobble together a quick workflow. You don't even have to write a big function. Just developing the intuition that, oh, this is a set of repeatable functions or repeatable commands is one thing,

12:53 Skill: Modifying the behavior of code via hooks and advice

Sacha: all the way to "this is how I use hooks and advice to either modify the behavior of something where the person who coded it has anticipated that a hook will be needed here, or advice in case they didn't plan for it at all." You're just going to override things yourself. How do people develop this sense of what's possible and how to do things?

13:15 Tip: Learn to think in terms of buffers and windows

Prot: Yeah, it's a difficult skill but it's something you develop by experience. The point to remember is that in Emacs, at its core, you have buffers and everything is a buffer and buffers are displayed in windows If you think in terms of that abstraction, something like a keyboard macro becomes a tool that will jump between buffers, will switch windows. It has no problem doing any of that. You are not limited in your thought to, okay, I have to work exactly where I am right now. I think that's a general approach that goes very far with what you do. Of course, when you are thinking of the advice and the hook, that I think is a little bit more advanced because you need to also have the skills to write advice. With hooks, maybe not. But for advice, you will need to understand exactly what is happening.

14:07 Skill: Reading the source code; Tip: Just jump in

Sacha: I have definitely jumped ahead here because this also requires the skill of reading people's code in order to find out there is a hook or there is some advice that you can do, or there's a variable and this is how you can let bind it to temporarily change its value during this part of the code. Let's talk about reading source. What sorts of things help people develop that skill of reading the source code?

Prot: You have to just jump in at some point. Like, you might do it by accident when you are in a help buffer and either you misclick S, which goes to the source, or you follow the link from above. But anyway, the point is it's a good skill to just, a good habit rather, just jump in and try to read it even if you don't know any programming. Try to read it as if it's English and try to see what you can understand. And of course, some functions will be extremely difficult. Others will be more straightforward. So I think eventually by exposure through osmosis, as it were, you will already learn something.

Sacha: I love the fact that our functions in variable names are often very long and it makes sense in English because we're not trying to squeeze into some very concise, very terse convention. Just put a full sentence in there. It's fine. We just use completion anyway. It's all good.

15:33 Tip: edebug is great for exploring code

Sacha: One of the tips that I'll put in here because people sometimes miss it is the power of Edebug. If people haven't come across Edebug yet, it's great because you can interactively step through what the code is actually doing and you can evaluate what the value is of this variable at this point. And every so often I had to go into the Edebug menu bar and remind myself, okay, you can set conditional breakpoints and all these other things that I have to remember that exist and can be used. But Edebug, if you're going to learn Emacs Lisp, learn Edebug.

Prot: Edebug is really powerful for sure and it's especially useful when you have functions that are relatively long. I mean what they are doing like they have a lot of steps and you have to understand the flow. Like if it's a very short function maybe you don't benefit all that much from eDebug but in practice you will need it. It's very powerful.

16:26 Tip: Reading tests can help you understand code, too.

Sacha: And the other thing I want to point out is that sometimes packages have tests and reading the tests can give you even more of an idea of how this function is supposed to behave. It's not always the case, but when there are tests, they're great.

Prot: In an ideal world, we will update our tests.

Sacha: Alright, so that's reading source code. There's so much that's really interesting to read. Sometimes you come across interesting idioms for Emacs Lisp and you're like, oh yeah, that's a great way to iterate through all the buffers and match a certain thing, whatever.

17:02 Skill: Idiomatic Elisp

Sacha: And so if you're in this customizer phase of things and you want to move to the contributor level, learning idiomatic Elisp is definitely like, okay, it makes things a lot easier.

17:17 Tip: Write tests.

Sacha: Charlie says, "Edebug and ERT tests change the way I develop Elisp. No longer flying blind." Yeah, great. In particular, I tend to break things whenever I make changes, so it's really nice to be able to say, okay, I'm going to nail down this behavior, at least for now. With a little bit of thinking, sometimes you can write tests for things that you would do interactively. So you can test a whole lot more because you have buffers and windows than you might in other languages.

Prot: Yeah, correct, correct. And you get to see it live.

17:52 Tip: When writing Emacs Lisp that expects a list, use plurals

Prot: Just to say on this point of when you are going through the tests and through everything, one basic thing which is in idiomatic Emacs Lisp is when you are writing the parameters of a function, if you are expecting a list, you use plural. For example, you have a function that goes through buffers. Your parameter is just called buffers. That alone should tell you that it's a list of stuff. You don't say "list of buffers," right? That's superfluous. You just say buffers. This automatically means it's a list. So that's very common. You will see this a lot.

Sacha: Here I am, I've been calling my variables buffer-list. Sometimes figuring out what I should call a function or call an argument is a bit challenging, but I figure I'll just name it whatever comes to mind and then I can defalias it or do a search and replace afterwards.

18:59 Tip: When naming, be verbose rather than terse

Prot: When in doubt, of course, be verbose rather than terse.

Sacha: Oh, yes. When you find yourself still using the wrong words to try to find it again, just add more aliases and you'll find it eventually.

Prot: More verbose. More words. All the words.

Sacha: All the words. All right. What are the things here do we want to dig into? Adopting is always an interesting challenge and it's a challenge at all levels here, right? From the user trying to figure out "How do I remember to use this keyboard shortcut?" to "I've written this new function, it's great, but I have to remember to use it." Do you have any recommendations around changing the workflow?

19:46 Tip: Iterate on your workflow in small steps

Prot: In accordance with what I said in the beginning, iteratively. Try to memorize one. You have this new function that, let's say, streamlines how you list files in a directory, whatever, I don't know. Use it. Don't have all 10 functions and try to remember them. Just use one. After two weeks, use the next one. After four weeks, use the third one, and so on. Little by little, make it something that you just do automatically, you don't think about it, with the recognition that you want to remember them all.

20:20 Tip: Make things more automatic, and use context-sensitive clues

Sacha: In fact, going on that point of automaticity, I also like making sure this stuff happens without me having to think about it. If there's a hook that I can take advantage of to just have it automatically turned on, or if there's a context menu I can add it to so that I know, okay, if I do this, then I'll see it in a shorter list. I can get to it more easily instead of having to remember how to find it and all these details. All these little ways to make it easier for myself to automatically enjoy the improvements, or at least have a chance of finding it again.

Prot: Yeah, yeah. This is in the spirit of prefix keys, with the help of the which-key package, for example, or what Embark is doing. Of course, there are different approaches. Maybe you want to set up a transient and in the given mode, you just type question mark, for example, and it breaks up your transient with what you want to do. There are various strategies you can go about to do something like that. I lost your audio, just to say. Yeah, no problem. Let's see. Of course I can sing in the meantime, but I don't think the audience will like it. Let's see. Yeah, no problem. No stress. Of course we could do this. Don't forget that there was a time in history where cinema thrived with technology like this. So it will work. Okay, I can read a little bit from the chat. So something I love doing is after I've learned that one function at the late...

Sacha: Can you hear me now? No. Test. Okay, okay, okay. Woohoo! Successful panicking. Alright. Great. Great. Magic? Something is happening? I don't know what is happening. My video is less important. It's fine. You may continue. Oh yeah, for sure.

24:48 Skill: Thinking in terms of elements

Sacha: Even just thinking, okay, here are the elements that it can work on and here are the actions that I want to associate with those elements. I guess it starts with the intuition of what are the things that I can address. And what I do is I just look at the embark source code and I'm like, oh yeah, okay, Org headings, that makes sense, and variables and all that stuff. I always like looking at people's setups. Okay, this one says you are now too quiet. Can you say something? Okay, okay, this is definitely a me problem. Hang on a second. Oh, okay, okay, okay, I think... Ah, technology. Why is it so fun? Test. Test. No, this is not right. No, no, no.

Prot: Let me know if you can hear me now. And of course, in the meantime, I can comment on the weather. I don't know if I can be heard. But in Western Europe, the temperatures are record high. And here in the mountain of Cyprus, it's like 20 degrees Celsius max.

Sacha: Okay. So did you hear any of the stream? Is Prot's audio okay now? You've got to keep talking, I guess.

Prot: Yeah.

Sacha: Oh, my goodness.

Prot: It's completely different.

26:16 Skill: Reading other people's configuration and adapting ideas to yours

Prot: "We can hear him loud and clear." Wonderful.

Sacha: Back to braindumping. Very good. So we talked about Embark and other things and practices and workflows. I learned by reading other people's configurations, but it does take a fair bit of intuition in the first place to realize this part of the configuration means this, and how to adapt that into my own workflow. Is there a way for people to develop that aside from just reading tons and tons of configs?

Prot: At some point you just have to try. You just have to be like, "Okay, this package everybody raves about, they must be doing something good. I don't know what that is, so I have to try it and see for myself."

27:07 Tip: Start with focusing on just one thing

Prot: Then for something like Embark... We are just using it as an example, but I think it's a good example for other things. Something like Embark can do a million things, but you can also use it for just one thing, right? Find the one thing that you can use it for, use it for that, then figure out what is the second thing and take it from there. The same can be said for Org and all sorts of packages.

27:33 Blog posts and videos are useful

Sacha: I find that sometimes videos are useful for it in terms of seeing it in context, but on the other hand, sometimes I don't have the patience to watch a whole video. I particularly enjoy the posts that are both blog posts plus videos, so I can just skim the blog post, copy the code without having to pause and type things in manually, but also see how it works by somebody showing me how they use something.

Prot: Yes. That's the idea.

28:09 Tip: Take notes as you learn, and ideally, share them too.

Sacha: I do want to sneak in this recommendation to share. I keep beating this drum. But whenever I write about something that I've learned, I always end up getting these comments from people who point out other things that I should check out too. So I highly recommend, whether you're a beginner or whether you're a power user of Emacs, try blogging. I am happy to add people's blogs to Planet Emacs Life so people can read your stuff. All the notes are great for both crystallizing what you know as well as possibly inviting other people to share other tips and comments that point out that what you just worked on is actually a built-in package and all you have to do is configure this. Happens to me often.

28:54 Tip: Accept being a beginner.

Prot: And what can help with blogging, especially once you are blogging about something that you know has a very high skill level, is to approach it in a diary-like way, where it's like, today I learned about such and such. I am not an expert, I am learning, and this is fun. That's your blog post. You don't have to present yourself as the foremost expert on the matter, because then of course you will have to wait many years to write that blog post.

Sacha: I think that goes under this separate intuition thing for mindset and accepting the fact that no matter how many years of Emacs experience you have, you're going to be a beginner in 90% of the things that Emacs can do. So we can totally just accept the beginner's mind. There's no need to worry about imposter syndrome because we're all like this. We're all figuring things out. If you want, you can put in a disclaimer. You can say, "I'm totally a beginner. Read this for the idea and not the Emacs Lisp style," if you're embarrassed, you're self-conscious about sharing your code. But yeah, we're all just starting out, essentially. I like the fact that people in the community are so accessible. There's no one really saying, oh, I'm an expert. You should do it. You should do it this way and only this way, because we're all aware that again, we've done it this way, but there are probably five or six other implementations that could be even better that are really out there.

Prot: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Sacha: Charlie says, "The leverage of blogging is unique in the Emacs community. Incredibly supportive, knowledgeable, and social group of people." That's another encouragement to go try it. That is all good. In fact, there are a few days left in this May carnival for "May I Recommend." If other people have recommendations, I'd love to hear about them too. Okay, so let's talk about... Actually, what do you want to talk about? What do you want to talk about?

Prot: Let's go and do something with the power users.

31:16 Group: Power users

Prot: With the power users, of course, you have a group that is, I would think, in some ways more diverse. Because of course there are different ways to become a power user. One, for example, is using Org more; another is using it as an IDE. So the common thread I would say here is that you are the kind of person who is digging deep. That's what you are as a power user. So if you want to become a power user, you have embedded as skills reading manuals and checking the source code, that sort of thing.

Sacha: At this point, you're like, "Emacs is going to be my tool. There's a lot of depth to it." And this is where you start reading, okay, "How do I use Org Mode?" Or "How do I set up my IDE so that it's just the way that I want it?"

32:13 Tip: Browse through package lists

Sacha: For fun, I will sometimes look through the package lists just to see what's out there that I can easily reuse. But often, it isn't even a matter of adding additional packages to your configuration.

32:25 Tip: Dive deeply into the packages you have: customization options, code, etc.

Sacha: It could just be diving deeply into the ones that you do already have, looking for options, looking for little things that you can toggle on and off, or considering how the different functions can be integrated into your workflow.

32:41 Tip: find-library gets you to the source code, occur can help you browse it

Prot: And to this end, I will add something that I do frequently because it combines the elements of what we have already covered, which is M-x find-library. You select the package you are interested in. You go there, then you do M-x occur. And you search for defcustom with a parenthesis in front. "(defcustom". This will produce an occur buffer with all the user options. So you do two things now. You learn about the user options, and you are looking at some source code. That's one way I can start reading source code.

Sacha: This goes back to why we don't just tell people... You don't like Customize, so the M-x customize + regular expression is off your list. Just look at the source code.

Prot: You'll be happier. Yeah, exactly.

33:29 Tip: You can also browse through Customize

Sacha: Browsing through Customize is also an option because it'll tell you about the things. You don't have to use the Customize interface to set it, but I have come across very interesting options that way, just clicking around.

Prot: Yeah, for sure.

Sacha: @gcentauri's like, yeah, I'm bored, M-x list-packages.

33:48 Tip: Have fun with randomness and serendipity

Sacha: Sometimes I randomize these things. I think for EmacsConf, either last year or the year before, we had random packages being displayed as a screensaver. I know people have sometimes on their dashboards, they'll display random inspirational quotes. It could be a random Emacs package. I think at one point I had it display random interactive functions, just so I could stumble across more commands. Taking advantage of serendipity can be a fun way to squeeze in a little bit of learning.

Prot: Nice, nice, yes. That's good.

Sacha: All right, so Jason Torres says, "I use custom just to explore."

34:32 Tip: Check out people's workflow descriptions and stories

Sacha: Another recommendation I'd like to put in here is reading other people's workflow descriptions. Again, going back to blogs and videos and all of that. It's because a lot of these things are not obvious from looking at the source code, but when somebody tells you a story about what problem they had and how they combined pieces of different packages to solve a problem, then it becomes a lot more real.

Prot: Yes. Plus, it puts you in the spirit of Emacs, which is you can be creative and piece together different elements of functionality and have a workflow that works for you.

Sacha: Let's try plugging in, re-plugging in my webcam. Let's see what happens.

Prot: Let's see, let's see. The moment of truth.

Sacha: Everyone will just have to imagine my eyebrows of agreement. Okay, so that's the power user. This is how you get even better at it.

35:42 Resources: manuals, Mastering Emacs, Emacs Lisp Elements

Sacha: I think Mastering Emacs would probably be like a book recommendation in this area. And for customizing Emacs and actually writing Emacs Lisp, there's your Emacs Lisp Elements book. What other things would you recommend aside from, yeah, read the intro to Emacs Lisp and the Emacs Lisp Memo for fun?

Prot: Of course, what you have listed there are all useful. The other one would be in the spirit of what we said earlier of trial and error. Learn how to, or rather get in the habit of writing little snippets of code. They don't have to be the best code of your life. Just something that gets the job done. Of course you can improve it later, but by getting in the flow of writing your own code, eventually what happens is you write better Emacs Lisp. You develop intuitions of what could go where, and eventually, before you know it, you are better at Emacs just because you were doing this little routine.

Sacha: Noticing the questions. This is also a skill. This is also something that you develop. A lot of times people do not even know what's possible because they're so used to just taking for granted that this is a limitation of the system. So sometimes we have to see somebody else, you know, fly through the code without worrying about like, okay, I have to go do this and do that and whatever. Oh, somebody says it's OBS, thank you. @ashraz has pointed out that OBS has my webcam, which is why the browser couldn't find it. So I will think with that some more, but in any case, we will continue.

37:29 Skill: Figuring out what's possible and making a habit of writing tiny functions

Sacha: Yes, so figuring out what is possible and then writing a tiny function for it and developing that habit of not tolerating these little bits of friction, I think is a skill. It's a thing you can develop.

37:45 Skill: Being mindful of what you do over and over again

Prot: Yeah, and another skill which is along the lines of writing your own code but maybe also a meta-skill is: be mindful of what you do over and over again. For example, let's imagine now you have a command that switches to the other window and then blinks the cursor or whatever, right? And these are two commands and you do them all the time. You do the one, you do the other, okay? Now you can write one command, which is a wrapper of those two, and all it does is call interactively the first, call interactively the second. Just by piecing those together you already have your own little command.

38:26 Tip: Keyboard macros can help you jumpstart custom functions

Sacha: Oh, I definitely want to point out here that you can use keyboard macros to generate the Emacs Lisp for it. So even if you're not that comfortable with Emacs Lisp, or you don't remember what the keyboard shortcuts do, you can record a keyboard macro. So you've definitely learned how to do that. And then you can get it to print out the Emacs Lisp that the set of keyboard actions ran. Or at least the Emacs Lisp to repeat the same keyboard shortcuts and then it will all figure it out. Anyway, so that's there. You can save that sequence of commands as a Lisp function in your config. So that's one thing, using keyboard macros to jumpstart your Emacs Lisp.

39:11 Tip: Use C-h k (describe-key) to describe shortcuts or menu items

Sacha: And the second thing is using C-h-K or Describe Key to see what a given keyboard shortcut or menu item will actually run. So that's all very useful stuff for figuring out the Emacs list to do something you're doing interactively.

Prot: I think that's the most used help command I do. C-h k. It's super useful all the time. It's very, very helpful. And not only you learn what command it calls, but also in which key map it is bound. So for example, C-c C-c in an Org buffer, it is telling you what the command is, and it is telling you this command is bound in the Org mode map. So if you want to change something, you know that you also have to be mindful of the key map. So there is your key map.

40:04 Tip: You can set up M-x to show keyboard shortcuts too (Marginalia?)

Sacha: Yes, it tells you other shortcuts. Oh, and along those lines, one of the M-x variants shows key bindings as well, which I recommend. If you're a power user, you'd like to become more of a power user, even a regular user, right? You want to start moving to using keyboard shortcuts for your more common commands and setting up your M-x command completion so that it hints at the keyboard shortcuts. Emacs by default also tells you about it after you run a command that had a shortcut. But at least that way, when you're looking through the command list you can see, "Oh yeah, this has a shortcut!" And then you can maybe even cancel out of your M-x and practice using that shortcut right away.

Prot: Exactly.

Sacha: And along those lines, I like using Marginalia and Consult because then I can see the command descriptions alongside the command name. So there's a little bit more detail there.

Prot: Yeah, I think you meant Vertico and Marginalia.

Sacha: Oh, yes. It's one of those things, yes. It just works with everything. So yes, Vertico for completions that show you a lot of detail, and then Marginalia to actually show the thing on the side, which is helpful.

Prot: Consult is wonderful as well, of course.

Sacha: Yes.

41:26 Resource: Emacs from Scratch series by System Crafters

Sacha: @ashraz would like to recommend the Emacs from Scratch series by System Crafters. They say it's a bit dated from 2020, but still mostly relevant in general. There are a lot of video resources out there.

Prot: That's good. 2020, oh my goodness. It's been so long, I can't believe it.

41:50 Tip: Old tutorials can still be useful, although don't treat them as the sole source of truth (things may have changed since then)

Sacha: It's really interesting because I've been trying to organize the tutorial resources that people who are new to Emacs will come across. And a lot of times, some of the Org videos are from 10, 20 years ago. But they're still valid, so we have to make sure people don't immediately get turned off by the date in the video. But at the same time, they can start to tell the difference. Okay, this stuff is still applicable. But this stuff over here, it needs to be translated into how you do it in modern times. It's a little challenging for people to navigate this.

Prot: Which of course points to another meta skill which is generally information related to Emacs is useful and it will work long into the future. But don't take a tutorial or a video as the source of truth. Always use it as a proxy. Okay, I get the idea. Now I will have to check the documentation and so on.

42:55 Skill: Finding preferred resources

Sacha: I think that part of the learning journey as a user is also finding your preferred resources. A lot of times, you're not going to learn everything the first time around. Everyone thinks in different ways. You do need to spend some time looking for the kinds of resources that jive with the way that you think, with the task that you want to do or the workflow you want to have. It's using the language at the right level for you, et cetera, et cetera. Even knowing, going in, that you're not going to find one-size-fits-all tutorial because Emacs has so many different workflow possibilities... Spending some time to figure out what you like as a tutorial or as a reference, and then going back to that again and again as your understanding develops, I think is a thing worth doing.

Prot: Yes, exactly. That's the whole point of Emacs more broadly: that it accommodates the different kinds of people because it's so customizable. If something doesn't work for you, don't try to force yourself to work the way it is. Rather, change Emacs to work the way you think.

44:12 Tip: If you find your tribe, look for ways to keep in touch with them

Sacha: On a meta note, finding people who think the kind of way you do is super helpful, like the tribe within the tribe. For example, you've got this cluster of people who like using Denote because their brain works the same way that yours does when it comes to filing their notes. Once you find that connection, finding ways to keep up with what those people are doing, and often this is RSS because that's a great way to get the updates without getting buried in email. That can be a great way to keep stumbling across things that might help you.

Prot: Yes, that's a very good point.

45:00 Tip: Manage unequal RSS frequencies with folders or tags

Prot: On the topic of RSS, just to say something that I learned many years ago the hard way: RSS works best if you subscribe to resources that don't post 30 or 50 or 100 articles a day. If you subscribe to the BBC or whatever, that will not work because it will crowd out the blog that posts once every month.

Sacha: What I do with that is I have different folders.

Prot: Folders, filters, etc.

Sacha: Yeah, folders or tags or whatever. So all the microblogs or all the very prolific things go into one folder, which I generally ignore because it's hard to go through.

Prot: Fair enough. Subscribe.

Sacha: Yeah, the people who post once a day or once a week or once a month or once every blue moon, then it's easier to keep up with them because it's not buried in all of that stuff. You can look into your RSS readers to support for keywords maybe in order to do some more filtering and prioritization. This is one of the things that I've always envied about people who use Gnus for reading RSS. Because there's nnrss. Then you can use Gnus scoring to prioritize the RSS items automatically for you. But that's definitely a power user thing, because it's Gnus.

Prot: I think that's a power user among power users. That's really an exception.

46:33 Tip: Doing more things in Emacs has compounding benefits

Sacha: Actually, that touches on an interesting thing about becoming more of a power user of Emacs. If you let Emacs assimilate more of your life, if you start to use Emacs for more and more things, you get not just linear improvements but compounding ones as the things that you have can interact with other things. Even just for the base case of if your to-do list is in Emacs and your coding is in Emacs, then you can create to-do items that link to your code, all the way to if your email is in Emacs, then you can make your to-do refer to your email and stuff like that.

Prot: Exactly. That's where it gets really powerful.

Sacha: If you want to get even deeper into the power of Emacs, try to push more of your life into it. I love seeing the things that people do with browsing the web in Emacs. What kinds of things do you do in Emacs that make you go like, this is where the power of having everything together works out really well.

Prot: You already mentioned them, like email in Emacs together with your agenda, but also Dired, because you can mark files and attach them to the message composition buffer. You can run a M-x shell and your three marked files in Dired, you type w or 0 w and you get their path and then you can do something with them from a shell, if you cannot do it directly from calling a shell command from Dired. There are many ways like that. The keyboard macros where you can jump from a Dired buffer to a shell buffer, or from one buffer to another. All these little things. For me, it's very powerful. You use it all the time.

48:31 Tip: Learn to think of it as just text

Prot: At some point, you don't even think about it. It's just text laid out in windows, each of which shows a buffer. So at some point, it doesn't matter if it's email or programming or prose. At some point, they are all the same. So it doesn't matter at all.

Sacha: Developing that mindset of "it's just text" and the facility for working with text, such as keyboard macros, or being able to jump around, or writing your own functions to manipulate it, or even just using isearch to go through it or using undo in different contexts. I think that's definitely something that people develop and when they develop that intuition, it really helps.

Prot: Yes, exactly. In the beginning you won't think about those linkages. They won't be obvious to you. But just be mindful that they are there. They are possible. As you use Emacs, at some point you just feel naturally about them, and they happen. You're like, oh yeah, of course that was always possible. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight... In the beginning, you will be like, "Wow, I can do that!"

49:46 Tip: Take notes along the way

Sacha: That's the other reason why I want to encourage people to take notes along the way, ideally sharing them, of course, but even just for yourself, because a lot of times you will get to the point where this is just the way you've always done it. On the other hand, if you had those notes as you're figuring out how to do it, and you share those notes, then you're leaving these breadcrumbs for other people who are traveling down the same or similar path. That's something that would be very helpful for people.

Prot: Yeah, exactly.

50:16 Tip: Explore different ways to navigate and act on things

Prot: Even if you don't have external packages... For example, a workflow that for me was so powerful that I was like "Yeah, this is the way to go" involved the grep and then editing the grep results. But even if you don't use a bespoke package for that, which of course is also built into Emacs now, the functionality, you can use the grep results just as a way to jump to the result. If you hit RET, it takes you to the buffer at the point where the result is. You can have a keyboard macro that jumps to the result, makes some edit, goes back, jumps to the next result and repeat, right? You can do that even without the package. The point is that you can collect results and edit them in like a second or a minute, whereas you would need literal hours to do that and it would be error-prone.

51:09 Tip: Learn to combine different building blocks

Sacha: Yeah, and this points to the skill of being able to see and work with different building blocks. You have a block for, this is how to navigate. There are different ways to navigate. You could navigate to something based on some matching text, or you can navigate to something based on a line. You can set up your windows so that you can switch between windows or whatever. Then if you can combine that with, okay, these are some building blocks for acting on something, or this is how I can use the kill ring to take it to... or this is how I can use registers so that I can save some text or save a position or whatever else. The more of these building blocks that you can develop slowly, because being able to internalize the concept takes time, then all these different ways that you combine it to solve a problem makes Emacs very powerful.

Prot: Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to think of it, as building blocks.

Sacha: I don't know how people will do that either, aside from read the manual for fun and watch Emacs videos and read other people's posts. Often I think, what if we make a skill tree, right? Because people like gamification... But then this is going to be a really ridiculous, large skill tree with arrows going all over the place.

Prot: No, no, you don't want to do that. It will be the RPG that never ends. There is no final boss.

Sacha: @yogi583 asks what is a built-in function's name to edit grep result in Emacs?

Prot: I don't know but what I usually do is... Grep edit mode I think. It's new, right? It's new. It's built into Emacs 31 I believe.

52:47 Tip: Get the hang of keybinding conventions

Sacha: What I think of it is I go to the grep buffer and I press C-x C-q because that's the general "toggle read only"... That's another mental concept there, right? Getting a sense of the key binding conventions that might be translated into different actions in different places.

Prot: Yes. There is an annex to the Emacs Lisp manual, the Emacs Lisp reference manual, which talks about the key binding conventions, which is very useful for people to read. Even after you read that, it's a little bit hard to reason about the key bindings if you are getting started, but trust the process. You will see the patterns as you go. Generally, you can expect C-x to be global key bindings, and C-c followed by control something to be major-mode-specific key bindings.

Sacha: One of the things I like about reading other people's configs is that they'll rebind something and I'll be like, yeah, I can totally take advantage of that keybind because I'm not using the standard one as much.

Prot: Let me tell you about one I used. Of course, there are many, but by default, you close Emacs with C-x C-c.

Sacha: Who closes Emacs?

Prot: Yeah, people who make mistakes in life, such as myself. So because I would fat finger that the whole time, you want to unbind C-x C-c and then do C-x C-c C-c then you can exit. I would do it by mistake the whole time and I would destroy whatever I was working.

Sacha: Yeah, key binding design is this whole other thing that I haven't really mastered myself either. We've talked before about making the key bindings make sense. When they're mnemonic, they're easier for people to remember, right? But this is definitely something that I struggle with.

Prot: So think of it this way, of course assuming there is a space for it or you unbind something. C-x something is a global key potentially with a prefix, as a prefix. C-x r is a prefix, C-x p is a prefix and they have global scope, right? If you are doing something that is global in nature, it should work everywhere. You may want to do the same if you are okay with overriding default key bindings, right? Otherwise, you want to do something that is more specific. C-c C-something for a mode. Again, optionally overriding what a major mode is doing. Then you have to work with that. Use mnemonics. Use words that make sense. For example, C-s is the default key for searching. M-s is the prefix for alternative search. Think of it. Alt-S, right? All the alternative kind of searches, such as M-s o, right? So you can now think of M-s and then g would be my grep. M-s and f would be my find and so on. You can think in concepts like that.

56:06 Tip: Use which-key for keybinding help

Sacha: When in doubt, keep which-key enabled so then it will remind you at least of what else you've had configured for that prefix. That's the other recommendation. which-key mode, it's built in now. Just go use it.

Prot: Yeah, which-key mode is very useful. If you are using the Embark package, it has a key that will take over C-h. So actually that works even with default. If you type an incomplete key sequence, C-h will produce a listing with all the keys that complete that sequence. So it will be a help buffer that will tell you, okay, C-x, C-h, for example, will list everything that follows C-x. And it will name the command and all that. So that's also something to consider. I think if Embark were to add the which-key functionality where it's like C-h on a timer, I think then Embark would be a straight upgrade over which-key. In that regard. So Omar, if you are listening... Asking for a friend.

Sacha: @gcentauri says, "I recommend learning how to define a key map and put it under a leader key. I have M-m as my personal key map and then the things I find very useful I add to my key map." For this one, I've been experimenting with bind-key, which makes all of this stuff much easier in terms of defining prefix key and adding a docstring and all those other lovely things.

57:41 Tip: Figure out your ergonomics

Sacha: I like your other meta tip about experimenting with how your keyboard is set up. So for example, even on my laptop... I have a ThinkPad. So even on my laptop keyboard, there's no QMK, but I can use Kanata, which you've also recommended elsewhere. to try experimenting with one-shot modifiers and home row mods or other things like that that I want to, making it easier to press key bindings that have different modifiers. I don't want to have to press ctrl and shift and super all at the same time. If I set up one-shot modifiers, I can just tap tap tap and it becomes easier to press.

Prot: Yes, exactly. That opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of mnemonics, but also in terms of prefix combinations and all that. You can go a very long way.

Sacha: And I think there's a meta thing here also about getting a sense of what would make it easier for you to be able to continue enjoying this long term? Because RSI is not conducive to enjoying Emacs long term.

Prot: No. For sure. Something that I think I learned the hard way through pain is that you want to consider your desk, how you sit at the desk - you want to consider everything, not just the keyboard. For example, I have adopted a standing desk since forever. I do that all the time. I never sit, because it works better for me. I have the keyboard set up the way that makes sense to me. I can write all day. It's what I do. I don't have any pain. Whereas before I would sit on an awkward chair, the desk was not optimized, the keyboard was definitely not something I had thought of, and I had pain. It was really difficult, and I reached the point where I couldn't write. I was like, okay, I have to quit.

Sacha: If Emacs is something that pays off better in the long term, it's good to have a long term.

Prot: Exactly.

Sacha: Speaking of my very short term, in about one minute, I'm going to go off and help with the kiddos' lunch break. I very much appreciated this brain dump. This is great. I'm going to do all the usual transcription and things like that, start pulling out some of these ideas. Chat, if you found anything super interesting that you would like fleshed out into a blog post, say it so we know what to focus on for priorities, right? This was a lot of fun. Are there any key recommendations you want people to make sure they check out or is it just generally like, everyone...?

Prot: No, I think what you have here is good because, of course, you can always say more. So I will conclude with what I started. Less is more, seriously. For life, not just for email.

Sacha: Your brain is surprisingly small. If you break what you learn down into tiny steps, you have a higher chance of it actually sticking. Once you get something in, then it makes things a little bit easier. You have a little bit more space to learn the next thing, and so on and so forth. Otherwise, if you bite off too much, you get overwhelmed.

Prot: Very nice, very nice. And that ties into the lunch break. Yes.

Sacha: All right. Thank you so much. I will skedaddle and yeah, I will do all the things afterwards. Thanks everyone also for dropping by and hanging out. All right. See you around.

Prot: Take care. Take care. Goodbye. Goodbye.

Chat

  • ChristianTietze: ​🥁
  • protesilaos: ​Hello world!
  • MichaelVash7886: ​hello Prot
  • ChristianTietze: ​In (comparatively) ice cold Germany we had ~30ºC this week and there's Prot with 3 layers of clothes 🙂
  • chelmikador: ​​Hello!!
  • gcentauri: ​Hello!
  • gcentauri: ​totally
  • gcentauri: ​nerd sniping minefield
  • gcentauri: ​Emacs gives us Discoverability, and learning which tools enhance it for you is really important. Consult for example, and Helpful
  • sachactube: ​​https://pad.emacsconf.org/yay-emacs
  • gcentauri: ​i was literally doing that last night before bed
  • gcentauri: ​i came across the Forms library I had no idea existed
  • CharlieBaker707: ​​edebug + ert tests changed the way I develop elisp! No longer flying blind 🤣
  • ChristianTietze: ​end-to-end tmux snapshots – you can assert on the modeline contents and other 'ui' of Emacs too, at least in terminal rendition of course
  • gcentauri: ​because in Lisp its lists all the way down :)
  • CharlieBaker707: ​​something I love doing is, after I've learned that 1 function, at a later point I'll meta-x for that package's namespace, then embark-collect into a buffer and explore what other user-facing exist.
  • sachactube: ​​ugh hang on
  • CharlieBaker707: ​Stole that trick from Prot ;-)
  • ChristianTietze: ​🎶
  • sachactube: ​​hahaha, you can just keep braindumping tips while I panic
  • sachactube: ​​I will continue to panic
  • blaiseutube: ​​don't panic
  • CharlieBaker707: ​we can hear you!
  • CharlieBaker707: ​but not Prot :-D
  • blaiseutube: ​​oooh much better!
  • yogi583: ​​we cant hear prot
  • blaiseutube: ​prot is too quiet
  • gcentauri: ​@sachactube - prots audio is very low
  • renaudbussieres: ​​Is Prot only in your headphones?
  • sachactube: ​​I will look into that
  • blaiseutube: ​his audio is completely different
  • chelmikador: ​​now!
  • yogi583: ​​we can hear him
  • blaiseutube: ​yes!!!
  • CharlieBaker707: ​​loud and clear Prot!
  • MichaelVash7886: ​​all set now
  • gcentauri: ​Yes!
  • gcentauri: ​good!
  • blaiseutube: ​perfect!
  • blaiseutube: ​ooooh, Cyprus is nice
  • blaiseutube: ​Massachusetts is also 20C
  • ashraz: ​​Is prot's sound only clipping for me a bit or also for others?
  • MichaelVash7886: ​​maybe a little but it's not bad on my end
  • sachactube: ​​That was me because I panicked about audio, returned to normal levels now
  • CharlieBaker707: ​​The leverage of blogging is unique in the Emacs community. Incredibly supportive, knowledgable, and social group of people.
  • gcentauri: ​We always need beginners to show us where things actually DONT make sense! A beginners mind see's all possibilities
  • gcentauri: ​yep. "i'm bored, M-x list-packages"
  • gcentauri: ​yeah i use Custom just to explore
  • gcentauri: ​Discoverability!
  • gcentauri: ​(btw this is shoshin from elsewhere)
  • renaudbussieres: ​​"M-x apropos-user-options" is another way to browser customizable options :)
  • gcentauri: ​@sachactube we can see you in the lower right, you've somehow gone to having your video floating
  • ashraz: ​​@sachactube Your webcam is shown as an overlay over the chat, which may be the reason why it cannot be shown a second time on Firefox
  • ashraz: ​​*Chrome
  • blaiseutube: ​​BRB
  • sachactube: ​​thanks!
  • blaiseutube: ​​…. seems like a "config profiler" would be handy, to produce a human readable summary of settings.
  • ashraz: ​​I also liked the Emacs From Scratch series by System Crafters. It's a bit dated (from 2020), but still mostly relevant in general, IIRC.
  • ashraz: ​​@blaiseutube Profiler as in loading time, or in "what is actually in that profile"?
  • gcentauri: ​is that Marginalia?
  • ashraz: ​​@gcentauri Aye, marginalia shows the shortcuts.
  • gcentauri: ​not Marginalia
  • gcentauri: ​i think maybe Vertico
  • ashraz: ​​2020 predates the minad-stack (vertico, marginalia, orderless, consult, corfu), it used ivy, swiper and company.
  • ashraz: ​​But the mindset is still in that series 🙂
  • valentinoslavkin6116: ​​Yeah, emacs from scratch is pretty good. Maybe it could explain a bit more the language or the use-package macro, but it works regardless
  • MichaelVash7886: ​yeah I haven't watched the series as so much changed since then
  • sachactube: ​​blaiseutube config profiler sounds interesting, what did you have in mind?
  • yogi583: ​​whats the builtin function's name to edit grep result in emacs?
  • gcentauri: ​Need multiple skill trees
  • gcentauri: ​different character classes
  • ashraz: ​​@gcentauri Also different positions on the alignment chart.
  • bledley99: ​​Lovely people, been watching/reading you two for years. Thanks for all you do. 🙌
  • gcentauri: ​I recommend learning how to define a keymap and put it under a leader key. I have M-m as my "personal-keymap" and then the things i find very useful i add to my keymap
  • gcentauri: ​and +1 which-key
  • ashraz: ​​See `D.2 Key Binding Conventions` in the manual for the conventions (for package maintainers)
  • ashraz: ​​*in the elisp manual, not the emacs one.
  • renaudbussieres: ​​I find "leader key" strategies better too, for example the C-x keymap, displayed with which-key, is too crowded and diverse to make sense
  • gcentauri: ​yes - i had to switch to xah-fly-keys because of RSI
  • gcentauri: ​but Emacs can change and adapt to YOU! which is important
  • MichaelVash7886: ​I want to look at Meow at some point for a leader key and modal editing
  • valentinoslavkin6116: ​​Meow is really great
View Org source for this post
You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
More posts about emacs, community, yay-emacs