YE21 April 23: Continuing to think about newbies / starter kits
| emacs, community, yay-emacsI continued thinking about the Emacs Carnival April 2026 theme of newbies / starter kits. Here are my notes and transcript from my previous livestream on the topic.
Overview
My goals for this 1-hour session:
People often recommend Emacs News to people who are looking for resources or inspiration. I want to make it easier for newcomers to Emacs to:
- feel more connected with the community and find sources of inspiration that can encourage them to keep going
- find recent beginner-related resources without needing to page through the archives
- find examples of workflows and tutorials for common needs
- not feel overwhelmed by all the links; be able to focus on the things at their level
Some things I can do:
- ☑ Update the header of https://sachachua.com/blog/category/emacs-news/ to make it easier for people who are new
- ☑ Update https://sachachua.com/topic/emacs-news/
If there's time, I can flesh out my outline further. YE20: Emacs Carnival: Newbies/starter kits
Chapters
- 0:00 Intro
- 0:01 Starting up
- 3:23 Newbies and starter kits
- 5:55 Emacs News
- 7:14 Let's move the mailing list option up
- 7:51 An aside talking to Prot
- 9:52 Challenges: Isolation
- 10:45 Overwhelm
- 11:14 Balance of time
- 11:33 Unknowns
- 14:00 Post-its
- 14:21 Finding help
- 14:53 Testing BigBlueButton
- 17:02 Thinking about reviving Emacs Hangouts
- 17:48 Emacs News as a newbie
- 18:29 Aside: Jeff is looking into making VS Code plugins
- 18:57 Notes on making the most of Emacs News
- 20:50 RSS
- 23:42 newsticker
- 27:25 Stream delay
- 28:31 Reading news with newsticker
- 29:04 The usefulness of screenshots and videos
- 34:20 Back to Emacs News
- 35:00 Prerequisite knowledge for Elfeed
- 37:29 Other resources that people might find useful
- 40:56 Beginner map
- 42:44 emacs-news/index.org is 5.5 MB of plain text
- 43:55 consult-focus-lines
- 44:13 Organizing the links
- 45:02 Organizing screenshots and videos by package
- 45:49 Info pages
- 47:08 Remembering keybindings
- 48:40 The guided tour
- 50:07 Recap
- 53:12 newcomers-presets
- 57:52 Wrapping up
- 58:19 Remembering keybindings
- 59:13 Picking Prot's brain next week about the newcomer experience
Transcript
Transcript
0:01 Starting up
Alright everyone, this is Yay Emacs 21 and I think it's a good opportunity to continue with thinking about newbies and starter kits. Also, theoretically, you might be able to join via Big Blue Button. I will put the link in the chat and we can experiment with it because I have no idea if it works or not. Let's go see. That's not it. Let's get the right one. I need to have shorter URLs, but that will come eventually. Step two, find the chat window. I have too many windows. Okay, let's see if that works for now. And then, let's find out if everything gets crazy if I share my... Like, how does this work? I unmute myself. Testing. Okay, that shows up. I am logged in with the EmacsConf user at the moment. I probably have a me account on this as well. I just don't remember if I've got that set up yet. Anyway, we're experimenting with these because next... next week? Next next week. Next next week or so. Yes, next next week I am chatting with Amin Bandali and we're going to start doing some Emacs chats, possibly on BigBlueButton because it's free and open source. So that is all goodness. And let's share screen one, I think. Could not share the screen. Hmm. I'm going to try this with the other browser. Let's paste in my join link. Let's log in as me. Microphone. Ah, it doesn't like my microphone. Fine. Let's see if this lets me share my screen. Entire screen. Share. Okay. Alright. So now I'm sharing. I am not sharing. It's not happening. Well, it's thinking about it. So my goal is to get to the point where I can use big blue button to share my sub goal, my side quest, to share my screen so people can see what I'm talking about and stream at the same time. But it doesn't seem to be happening, so that might be something I need to fiddle with off screen. OK, I will just save this for if anyone wants to drop by and share their stuff. OK, that is cool. I will live. 3:23 Newbies and starter kits
Okay, let us get back to whatever I can do. So yesterday I was thinking about this Emacs Carnival April 2026 topic of newbies and starter kits. And I wanted to start thinking about what I can do to help people with isolation, overwhelm, and these little challenges that come with being new to Emacs, but actually there's still challenges that we deal with, even when you're experienced. And I'm seeing people in the chat, but it's not showing up in the chat of social stream. Boo. So @Mehrad42 says hello, and @JacksonScholberg also says good morning. Good morning to you too. I have, in the notes and transcript... I've actually updated this with a transcript, I think. So now my post from yesterday has the video from yesterday, which is great. It also has my outline, which might be slightly easier to read in non-dark mode. Dark mode, dark mode, dark mode. Tough. One second, thought. Never mind, you can you can deal with the dark mode flipping yourself. So I have the outline, I have some to-dos for myself, and I have this lovely transcript which I edited and added chapters to because text is wonderful. So all of that is there. Probably there's still some misrecognized words in it, but handy. And then the outline up there has the links. So theoretically, I can start taking this and doing stuff with the thoughts and with the text to figure out how that goes. Let's see. Reload. Ah! Did the reload work? No. Okay. Things that I don't quite understand, but that's okay. I'll live. Okay. Let's get on with it then. 5:55 Emacs News
So a lot of people recommend Emacs News to new users or to other people who are interested in keeping up with what's going on in the Emacs world. I want to make it easier for people to find the resources and know what to do with things. So here's where they often end up. One of the things I've just added is a note that you can get to this page using a shorter URL, like https://sachachua.com/emacs-news or https://sacha.ac/emacs-news. And I should probably make it also work without the dash because then peoplethey don't have to remember, okay, does it have a dash? Does it not have a dash? And so forth. So that can be a to-do for me. Add an nginx redirection for Emacs News. No dash. All right. And I've also added this. Are you new to Emacs? Check out these tips for making the most of Emacs News. Plus quick subscription options, elfeed and nnrss for your favorite newsreader, MailChimp, or whatever. 7:14 Let's move the mailing list option up
I feel like it's slightly easier for newbies to deal with mailing lists because everyone knows how to do email and not a lot of people know how to use the awesomeness of RSS readers. So let's in fact switch this around so that the mailing list is up there. And let's make elfeed a link. Where is elfeed? 7:51 An aside talking to Prot
Hey, bonjour, Prot! Okay, Prot is also dropping in. I actually wanted, so I have the session with Prot next week and I actually want to pick Prot's brain about the newcomer experience as well. I've decided to draft some notes around that in here. So instead of my just telling you about all the cool stuff that I've been building for updating, you know, updating YouTube related entries on my blog or whatever. I want to pick Prot's brain about newbies and starter kits, which is great because Prot had some contemporaneous notes in 2019 when he started with Emacs. There's a video blog and he shared his experience starting as a non-programmer. And in his recent 2026 talk, for which the transcript and the video are also available online, these are both in the emacs.com page. You can follow these links yourself, but I will copy them because I can. Let's copy, copy, copy, copy as. Why do I have too many options there? Okay. So I will copy these links in. Prot says, starting Emacs without a background in programming, he learned the basics within a few days, started writing his own Emacs Lisp within weeks, and within a year, he had contributions to core Emacs. So I'm curious about how we can make the newbie or starter kit experience better for people. And as a quick summary of what I discussed yesterday in my brainstorming thing, it's in posts.org, which I have a sketch of. Sketch of? Yes. 9:52 Challenges: Isolation
We are thinking about the problems of isolation, where people generally don't know somebody else in real life who is into Emacs and can just lean over and fix stuff for them. And also they're not looking over someone else's shoulder and getting inspired by The cool things that they're doing. I'm not sure you can get much more isolated than being a mountain hermit in Cyprus, so Prot is an excellent example of still managing to be virtually connected, even though he's physically isolated. Oh, wait, actually, we do have some monks and we have some mountaineering guides who still manage to make interesting completion frameworks, like Helm. That's Thierry. Anyhow, so isolation is something that a lot of people feel is very challenging for them when it comes to learning. 10:45 Overwhelm
There's overwhelm, so just the sheer number of things that you need to learn, the new terms for everything, the keyboard shortcuts, the things that you've got to do in order to get a basic working environment set up to the point where you feel comfortable spending some time in it every day without feeling like it's holding you back. Cheat sheets and actually things like menu items and toolbars can be helpful for that. 11:14 Balance of time
Third problem is balance of time. You know, spending time tinkering with your config versus spending time getting things done, which is less of an issue if you're learning it at a leisurely pace, but more of an issue if you are under some pressure to become productive as soon as possible. 11:33 Unknowns
And the fourth is the things that you don't even know to look for. This is where Emacs News and other sources of inspiration can be helpful because then you come across a video or a blog post and you say, I can do that. And if you're lucky, that video or blog post will be accompanied by a tutorial that says, okay, this is step-by-step how to do it. But often there's still a lot of translation that's needed so that it can fit with your particular environment or your particular workflow. @JacksonScholberg shares that they gave up on using Emacs yesterday, and then they realized they could use VS Code to get things done while they're learning Emacs. So it's not an all or nothing thing. You can learn, you know, you can still use another editor to do most of your work, but use Emacs for a small set of things that you know how to do with it. You know, you might just know how to edit a file and save it. And that's it. That's good. That's great for starters. And then every day you might learn one new shortcut or one new thing that you can do. Gradually, your use of Emacs will grow and grow and grow until you start thinking, hey, why can't I just read my email in Emacs like all the cool kids? Or why don't I just go figure out how to browse the web in Emacs or keep track of my sewing in Emacs. That does actually happen. So yeah, totally just start small. But this process of breaking things down into tiny steps is something that newbies might not know. There are a number of different ways where people can get this sort of advice on how to break things down to make things simpler. One is, you know, every time people post this challenge on Reddit or elsewhere where they say, OK, I want to learn Emacs, but there's so many things. How do I learn this? Everyone keeps saying, OK, start small. 14:00 Post-its
Maybe have a Post-it note, which cannot be seen, a Post-it note on your monitor with the keyboard shortcuts that you are trying to learn. or have one text file where it's just your notes about what you're learning. Just break it down. 14:21 Finding help
Or people can go to, if they're having a hard time finding out what to break it down into, they can go to places like Reddit or IRC, the Emacs channel there on libera.chat or in meetups and say, okay, this is where I am now. How do I do this? How do I get there? And that might be helpful. Anyway, so those are the four challenges. 14:53 Testing BigBlueButton
What I want to do today with the one hour I have is I want to, unless other people happen to drop into the Big Blue Button, I think that I am also trying to experiment with except for some reason I'm not sure I can share my screen, which is a little inconvenient. I will debug that later. Anyway, what I can do in the background is start to think about the experience of coming to Emacs News as a newbie. Hey, @JacksonScholberg is in there! Okay, theoretically this sort of works. I don't know if people want to say things. What is going on? Hang on a second. uh okay uh. Call from the school so we'll have... I asked him to call me back in one hour and we'll see how that goes. Hello, @mtendethecreator! Feel free to unmute yourself and share anything if you want to in the Big Blue Button. In the meantime, I will continue... I have not actually spent some time yet thinking about how audio will work with this because Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox have a little bit of a problem, I think, with sharing my audio. Actually, maybe this. This is a test. Can you hear me through Big Blue button? Maybe that works. Maybe that doesn't. We'll see. Okay. And in the meantime, I can just continue with this until people want to experiment with that part. All right. Emacs News. So Emacs News. Hello. It works! It works! People are talking. I mean, people can talk. Thank you very much. I can actually hear you. Feel free to jump in. And for anyone else who also wants to be on stream, kind of, I will paste the Big Blue Button thing again. And all y'all are going to behave yourselves, I hope. We'll see. 17:02 Thinking about reviving Emacs Hangouts
One of my long-term goals would be nice to revive these Emacs Hangouts that I used to do on Google Meet, I think, a long time ago. But of course, we've got Big Blue Button now, so we can do it on proper free and open source software, where people just come and share what they're working on, what they're curious about, what they want to learn. And then we can try these sort of... Now I'm going to try to remember to pause every moment so people can interject. 17:48 Emacs News as a newbie
Emacs News as a new person is a little bit overwhelming. Imagine a newbie says, okay, I'm new to Emacs, what should I read? And people recommend things like, oh, check out the Mastering Emacs book. Read the C-h t tutorial. It's great. It is a great starting point. Oh, if you want to keep up with what's going on, interesting things, and how you get connected to the community, read Emacs News or subscribe to it. So this is a little overwhelming for people. 18:29 Aside: Jeff is looking into making VS Code plugins
Jeff says that he's researching making a VS Code plugin, actually. Good luck! If you run out of things, like if you run into things that you can't do with VS Code, I think some people have experimented with doing Emacs-y things inside VS Code or vice versa. I'm not entirely sure. I can rummage through my notes and see who has mentioned that before. If there was an EmacsConf proposal for it before. 18:57 Notes on making the most of Emacs News
Okay. Anyway, Emacs news. So I have this now where I say, okay, check out these tips for making the most of Emacs news. So like I was saying, I was thinking maybe starting with... Let me find the page that edits this. Topics, Emacs News. Okay. Starting with email is probably the easiest, so I will do that. Do I even want to nudge people to use MailChimp? I don't particularly like MailChimp. This is just Emacs News as either HTML or plain text emails. Includes Org version if you prefer. Oh yeah, I mentioned that here. So that's mine, and then I have an explanation of... If you are reading email email in Emacs... Yes! You can read email in Emacs. You have... All right, so there's that. RSS. So now I have more of a description of how to get it by email. And this goes to the subscription page. People can fill it in. It works like all the other mailing lists people are used to. 20:50 RSS
If people want to subscribe to RSS, new users for Emacs will probably not even know what RSS is. Why they might want to do it. Um... Do I want to explain this here? Okay. Does elfeed come with enough of an explanation so that a user can get started with it? Not very much of an explanation. Okay, is there an elfeed tutorial that I can... I feel like this is not really an elfeed tutorial. I feel like there needs to be like a basic from scratch, "I don't even know which init.el or .config/emacs/init.el or .emacs or whatever thing I should use." There should definitely be a tutorial here. Let's add a comment. I need to actually probably add a tutorial for setting up elfeed from scratch. Okay, is there a feedreader that people like to use? So why RSS? RSS lets you read updates from sites that support it in a way that's more structured, that's separate from email, without using your email client. Why RSS? This is like a nice friendly description. Get updates. You can also... That's not very much of a Why RSS sort of thing. Why RSS versus email... Which is handy when you find email overwhelming. If you find email overwhelming. 23:42 newsticker
Okay, newsticker. I will also add... @charliemcmackin4859 suggests newsticker. It seems pretty friendly. There is a newsticker feed reader for Emacs. Okay. Is there a newsticker Emacs tutorial that I can link to? Okay. So this is like... use customize-variable... Is there a newsticker? There's load-library, newsticker. newsticker-url-list. Okay, let's go see what that looks like. Okay. I need to load the library before I can do that. load-library newsticker to load it. newsticker-url-list. Okay. Click on INS and add... Oh, as a URI... Click on INS. Emacs News URI. That... Okay, let's try it ourselves. Emacs News. And that is the URI. Huh, I never actually used this. Okay, I'll click on apply and save. And then, how do you actually watch it? I mean, look at it. newsticker. newsticker-start? No, it's not like that. Okay. newsticker-show-news. Oh, okay, okay. newsticker-show-news. Alright, okay, okay. That is newsticker. That is fairly easy to get started with. So let's recommend that. So this is set up. 27:25 Stream delay
We are slightly delayed, @charliemcmackin4859 says. It is because I am trying to have a 10 second stream delay in case I do silly things like accidentally show my entire email screen online and other such things. I have a panic keyboard shortcut and a panic menu item. This is the panic menu item. See, it says panic, which kills the stream. I previously had another OBS that this could stream to in order for it to switch to a backup message if I cut the streaming, but for some reason that one is segfaulting constantly when I start streaming from that second OBS instance, so I need to look at that more. But yes, now we have a little bit of a stream delay, and 10 seconds is a bit long, but apparently my reflexes and my panicking are still kind of tough at the moment. Eventually, when I get better at saying okay, I know which keyboard shortcut to go, I can reduce the delay, but yes. All right. 28:31 Reading news with newsticker
Reading news... This is.. what is this again... That was newsticker-show-news. Thank you so much. So that was a very helpful tip from @charliemcmackin4859. Okay so there's the tutorial, mini tutorial... Elfeed is slightly more complicated, but also quite useful. Okay, so we can just move this one for now. We should show people what it looks like. 29:04 The usefulness of screenshots and videos
So @mehrad42 says, when I started with Emacs, one of the biggest issues was not to know what each package does. Some have a picture or video or ASCII cinema, but most of them don't. Yeah, that's definitely a thing. It would be great for more packages to have screenshots and descriptions, and videos show workflows better than just... Since the people making packages and the people making videos or screenshots or blog posts are not necessarily the same people, we should have a different way of finding the resources related to a package that might be helpful. Where was I? I was actually taking a picture, adding a screenshot of this, right? Okay, so let's show this screenshot over here. And I want to show, this is what it looks like. And I take a screenshot using my [super-s] and this is the newsticker thing. And then I'm going to stick that in this page. And this is what it looks like. This is what I'm saying. Insert screenshot. That is not the last screenshot. Where did the screenshot go? Oh, hang on a second. Okay, newsticker. There we go. That's because the recording keeps getting bigger. So this is a screenshot of newsticker. There you go. People can then see and decide for themselves: is this worth it? Because inspiration is... The things that people struggle with when it comes to overwhelming, there's a lot of stuff to get through. The main question that newbies will have is, is this worth it? Is it worth it to read this tutorial or figure out how to fit this package into my config, figure out how to set up my config in the first place? Having a screenshot or a video up front makes it much easier for people to say, "Yes, I want that, and I'm willing to spend one or two hours to figure out how to get that working." I want to add a screenshot to this one, of course, so that people can see what it looks like. And in fact, why don't I stick this up here so people can see right away. Let's see what that page looks like if I have that. Blog Emacs News. Oh, that's not it actually. This is topic Emacs News. All right. It is not actually showing up. Why isn't it showing up? That shows up there. Okay, good. My export is not exporting. Fun. Okay. Hang on a second. Let's look at the HTML. I expect that to just have ~/proj/static-blog/topic/emacs-news/index.html. I expect that to have the image. It does not have the image. Why does it not have the image? Is it because it has a description? Derp. Okay, let's try that once more with feeling. Yes! Okay, okay, okay. Almost. All right. Now my caption is not captioning. Is it because... Is it because it's a list and it's getting confused because it's not a block? Okay, okay, okay. Here's a preview. Here's what newsticker looks like. Built into Emacs. Progress! Progress. @JacksonScholberg says it's gotta be ASCII Cinema. I actually haven't been using ASCII Cinema. I should probably check that out too. I've just been recording videos. 34:20 Back to Emacs News
Okay, okay. So now on my topic, Emacs News. Has it been copied over yet? We are making things better live. This is great. Okay. Do I want to always, like... People are scrolling through this. Yeah, it's fine. I can put that in a details disclosure thingy if they want to not see it unless they click on it. It's there. People can scroll. It's fine. 35:00 Prerequisite knowledge for Elfeed
Elfeed is a separate package. You'll need to know how to install packages. You'll need to know how to add... Is it available? Where is it available? It is MELPA or el-get so people would have to know how to to enable MELPA, which is not listed here, so this is a bit more advanced. You'll need... Then nnrss and Gnus is like way advanced, so Elfeed is more of an intermediate. Newsticker's basic. You're right, this is what we should probably recommend if people are just getting started. Which means I should include it in here. News... Do I say elfeed somewhere here? Oh actually, emacs-news.html. This is the header part here. Use newsticker. That means I a tip instead. This is like, topic emacs news, how to subscribe. Oh, I'm not in Org Mode. I can't just use those links. I'm sad. Topic, Emacs News. Fine. Write HTML. Okay, here we go. So now the tip is there. and I can send that to my blog in the background. Progress is being made! Where are we now? 37:29 Other resources that people might find useful
Other resources that people might find useful... EmacsWiki has a newbie sort of page. Here we go. This is where I want to gradually start adding stuff. I cannot... Emacs newbie page on Emacs wiki. Okay, so if people are starting out, I want them to come across the Emacs Newbie page for sure. What else should they find out about? So let's go see. Fairly straightforward. I don't know if Emacs Newbie with Icicles is, uh... Well... I feel a little uncertain about this recommendation, but I don't want to take it all away, because someone's put a lot of work into it. Maybe it might be helpful to add some other stuff. Okay, anyway. Help. So i need to make sure there's a way for people to get help. Yes. Okay. The beginner map thing that I mentioned, which I do not have... I should have as a... Beginner resources from Emacs News Archives. And How to Learn Emacs. That's definitely a thing. Oh, yeah, let's mention Planet Emacslife. So we're just going to link up a bunch of things here for now. And, um... Where are we? I'm very confused. Did I accidentally close my Big Blue Button thing? Oh, no, we're still here. Planet Emacslife aggregator brings together lots of Emacs-related blog posts. 40:56 Beginner map
You know, this thing over here needs to have me saying, Hey, if you need help navigating this, please email me. Where is this even? Beginner map. Okay, if you need help navigating this or would like to suggest other beginner related resources, please email me. Alright. Let's explain why I'm doing this. I want to make a map of those things people often wonder about when they're learning so that you can find what's close by. Maybe we'll add... Theoretically, unless weird things happen, I should have that introduction. It's always good for people to have contact information. There you go. Okay. So that gives them a list of the things that are in this, and then it gives them, like, themes. 42:44 emacs-news/index.org is 5.5 MB of plain text
Okay, okay, okay. Back to Emacs news. So Emacs Newbie, plan an Emacs life, map of some beginner resources. What do people also find helpful? Yeah, there are tons of resources. So @JacksonScholberg says, I didn't know there were so many resources for Emacs. There are tons of resources for Emacs. In fact, if you want to go through all the ones that I've posted in my Emacs news thus far, this file over here is five megabytes and basically includes all the links, links, links, so many links. ever since the first one that I have in this thing. It's long and it's in Org Mode, so you can you can just search through the categories you're interested in, or you can use occur or this new command that I just found out about. 43:55 consult-focus-lines
If you have consult, you can consult-focus-lines and it will do kind of like occur but within your regular buffer. So it just focuses on the lines that match or don't match a specific expression. Anyway, there are a lot. 44:13 Organizing the links
What I'm thinking of doing is I'm thinking of going through all the things that said beginner, anything that I stuck in the beginner category, and filing that somewhere in the map. So for example, here, this is a kind of a meta discussion. How do you deal with that overwhelm problem where you're like, I'm overwhelmed by the number of key bindings that I want to learn. And there's a discussion here about, yeah, you know, do the tutorial, then take advantage of which-key, make sure which key is enabled, memorize the basic movement keys, and then start, you know, start using Post-it notes. Everything's fine. You can just stick a Post-it note on the thing. Yeah. So there are a lot of beginner related resources and there are a ton of other resources for other things. 45:02 Organizing screenshots and videos by package
So what I probably can do is to help with a newbie issue where they're curious about learning Emacs, they don't know whether it's going to be worth spending the time to do it, is I can look for or keep an eye out for interesting videos that come, you know, or screenshots that come along with detailed tutorials on how to get started. Let's say, for example, Org Mode Latex Export or how to set up your Emacs for JavaScript development. And then I can say, okay, if you're starting out, these are some of the things that you might typically be interested in. How do you get started with it for note-taking, for example. 45:49 Info pages
@mehrad42 says, also info pages are a very good source of information. The info pages' key bindings are a bit odd at first, so need some explanation. We should say that in the Emacs news, assuming people are starting out from scratch and they don't know how to get help. It's kind of something about... Also the Emacs and Org Mode manuals are great. You can read them as within Emacs with C-h i, with M-x info. Yeah, that's C-h i. Or find them on... Emacs manual, and the Org one is here as well. Okay. 47:08 Remembering keybindings
@maxfriis says try to articulate what you want to do with words that start with a key binding. To easily memorize key bindings. I like to use M-x. M-x also shows keybindings. I have it set up with marginalia and consult, which I think might be too advanced for newbies, but definitely completion is one of the things I like to get people up and running first. Is there like a recommended quick start? Here, you're brand new to Emacs. Get this going. I guess that's where the newcomer presets thing comes in and I should see what's inside it. Emacs says try to articulate what you want to do with words that start with a keybinding to easily memorize keybindings with the letter used in the keybinding. So this is advice to make your keybindings mnemonic, to make them make sense. And it's probably useful for newbies to learn that you can easily change your keybindings so that they can make more sense to you. Sorry, C-c plus a letter is reserved for your use so you can stick whatever keybindings make sense to you on there with regular letters and everything. 48:40 The guided tour
So I want to link to something from Emacs News that gets people started on that journey, which I think might be the Emacs Newbie page. So the Emacs Newbie page will link people to is a guided tour. Guided tour. This is not very much of a guided tour. There used to be a better guided tour. Where is it? That's a guided tour. Okay, that's a guided tour. Okay, that's a guided tour. All right. So it gets people through navigation, but it does, can you, does it talk about configuration? It does not talk about getting started with your configuration. Okay, where do we start telling people about getting started with configuration? Learning Emacs. Okay, maybe I should include all these things. I cannot decide. 50:07 Recap
Okay, well, we'll start with the Emacs New page, which is already better than it used to be before. Okay, so today I wanted to: update the header of the Emacs news page to make it easier for people who are new. I've got the short URL so that people who are recommending them, it's easier I think maybe to stick it in people's brains. Although, challenge as always, spelling my name is tricky. So maybe I need to make sure that yayemacs.com/news goes to this as well. which I don't think it currently does. So, did I already add that as a TODO? Ah, here we are. Also, yayemacs.com/news and emacslife.com/news. I mean, I have domains. I might as well use them. Okay, so that's done. And I've updated this. so that people can start to connect with the community and find ways to work, you know, find better, find ways to use this Emacs beginner thing. It's still a little hard for people to read. You know what I should do is I should take this beginner resources So my beginner resources org is in ~sync/web/beginner-map.org. So if I make this part of... sacha-copy-filename. Okay, if I make this part of my... I want to say it's like a refile target. Yeah, here we go. And I want to say, okay, add that to my refiles. So then if I... think about this carefully... C-u C-c C-w, which is org-refile, then I should be able to go to, all right, the beginner maps. Ah, perfect. Okay, okay. So now if I'm talking to somebody and I say, oh, okay, they want to learn more about customization, I can jump to this, which actually reminds me, what? 53:12 newcomers-presets
Newcomer, preset, Emacs. Newcomers presets. Is there like a thing that says what this is? Has anyone written a blog post about it yet? Where do I even find this? Okay, okay. Splash screen. It was in the splash screen, wasn't it? How do I... Okay, display splash screen. Splash screen. That is not it. Okay, how do I find this newcomer presets? So I can tell people, this is what you do in order to do it. Chapter 51 of the manual. Read the manual. Emacs. Newcomer. Okay, newcomer theme. Okay, fine. If I say load-theme newcomers-presets... Okay, I don't actually want to load the theme though. Can I say find-theme? I cannot say find-theme. Can I say... Oh, fine. I load the theme and then it'll be loaded. Interesting. So now is it loaded. Newcomers theme. Okay, here we go. I can just find the function newcomers-presets-mode... Okay, now I see it. newcomers presets theme Okay, line number, flymake, flyspell. That makes sense. So, does it... Let's do it in emacs -q. What do I type here in order to get that to work? load-theme newcomers-presets. Completion is still not there. I want completion as part of the newcomer's theme. I should mention that in emacs-devel. Because M-x, it's not obvious that you should type tab in order to complete things. I just do want to have... ido-vertical maybe? fido-vertical-mode. I mean, this by itself would already be nicer, I think. Okay. I need to suggest fido-vertical-mode, maybe, for newcomers-presets. Okay. And then, want to say... this would be nice to have a crash course: here's how you get a reasonable Emacs for the basic working environment that you want, but it's really better than it was before. And I think newcomers-presets is actually even... It's in Emacs 31, so most newbies will not even be on this yet. Okay, so that is... that's more of a future recommendation, I think. Okay, I got two minutes! I got two minutes before it's lunchtime. 57:52 Wrapping up
Okay, where was I? I'm going to go take this transcript for this session as well and then do my tinkering with the spelling and things like that. But I did set out to do the things, I got the things done that I set out to do, so yay! Thank you so much for the chat because that was very helpful. I learned all sorts of things. I learned about newsticker which I've never used before. 58:19 Remembering keybindings
I should also note, @maxfriis says, I almost never use operations rectangles, but I remember C-x r and then I can use which-key. So you only need to remember the letter R, @JacksonScholberg says. And @maxfiis says, refer to the operation as an operation or a rectangle. So I remember the R. So if you can get the logic behind the keyboard shortcuts, they become a lot easier to remember. It helps to make your own cheat sheets for that because you can say, all right, C-x 5 is all the frame related things. And here I have which-key kick in automatically after a short while. And it says, okay, these are the things. I've got this like weird highlighting going on. These are the things that start with C-x 5. 59:13 Picking Prot's brain next week about the newcomer experience
Prot, if you're still listening, I would like to pick your brain next week about what you think about improving the newcomer experience. Especially since we can take advantage of the fact you came in without a programming background. A lot of people are coming into Emacs for surprising reasons, like they've heard awesome things about Org Mode, and they're not programmers, they're writers, or they do other stuff. Sometimes they're teachers, sometimes they just do things, and Org Mode sounds like a thing that might help their brain from going to twenty different places. What can we do to make it better for newcomers to Emacs? What paths can we build? What resources can we share that people can then link to that helps address that? Prot says, yeah, he's listening, happy to discuss this with me and with all y'all if you want to join us next week. But right now the kid is going to come out and have lunch break, so I'm going to have lunch break too. Thank you for joining me. This was fantastic. I'm going to post the notes, the live stream video will already be immediately available from yayemacs.com. If you search for ye21, then you will find wherever the notes end up. Thank you everyone again, and I'll see you around!Chat
- @mehrad42: hand-pink-waving
- @JacksonScholberg: Good morning Sacha
- @protesilaos: Bonjour Sacha!
- @JacksonScholberg: I gave up on Emacs yesterday then I realized I could use VSCode to get things done while I am learning Emacs.
- @JacksonScholberg: First just edit a file.
- @mtendethecreator: Hello. From the other side lol
- @j7gy8b: I'm researching making a VSCode plugin actually
- @j7gy8b: for comparison
- @mehrad42: there is an org-mode extension in vascode that is hoping to do things is Emacs way. i'd stick to Emacs, but it someone find it useful, use it.
- @charliemcmackin4859: newsticker just happens to be the first one I set up, but seems pretty friendly too
- @JacksonScholberg: Outside of email would be good. I ignore email sometimes.
- @mehrad42: when I started with Emacs, one of the biggest issues was not to know what each package does. some have a picture or video or asciinema, but most of them don't.
- @JacksonScholberg: That's why I ignore email haha
- @charliemcmackin4859: newsticker-show-news
- @charliemcmackin4859: hah, we are delayed
- @JacksonScholberg: game over
- @JacksonScholberg: It's gotta be ascii cinema
- @mehrad42: also infopages are very good source of information. The infopages keybindings are a bit odd at first, so need some explanation.
- @JacksonScholberg: I didn't know there were so many resources for Emacs
- @JacksonScholberg: Post its are great
- @maxfriis: Try to articulate what you want to do with words that start with the keybinding.
- @maxfriis: to easily memorize keybindings
- @maxfriis: with the letter used in the keybinding
- @JacksonScholberg: Good idea thanks
- @maxfriis: I almost never use operations on rectangles, but I remember C-x r - then I can use which-key
- @JacksonScholberg: Only need to remember letter r
- @maxfriis: and refer to the operation as an operation on a rectangle so I remember the r
- @charliemcmackin4859: 👋 fun stuff
- @protesilaos: I am listening. Happy to discuss this with you.
- @JacksonScholberg: Bye!
- @maxfriis: thanks
- @mehrad42: awesome. thanks
You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
