Yay Emacs 33: Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs: Built-ins

Posted: - Modified: | emacs, yay-emacs

: Updated transcript

I chatted with Prot about the Emacs Carnival June 2026 topic Underappreciated Emacs Built-ins. Thanks to Ross A. Baker for hosting the carnival!

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Chapters

  • 0:00 Starting up
  • 2:27 Focus and distraction
  • 3:54 Org Mode and other note-taking, task-management systems
  • 4:58 Kill ring
  • 6:50 Registers
  • 9:58 Narrowing
  • 12:04 org-narrow-to-subtree
  • 12:13 narrow-to-defun
  • 13:19 Indirect buffers
  • 14:50 Undoing within a region
  • 15:53 Bookmarks
  • 17:41 isearch
  • 18:21 Tip: Add a counter to isearch
  • 19:26 C-x C-x (exchange-point-and-mark)
  • 20:55 Popping to marks - going back to where you were
  • 21:49 Selecting what you just pasted
  • 22:33 Indenting pasted or selected text with indent-rigidly
  • 23:24 Popping to mark after xref or imenu
  • 24:05 Adding other packages like consult
  • 24:44 Tip about indicating isearch wrapping
  • 25:26 Navigating by sentence or s-expression
  • 27:45 Navigating to other errors
  • 28:29 Tags
  • 28:47 Imenu
  • 30:19 Projects
  • 32:10 Putting projects in tabs or frames
  • 32:35 Tabs
  • 34:41 Navigating frames
  • 36:07 These navigation shortcuts work for prose, too
  • 37:09 follow-mode
  • 37:50 Ediff
  • 42:12 Calling functions by name
  • 42:52 Completion
  • 44:13 Manuals
  • 45:57 Menus
  • 47:46 Automation - abbreviations
  • 49:56 Quoting the next character with C-q
  • 50:31 Mapping abbreviations to code
  • 51:51 Taking notes with org-capture
  • 52:08 Navigating back to captures or refiles
  • 53:49 dabbrev
  • 54:44 Keyboard macros
  • 57:52 Editable grep and occur
  • 1:01:01 Emacs Carnival June 2026: Underappreciated built-ins

Transcript

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0:00 Starting up

Sacha: There's a 10-second delay, so I can never quite tell when I'm starting to start, but I think I'm going to do that now. Okay, let's go. Okay, I have pressed the Go Live button. Let's see how it goes. So this is Yay Emacs 33 with Prot: Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs. Today, we're going to be talking about underappreciated Emacs built-ins, which is the theme for this month's Emacs carnival.

Sacha: Kind of like this, you know, shared, lots of people writing or talking about a specific topic. This one is hosted by Ross A. Baker. (Thanks for hosting that!) Anyway, so I'm here with Prot. I was very tempted to just dive into this brain dump like last time about... Let's start with the kinds of problems that newcomers and intermediate users might run into, especially the problems they don't even know about because Emacs would allow them to do things that other editors might not offer. But they've got to think about it first, right? They've got to discover that this is a need of theirs and that Emacs can help them with it. So maybe this conversation can be a high-level discussion of these concepts to help people develop this intuition for what's out there, particularly for the things that Emacs does differently compared to other editors. And if we start with a problem, and I have several that I often run into in my own life, you might suggest others as well. Then we can talk about how the things that are built into Emacs can support that and how they fit together at a high level. We don't have to go into "This is precisely how to start a keyboard macro and how to stop it." People can look that up in the manual. But the idea of a keyboard macro and how it's useful, that would probably be a good thing for a conversation. Then for the advanced users who are listening to this, we can sprinkle in some things we've seen about some really advanced uses of these built-ins, because there's a lot of high-level use that I haven't even got into yet. So Prot is here, which means that because you've got two people, you can see how these same tools can be used in different ways to support different workflows. I'm going to suggest some problems that I have. Of course, you can share some from your experience and from the times that you've coached other people.

2:27 Focus and distraction

Sacha: My main problem with life in general. is focus and distraction. Because I have a kid, my focus time is very unpredictable. It can be interrupted any moment by somebody needing help. My life over the last 10 years has mostly been about five minutes here, 10 minutes there, maybe 15, one hour of focus time if I'm lucky. This is a universal challenge. Well, some people actually get to focus, but my brain is not one of those focusable things. It has to work in stops and starts. Any chance this is a problem that you also run into?

Prot: Not to that extent, but I have the propensity to go down rabbit holes. I will go really deep, like really deep. You give me something which I know nothing about, I will become an expert in it. But of course, this is a problem when you combine it with curiosity, because now you want to learn everything. Thankfully, I have learned to control myself. If you give me something I don't know about, I will say, OK, sounds very tempting, but I will not even try. I won't even go down the rabbit hole.

Sacha: So these are two sides of the same problem, and something that a lot of people will resonate with... When you're working on something and you realize, okay, I've got to go do this other thing first or, oh, I'm curious about this question that has come up in my brain. I want to go down that rabbit hole. How do we manage this? Emacs is here to help.

3:54 Org Mode and other note-taking, task-management systems

Sacha: My first recommendation for this problem is: take advantage of Org Mode or other built-in note-taking task management support systems because it... Sometimes people think, okay, an IDE is just an IDE, right? If they're programmers, it's just for code. Sometimes people are writing. They're using a text editor just for writing their novel. But because Emacs has these built-in ways to support managing your to-dos and all that stuff, it's very easy just to stuff that task in there. Have a quick shortcut to go to your to-do list and put something in. Then it gets out of your brain so that you can try to focus on the thing that you're trying to get done. That's my quick underappreciated... actually, a lot of people really appreciate this, but it's one of those things people coming to Emacs from other editors might not immediately catch on to.

Prot: You might not understand the extent of how valuable it is. It's the gift that keeps giving, basically.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. When your to-dos and your notes are just a couple of keystrokes away, and they can save the context of whatever you were looking at.

4:58 Kill ring

Sacha: There are all sorts of other small conveniences that Emacs has that also help with distraction and focus. For example, the kill ring. It's such a simple thing, right?

Prot: It's super simple, but super useful. Just to say on the kill ring, it has been part of Emacs for several versions now, but it's not obvious. If you type M-y without C-y beforehand, you get completion. So you can select something that you had in your kill-ring like a few kills ago. Clipboard navigation, which is something that you don't see right away.

Sacha: If people are coming from outside Emacs and they're like, "What is this thing that you're talking about?" People are used to having a clipboard, right? As soon as you copy something, your program forgets the thing that you previously copied. On mobile phones now, if you press paste, you can see a selection of the previous things you've copied before. It's like that, but larger.

Sacha: Prot points out: you can use completion with it. So M-y is yank-pop I think? What I find useful about this is sometimes I'll copy something because I want to go paste it somewhere else, and then on the way to that somewhere else, I get distracted by something, and I need to copy that, but I know that the kill-ring will have the other copies that I meant to put somewhere else.

Prot: By completion here, we mean you can type and match that thing, narrow down to it.

Prot: You don't have to go searching for it and, "Okay, which one exactly is it," right?

Prot: You can find it more easily.

6:50 Registers

Sacha: Registers. It's the other thing that I like to use when I know that I'm copying several things and I need to paste them, possibly in different order.

Sacha: Again, that's another thing that people are like, "What is this thing, even?" Do you find yourself explaining registers to people who are new to Emacs?

Prot: Yes. Registers is something that is underutilized, because of course, why would you need them when you can have a kill-ring with a history, right? Why do I need to store things in a register when I can just have them one after the other in the kill-ring. The answer is because if you do something more advanced, such as with a keyboard macro, it will always be correct. It's precise. It's not "Give me the last thing on the kill ring," or last thing minus two or whatever. Give me that, right, and you specify what that is. It's an expression of intent.

Prot: Plus more advanced things, like incrementing a number or whatever. I think that's super specialized.

Sacha: I don't even use that very much, but I know some people who use that to great effect. So that's one of those little Easter eggs for advanced users. If you're watching this and you're like, okay, I know about these built-ins, but there's more. Emacs has this fractal complexity. It just keeps getting more interesting the more you dig into it. Okay, so, registers. Registers can store text that you're copying, but they can also store other things. I think, like, do you use them for window configurations, Prot?

Prot: I have used them for framesets: frames and their window configurations. If you have three frames and they are split in different ways, you restore that.

Sacha: You can do all of that with just one register.

Prot: With a register, yeah. I have created another register of mine just to see how it works, where it saves a file with a specific location, but it's supposed to be in memory, not like a bookmark. I did it just for testing.

Sacha: I have that too. I use registers to files so that I can jump to things like my Emacs configuration or my notes or something like that. I use that instead of bookmarks so that I can just have a keyboard shortcut go straight to that register. I can do the [jump-to-register] and then I can just easily press one more key to get to the file that I want. So registers, again, if you're not used to Emacs, this is a built-in that's got a lot of features for helping you save text to things, especially if you're going to use them in keyboard macros because you can say, okay, insert text A and then insert text C and then insert text B. But you can also use them for other things like frameset, like the way that your windows and your buffers are arranged, or files that you want to go back to.

9:58 Narrowing

Sacha: Another built-in that I find really helpful for managing my focus and distraction is narrowing. I get distracted by all the other stuff, or I worry about accidentally revealing private information when I am streaming, or something else. So instead I narrow it to just the task that I'm working on or just the function that I'm editing. That's super useful not only for keeping me focused, but also for making sure that my changes don't affect more text than I mean to. If I'm using substitute.el... You can select the region, and a lot of the functions in Emacs will operate only within that region. But reselecting the region several times, if you end up needing to do multiple operations, it's a bit annoying. So instead, I'll just narrow and then it can work on the whole thing.

Prot: Yes. When you narrow, you can also be less careful, in a sense. Like, you do a query-replace, when you do !, it means yes to all, but if you are in a narrowed region, yes to all means only within that portion of the buffer. So if you take care to narrow to where you want to be, then okay yes to all, you don't even have to check.

Sacha: And I think this is underappreciated enough that, in fact, if you try to use… Is it C-x n?

Prot: That's the prefix key. C-x n for narrowing.

Sacha: The first time Emacs will say, are you really, really sure? It's one of those disabled commands, right? You've got to enable it for yourself. You've got to say, "Okay, I know what I'm doing. I'm not going to panic if the rest of my file disappears." I know it's there. I'm just choosing to focus on it. I think it's actually available off the menu as well, but I haven't used it off the menu bar.

Prot: Yeah, I don't use the menu, so I cannot tell. But I remember that prompt, "Are you really sure?" It's disabled by default. Please make sure you know what you want.

Sacha: Keyboard shortcut. That's the way to do it anyway.

Prot: The thing is that I do use it extensively.

12:04 org-narrow-to-subtree

Prot: Narrowing, of course, is generic., Org also has its own narrowing. The most common one is [org-narrow-to-subtree].

12:13 narrow-to-defun

Sacha: Narrowing to defun feels easier than trying to mark the function before search and replace. I love narrowing. In fact, I narrow to functions or sets of functions a lot, because I do a lot of work with with Javascript in HTML files, just a single file HTML that I can upload. It's got CSS and regular HTML in it as well. But I often just need to copy the particular snippet of JavaScript so I can paste it into the console as I'm making changes. I have a function that looks for certain text: "start of focus", "end of focus". Then it narrows to that section, which might include several functions. Then I have another keyboard shortcut that just copies the entire buffer and adds a little text at the end, so I can run whatever function I need to test. I can paste that into the browser. Narrowing either to one function or to a predefined region or whatever else is very useful.

Prot: Yes, very nice.

13:19 Indirect buffers

Sacha: Then people are like, yeah, but what if I want to narrow to two parts of the same file?

Prot: That's why you have indirect buffers there.

Sacha: It's Emacs, of course there's a way to do it. Indirect buffers is another one of those built-ins that's a little hard to wrap your head around, because you're like, okay, you're opening a file twice, but you can have it narrowed to a different part of it, or you can be looking at a different part of it, or you can even have it in a different major mode.

Prot: Yeah, yeah. And the point, like the practical one, is the different levels of narrow, really... The most common one, I mean, where it's like, okay, you focus on this heading and now you focus on this other heading.

Sacha: I'll often split my buffer if I know that I'm not going to narrow. So that way, if I need to refer to two parts of the file at the same time, I can have one window focusing on one part of it and the other window focusing on the other part of it. It might even be a different frame. And that way, I don't have to keep switching back and forth. I don't have to scroll up and down all the time. I can just look at one and then look at the other and arrange my windows and my desktop as I see fit. But if you want to do something more complicated, like more narrowing or different modes or whatever, then cloning an indirect buffer is the way to do it.

14:50 Undoing within a region

Prot: I don't know if you have this, but because you mentioned the region earlier, I will say it. Maybe you have it somewhere, I don't see it there. You know regular undo in Emacs and how it works, but when you have a region selected, undo works in the region. So you make a change here, you go make some changes up there, you come back here, you mark this region, undo only works here, it doesn't work up there anymore.

Sacha: Oh yeah, that's definitely a built-in that people will benefit from if they develop an intuition for it. If you've made a bunch of changes to your file and you notice that something's wrong in just this section, you can select the region and then undo within it to just fix those things. Those are some of the things that I've thought about for focus or distraction or getting tempted to go down rabbit holes. Do you use any of the other Emacs built-ins to help you with your tendency to dive really deep into something?

15:53 Bookmarks

Prot: So the other one would be bookmarks. You mentioned it already, but it really is worth having it there, because the nice thing with bookmarks is that not only it's a way to go to a place, but you also give it a name. So the counterpart... Like you said, okay, I have a key to quickly go to my init file, for example, my configuration file. But what if I want to have something by name that doesn't quite fit nicely in all the keys, right? Then I can have a descriptive name. Maybe it's long. For example, my notes for my meeting with Sacha, which is in mid-June, blah, blah, blah, right? I can have a long name like that, which is descriptive and gives me context. Then I use a bookmark for that.

Sacha: And that's a great built-in solution for the general problem of finding your way around. So in case you're trying to find your way around different files or different projects or different places in various files, bookmarks are great for that because you can give it a name. That means you can file more things than will fit on your keyboard. Kind of an advanced use of it, I was talking to Ben in the previous Emacs Chat about So he bookmarks Elfeed searches, and based on his naming convention, if he names his bookmark a certain way, then it becomes available for these other functions that he has. So if you have a naming convention for your bookmarks, you can do other things with it from Emacs Lisp.

Prot: Yeah, exactly. That's the more advanced power user thing. It's just data and you have access to it.

17:41 isearch

Sacha: Going back to something a little more basic for the problem of finding your way around, I think that isearch is one of those built-ins that people coming from a different editor might not think of using. "Find in page" is an annoying experience in a browser or in other editors. You have to go to the menu, you do it, and then there's things you have to click on in order to go to the next one or the previous one and so forth. But isearch lets you just keep typing and then you can just press the isearch shortcut again, C-s, to search for the next one, or you can go to the previous one very easily. So isearch is great.

18:21 Tip: Add a counter to isearch

Prot: Yeah, yeah, it is. I think one nice quality of life improvement to it, which again is several Emacs versions old, is a counter. Like it shows you are on number 3 out of 10, for example. You have a sense of where you are going.

Sacha: Otherwise, I find I just wrap around to the beginning and I take a moment to reorient myself because it has wrapped around. The other thing that I want to point out related to isearch as well is using it to help you mark a region. This is something that people aren't used to because in other editors, you highlight things with your mouse, right? Here in Emacs, we say, okay, press C-SPC to say you're going to start a region, and then just search for the end of the region, navigate to it somewhere, and the text between when you press C-SPC and where your cursor is now, that's the region.

Prot: Yes, exactly.

19:26 C-x C-x (exchange-point-and-mark)

Prot: On this note, C-x C-x. By default, it’s exchange-point-and-mark. Which, if your cursor is here and where you started is up there, it moves the cursor up there and now where you started is down at that point. You can expand the region both ways. You can keep switching and expanding.

Sacha: I have never thought about using it for expanding the region. I usually just use it to confirm that, yes, I am actually selecting the parts that I meant to select. Because by the time, of course, I've found the thing that I wanted to end the region with, I've forgotten or I'm not entirely sure I have the right start. So I was using C-x C-x to quickly verify and have everything nicely highlighted. But expanding the region, yeah, that's a thing you can do with it.

Prot: Yeah, yeah, of course. Now it's obvious, right? But it's something that you may notice by mistake, by accident.

Sacha: [interrupted by life] @charliemcmackin4859 says, "I love that you can make those marking tricks part of a keyboard macro."

20:55 Popping to marks - going back to where you were

Sacha: Oh, the other thing I want to say with marks is you can also navigate by mark. C-x SPC?

Prot: C-u C-SPC. I think it’s pop-to-mark is the concept.

Sacha: Popping to mark. We'll just go with the concept because people can search for the key binding. Which basically means for all the places where you were before you went off searching for something else or doing some other command, you can go back to those places in sequence. I think there are even some commands to let you easily navigate through all the places you've been previously. That is a thing that you can do with Emacs built-ins. It's called popping the mark. It lets you revisit places.

Prot: Yeah, yeah. Another point related to this and also related to yank that we said earlier...

21:49 Selecting what you just pasted

Prot: Imagine you have copied something and you are pasting it now in your Emacs. Then what you want to do is select it, maybe to do something with it, such as to make it all up case or whatever, right? Instead of selecting it manually, you can just do C-x C-x. Because when you paste something or when you do I search or whatever, it has the effect of updating the mark. Then you can work with that.

Sacha: Yeah, that one I use fairly often. Also, that way, you can easily see what it highlights, the part that you've just pasted, and then you can do your other replacements or uppercasing or whatever else to it.

22:33 Indenting pasted or selected text with indent-rigidly

Prot: The nice part for this is the indent-rigidly, C-x C-i by default, where you can now have a region of text including an implicit region between mark and point, and you just shift it around, literally left or right. Try it. It's very nice.

Sacha: C-x C-i. I think you can even use the arrow keys to move things, so you can just nudge it until it looks right, which is great because sometimes, when you paste things, the indentation isn't the same as all of the rest of your stuff. You might want to put it all the way into an Org list or whatever else, code block, whatever.

Prot: Okay.

Sacha: So C-x C-x, very handy even after you paste.

23:24 Popping to mark after xref or imenu

Sacha: Oh, @hmelman also points out the fact that things like xref or imenu push the last location before jumping means popping the mark is an easy way to go back from various navigation mechanisms. In general, if you have navigated away from something using some magical Emacs command that has taken you far from where you are, you can always find your way back home or back to where you were by popping the mark. I think there's even a distinction between popping the mark in your buffer versus popping your global mark. You can go to a different buffer that you were just in if you wanted to.

24:05 Adding other packages like consult

Prot: Very nice. Many of these are also augmented by packages. When you install a package, it doesn't introduce completely new functionality. It adds to existing one. For example, the consult package, which is very useful, very nice, has something to do with what we just mentioned. Like, navigating the mark in a visual way, so you get to see it.

Sacha: @hmelman points out that local and global marks are useful to navigate through. Check out all these other packages for adding extra functionality around that.

24:44 Tip about indicating isearch wrapping

Sacha: @matthewjorgensen9115 says, "thinking about isearch wrapping around search, gwhen you get to the bottom of your file, when you're isearching and there's no other matches to be found, it will by default wrap you around to the beginning of the file so you can keep searching from there." Matthew says you can either have scroll to position to know the direction (it also indicates the position in your mode line), or you can have your mode line flash to see it move from last to first. I don't have that configured. I should look into how to get that configured because it's like all these little things, right? But sometimes you don't need to make a big navigational jump. You just need to move forward by a little bit.

25:26 Navigating by sentence or s-expression

Sacha: Emacs has built-in shortcuts for navigating by expression, maybe things inside the parentheses or things inside the quotes, as well as natural language shortcuts like navigating by word or by sentence. Those are some very useful built-ins that are well worth learning the keyboard shortcuts for.

Prot: Yes, indeed. Of course, we call them S-expressions and the terminology of the commands alludes to Lisp, but they work in other programming languages as well. For example, there is the forward-sexp, but it works in other languages which don't have this Lispy syntax.

Sacha: So if you skipped over that part of the tutorial or the manual, go back and read it because it can save you some time. In a pinch, it will also help you make sure that your parentheses are matched up correctly and you go to where you expect them to go. There are other ways to make it easier to match up parentheses or braces or brackets or quotes like [ show-paren-mode ] or whatever. Sometimes I just go forward and back to see whether I end up in the right place.

Prot: A small trick here, if you are writing specifically Emacs Lisp, there is a very common mistake of adding an extra parenthesis, and it says "end of file during parsing", or one less parenthesis, what you can do with a combination of keyboard macros... You go to the beginning and you do C-M-e to go to the end of the defun, and then, in a keyboard macro, you keep doing that. Next, next, next, end, end, end, right? Until it stops, and you know where your error is.

Sacha: Oh, and I should tell people, if you give the execute-kbd-macro a negative argument, it'll run until error. So you just do that and it'll drop you where it ends. You don’t have to manually press e 500 times.

Prot: Exactly. The "run until error" happens when you are in a narrowed region as well. Error here means end of region, end of buffer.

Sacha: I should point out in the specific case where you're trying to hunt down a stray parenthesis, you should also just use check-parens, which will tell you.

Prot: Of course.

27:45 Navigating to other errors

Sacha: And for other errors not just limited to missing quotation marks or parentheses, it's well worth taking the time to set up flycheck or flymake or whatever error checking thing you want to use, because then you can navigate to the previous and next errors as easily as you would with keyboard shortcuts. If you get the hang of doing that, you can also use the same mental model to navigate through... If you're doing a keyword search with grep, then you can use the next-error, previous-error to also go to just the next match or the previous match.

Prot: That's very useful.

28:29 Tags

Sacha: I am not using tags nearly as much as I probably should for navigating symbols.

Prot: Tags, yeah, in the context of programming. Me, I haven't used that, no.

Sacha: Oh, yeah? I guess because you primarily work with Emacs Lisp, it's easy enough to find the definition from there.

28:47 Imenu

Prot: But imenu is the other one, along those lines.

Sacha: That's interesting. You don't use the menu bar, but you use imenu.

Prot: Yes, imenu is useful because, of course, it's with completion. Now, I should say here, of course, that the default imenu has this concept of going in steps, but you can flatten the list, which is more interesting for the purpose of completion. I believe what I'm saying is the case, but I don't remember anymore. But you can have a flattened list, at which point you navigate the file with completion.

Sacha: I should try that because I really like the way that Org, when you're navigating by the outline, you can also configure it to flatten the list so you don't have to complete the heading and the next setting and all that stuff. @hmelman says you don't actually need flymake for the error navigation thing. You can just use next-error and previous-error which works with compile and grep and occur and a bunch of other things that have the same convention. So yes, if you use the M-x compile command to run whatever your compilation step is, it will parse the output of many compilation systems, programs, and it will let you jump to the next error. It will also even show you the errors, I think. Anyway, so you don't need flymake. Flymake just gives you the squiggly underlines. But you can use next-error right away.

Prot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Flymake is more narrow. Yeah, correct.

30:19 Projects

Sacha: I think projects and project-based navigation is another big chunk of Emacs built-in functionality that is useful for people who have a hard time finding their way around. You don't have to manually find each file. You can set up shortcuts so you can say, I want to go to this project. Then from within this project, I can find a file very easily.

Prot: This is indeed very powerful. The thing is you don't have to also think in terms of the structure of the project, like the tree structure of the project, because if you find the file in the project, it will flatten the structure for you, so then you use completion to find it or find the directory where something is. Of course, you can still use the tree view as well.

Sacha: This is great because for example, in Java projects, the directory structure gets very deep because they have to be their domain name and package names and all that stuff. Just have either project or projectile index all of your files for you, and then you can jump to a file by name anywhere in your structure. You can tell it also to ignore certain files, which is handy so that you don't have to go into your node-modules. That would be silly.

Prot: Yeah, that would be a nightmare.

Sacha: Do we have basically the Emacs built-ins for finding your way around well covered here, or other other recommendations that people should go check out?

Prot: These are already very useful, yeah. Most of these, if not all, are augmented by packages. So the core functionality is there, and then you can do more stuff with them.

32:10 Putting projects in tabs or frames

Prot: For example, with projects, you may want to have an arrangement where you put them in separate tabs, and then you use a package like tabspaces so that each tab has its own buffer list, or my package beframe so that you put them in separate frames. Each frame has its own buffer list, so that basically when you search for buffers, you only see those related to the project.

32:35 Tabs

Sacha: I am not using tabs nearly as much as I probably could, so that is one of my underappreciated Emacs built-ins here. I'm getting the sense that people use tabs to say, okay, this is the set of windows related to managing my mail, or this is a set of tabs related to this project. This is a set of windows related to this project, or this is a set of windows related to managing my notes about something. Is that what you use tabs for?

Prot: I seldom use them. I use them specifically only within the context of popping into a Magit interface. So I have my project that I'm working on. Let's say it's split in three windows. And then I want to leave everything intact and just go into Magit to do some Git operation. I configure display-buffer-alist so when I do Emacs Magit, magit-status or whatever, it goes in a new tab. Then I leave my work where it is. I do the git thing, then I quit those. I'm back to my layout.

Sacha: I know you're a good advocate of checking out display-buffer-alist and all the wonderful things it can do. I should definitely look into having it set up a tab because that sounds a lot nicer than trying to remember, okay, I need to save my window configuration to register and then do this thing. I have it set up actually so that I can winner-undo in order to get back to my previous configuration. But of course, if I need to flip back and forth between two different views, like Magit and my project code, then a tab would work much better for this purpose, I think.

Prot: Yes, and it scales better as well, like if you need to have three tabs or whatever.

Sacha: Or a new frame. But sometimes managing frames gets a little annoying too.

Prot: Of course, of course. There are pros and cons.

34:41 Navigating frames

Prot: Speaking of frames, one nice thing is that there is completion again to select frames. So I forget how it's called. [ select-frame ], I think, is the command. If you have lots of frames and you don't know where they are, you can use completion for that. If you want, you can also name frames. I believe it’s rename frame. [set-frame-name] I forget now the command. Basically, you can give it a specific name rather than it changing the name all the time. So you can say, OK, this is my super important note for our livestream, right? That's the frame for you. Now you can find it.

Sacha: I should look into that. I also underutilize frames because for the most part, I have a keyboard shortcut like Super 1 which jumps back to Emacs, raises my Emacs window. But it doesn't work so well if I have multiple Emacs window, like multiple Emacs frames. If I can figure out how to get mentally through that or if I switch to EXWM as my window manager, then I'm sure that managing multiple Emacs frames will be a lot easier. But at least tabs, I can probably use within that one frame in order to manage different windows.

Prot: I would say tabs is the first thing you want to check. Frames is a little bit more... You have to change your mental model a little bit.

36:07 These navigation shortcuts work for prose, too

Sacha: @hmelman has one more tip to include in this section on finding your way around. You can use these S-expression commands in prose too. Like for example, C-M-u or backwards-up-list moves you out of a quote or a parenthesis and then you can C-M-e to go to the end of it. So even if you're writing, for example, a novel, and you're saying, okay, I want to get out of this quote and go to the next sentence, you can either isearch to the start of it, or you can go up out of the quote and then go to the end of the quote. Also very handy to learn the commands for killing an S expression [ kill-sexp ], which again also works with other stuff like quotes or parentheses, because then you can copy and paste things or you can kill it. You don't have to paste it back. It's just you delete it and then you type something else in. It's fine.

Prot: Exactly, exactly. And one of those is the mark-sexp, which is very useful.

37:09 follow-mode

Sacha: Oh yeah, oh yeah. And @matthewjorgensen9115 shares: follow-mode allows the same file with multiple frames like a book. So follow mode can work with two, three or more windows. You have an ultra wide, right? So like, okay, you can have several columns following the same file and you can scroll and all of them will scroll in sync.

Prot: Yeah, yeah. It's quite nice. Quite nice.

Sacha: I forget, does follow mode work with different files?

Prot: With different files? I don't think so. Like kind of a scroll lock for all windows?

Sacha: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Prot: I don't know. I don't think so. I haven't tried it.

Sacha: Worth looking into. [scroll-all-mode]

37:50 Ediff

Sacha: If you do find yourself needing to compare one file with another manually, then maybe like ediff?

Prot: Ediff would do that. You would have them side by side. But the thing with Ediff is that you don't get a scroll lock for both. It's only navigation through the differences. So that wouldn't be exactly that.

Sacha: For the purposes of comparing, Ediff will let you compare two files, but you can even use it to compare two buffers. However, Prot does have some recommendations in the one on the defaults that you shared before on how to make Ediff more manageable.

Prot: Yeah, I think by default it's not intuitive, because by default, when you do Ediff without any configuration, it will display its panel in a separate frame. If you have never used many frames, that's already your first problem. Like you don't even know what happened. The second problem is that the layout will be one above the other, which depending on your screen, you have like a wide screen, so it's not as easy of a layout. Then you have to figure out where the other frame with the panel is. Basically two variables where you change them and you have the panel at the bottom, the control panel and then file A here, file B there. And of course you can do it with three files as well.

Sacha: I will find it and put it in the show notes. Matthew also points out the following also works with centered-cursor-mode [(it’s a package)], which will keep the cursor position in the middle of the frame. So I can't remember whether there's also like a scroll lock or whatever.

Prot: scroll-lock-mode. Yeah, there is `scroll-lock mode.

Sacha: Or there was another Emacs built-in that someone mentioned that scrolls it one line at a time, keeping it centered, I guess, which the person found very useful because their cat was sitting on their laptop. So moral lesson is: learn about the Emacs built-in because you never know when a small mammal will be obscuring half of your screen. You can still use Emacs. Which actually is an interesting segue into this thing about discoverability because Emacs is quite unlike many other editors. It is very well documented and if you can figure out how to navigate and find that documentation and even how to make this fun for you, then you can do all sorts of interesting things with it. Okay, so self-documentation. I love telling people, okay, you can just press C-h k or describe-key to describe anything. You can C-h f any function. You can, you know, C-h v any variable. describe- whatever is great. Of course, adding C-h to the end of the keyboard shortcut that you've started but you've forgotten how to finish, especially if you've turned on which-key mode, is great for listing the actual shortcuts that start with that sequence.

Prot: And even without which-key, it will put all those shortcuts in a Help buffer, and it will show the key and the name of the command. Of course, you can click on the command to read about it.

Sacha: Someday I think it would be amazing if Emacs comes with a completion interface that's easy for people to understand and get started with, but in the meantime, if you don't already have completion set up, that is well worth taking the time to figure out.

Prot: Yeah, yeah. The built-in one has improved tremendously. I mean minibuffer.el here has improved tremendously over the various recent versions. But you still need to be aware of all the user options to configure it. So to get, for example, a single column view instead of a grid with 100 options... That requires some effort. Out of the box, if you really want something that is built into Emacs and does completion in a way that is fairly easy to understand, it would be icomplete-vertical-mode or fido or fido-vertical-mode.

42:12 Calling functions by name

Sacha: Another thing that Emacs does differently that might be good for people to learn about is that in Emacs, it is totally okay to not remember the keyboard shortcuts for everything or not use the menus for everything, because not everything will fit in the menus either. If you kind of remember the name of the function, you can use M-x and possibly completion to go run that function, which is helpful because sometimes knowing the words to call a function is a lot easier to remember than remembering the shortcut for it.

Prot: Exactly. And I would say completion...

42:52 Completion

Prot: If you have to configure one part of Emacs, it's completion. If you improve that part of it, it will help you everywhere. Like we were saying earlier about bookmarks, it helps you there. The kill-ring, it helps you there. Finding files, it helps you there. Switching to buffers and so on. Like what we are now talking about. It's always useful.

Sacha: When you set up a completion, also learn how your favorite completion system lets you put in things that look like they should match something on the list, but you actually want just the partial part or just the blank part. For example, in some systems, you press M-RET or M-p to send what you already have there instead of selecting one of the completion options. This is helpful because sometimes you'll want to name a file something that is a substring of another file and you want to be able to say, yeah, that is actually what I meant, not the completion part.

Prot: Yeah, yeah. I think that's the only rough edge with most of those, yeah. Where you have to be mindful of that or, you know, I have to select the prompt or I have to type a special key for this edge case. Yeah.

Sacha: Once you get that sorted out and you've drilled it into your fingers, it's very, very helpful to have completion sorted out.

44:13 Manuals

Sacha: Emacs also comes with extensive manuals. You like to write very thorough manuals for your packages, which I also appreciate. Flipping through manuals for fun is something that we've discussed in previous... This is such a great practice. You learn something new every day. I was going through the Emacs manual in preparation for this conversation and I was just highlighting things that I need to dig into.

Prot: It's very useful and again to point out completion. C-h R is how you can search for the manual of a package. Like for example, I'm interested in Org. C-h R, Org. I find Org from anywhere, right? C-h R and then I will search for something else, right? Elisp, for example, to go to the Emacs Lisp reference manual. Again, very useful. From inside the manuals, g to go to a chapter, also known as a node, i to go to a topic, an index, and m if you want, but g and i. Just think of g and i. Very, very useful. m is also useful to navigate the menu of the current node.

Sacha: I use s also for search.

Prot: And there's for research throughout, yes.

Sacha: Yes. I have not been using C-h R. I have been using C-h i to look at the whole list of info manuals and then using m or isearch like a newbie.

Prot: That works. The problem with that is that if you have already gone into a manual, C-h i will take you back to that manual. So you have to click it and then start again.

Sacha: Okay. Alright. Well, I'm learning new things.

Prot: Nice.

45:57 Menus

Sacha: Okay, you mentioned you are not a fan of... you don't use the menus and I know a lot of people...

Prot: But I appreciate that. And in one of my... oh, in a couple of my packages I have menu entry.

Sacha: Yeah, and I know a lot of people turn the menu bar off in their "this is how you configure Emacs" sort of tutorials. But if you are new to Emacs, and even if you're an intermediate user, I strongly recommend, sacrificing that tiny sliver of vertical space for the menu bar, because it's a great way to discover commands that are related to your particular major mode or other things. It's just fun to go through it and see what's been deemed worthy of including in one of those menus. There are some efforts now to get the right-click mouse menus to also have lots of interesting options, but definitely the menu bar at the top, which can also be accessed if you use F10 if you don't want to use the mouse. The menu bar is even working on terminal, which is nice. So yes, menu bar at the top has a lot of useful suggestions for discovering things.

Prot: Yes, yes, excellent. The part you mentioned about key navigation, that's also good. You may be like, don't want to use the mouse. There you have it. You don't have...

Sacha: And speaking of key navigation, if you press C-h k, which is describe-key, it will work on menu items as well. If you're finding yourself always going to the menu to do this thing, sometimes the menu items are not named the same as their commands, but you can use C-h k to find out what that function is and what keyboard shortcuts it's bound to. Then you can call it with M-x directly, or you can memorize the keyboard shortcuts.

47:46 Automation - abbreviations

Sacha: Okay, shall we move on to automation, for which Emacs has a ton of built-in things? Using abbreviations and things like that is actually something I picked up from reading your config, I think, because you use abbreviations a lot.

Prot: Yeah. Very nice. Very useful. Even for basic things. For example, I want to write, you know, my fancy French expressions, like, this is so déjà vu, you know? I want to have the accents correct. I just write deja vu with English, and then I have the French equivalent with all the fancy accents. Stuff like that you can do, like... something you keep misspelling the whole time you actually do it, right, something that is with an annoying spelling, like annoying capitalization like LaTeX. Nobody knows how that is written. You just write it latex, all lowercase, and then expand to whatever it should expand. This sort of thing is very useful. Of course, you can just have some short text which expands into very long text.

Sacha: We should also point out if you type something that is normally an abbreviation like LaTeX, but in this case you actually want to write the word latex, then how do you do the abbreviation without it being expanded into whatever that is?

Prot: Of course you would rather avoid that situation with your abbreviation. It wouldn't be like that, but otherwise you will have to undo. When you do SPC and it expands, you undo. That is a little bit annoying, for sure. But I would say, just make sure to have abbreviations that are not ordinary words. They are a little bit contrived, so you don't get false positives. A good use case here, like what I have in my configuration, like you can have your abbreviations behind a character such as the semicolon. Then of course it's very unlikely that you will have semicolon later.

49:56 Quoting the next character with C-q

Sacha: The other thing that you could potentially do is use C-q to quote the next character literally. So here for example, I have ot expand to the current time, but if I say ot C-q SPC, this helps. And in general, this idea of C-q to quote the next character is also useful in other places where you might, for example, need to add a literal new line to a search or something like that, or a literal tab.

50:31 Mapping abbreviations to code

Sacha: The other thing that I want to add to abbreviations here is your abbreviations are not limited to just text. You can use them to run things, which means you can use them to run things that expand to text, or I think you might even get away with using them to run commands. So it's pretty limitless.

Prot: Yeah, yeah. Of course, it's how determined you are to write custom code for that.

Sacha: Or how resourceful you are in finding other people's custom code that you can copy, at least. Good motivation to learn Emacs Lisp. I do not remember if Yasnippet is built-in. It feels like it's built-in.

Prot: No, but it's one of those that basically everybody uses. Yasnippet or Tempel.

Sacha: A couple of questions from chat. When highlighting parts of the manual, how are you doing this? In bookmarks, bookmark-region, using Org Remark, other ways? I was doing this at the playground the other day, so I just had it in my iPad and I had it in one of those graphical note-taking things and I was highlighting with the Pencil. But I've heard good things about Org Remark, which is a package.

51:51 Taking notes with org-capture

Sacha: You can also use just org-capture if you’re reading the manuals from within Emacs, which you can. If you org-capture, you can even select sections of the manual and it'll automatically save that in the capture template along with a link back to where you were looking. This is great.

52:08 Navigating back to captures or refiles

Prot: Since you mentioned org-capture and we talked about bookmarks earlier, when you do org-capture or org-refile, it stores a bookmark. You can go back to the last capture, the last refile.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah, which is handy. Also, you can use org-refile to navigate your Org files. In addition to using it to jump to the last thing that you filed because you were like, "Oh, yeah, wait, I forgot. I want to add more to that note," you can also use it to jump to any of your projects, for example, or any of your notes, assuming you’ve set up your org-refile-targets appropriately. Okay, @RandCode has question. Does Emacs have a grammar checker like Harper's LSP? I know there are packages that people can use to work with Harper and other things. Do you know of any other built-in things?

Prot: Built-in, it's flyspell, but that's not grammar. That's spelling.

Sacha: Okay, all right.

Prot: I cannot think of something. No, I don't think there is for grammar. So Harper or anything like that would plug into Flymake.

Sacha: @greggr0th has a question. What are your favorite completion plugins?

Prot: Yeah, I think it's really vertico. I prefer it over the built-in options, over icomplete. So it's vertico, and then with that, I would say, at minimum, orderless. So vertico and orderless, at minimum. But then, of course, if you want a little bit more, which is very useful, Marginalia, Consult, Embark, maybe I'm forgetting something, save-hist, it's built-in. But yeah, those, those for sure.

53:49 dabbrev

Sacha: @hmelman says dabbrev for dynamic abbreviations is underrated. You don't need to predefine them. You just type the start of a word or symbol and type M-/, and it will search the buffer for something starting with what's on the left side of your point and then expand it. I can't remember if it's dabbrev or hippie-expand, but you can also set it up so that it can try words from other buffers or other things that you've got or contacts or whatever. Anyway, so dynamic abbreviations. If you search for dabbrev and if you look also for hippie-expand, you will find lots of things that you can configure to fit your particular workflow. So you can expand abbreviations without having to define them.

Prot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Super powerful. Super useful. I use it more than tab completion, you know, like with core. I use dabbrev more. It's very nice. Yeah.

54:44 Keyboard macros

Sacha: Okay, so we've mentioned keyboard macros very briefly, but this is another very powerful chunk of things that people might not be used to if they're coming from an editor that is not Emacs. So keyboard macros, what's kind of like the thing that we can use to explain? How do we explain it to people who are new to this?

Prot: In its simplest form, you record what you type and you can play it back in its simplest form. But the thing with Emacs is that you don't just record typing motions, typing actions. You also record all the Emacs motions. You can have a keyboard macro that includes stuff such as move to another window or create a new split or whatever. You can do more advanced things like that. This has very nice qualities to it where it's like, oh, I just want to copy all these symbols and move them to my shell buffer and then I will do something with them, pipe it to something like a program outside of Emacs. So it has a lot of nice applications like that.

Sacha: I think that if people can get the hang of: very carefully set up their keyboard macro, think what's a series of steps that I can do so that I can do the change and then move my cursor to the start of where the next change should be... For example, I'll start the keyboard macro, I'll delete the word, I'll type in something new, or maybe I'll paste in a register I'll use isearch to find the next point at which I need to do something. If you define your keyboard macros like this, then you're giving yourself the ability to interactively confirm whether you're still on the right track and then make the change because that way, it's not just like a search and replace and you're hoping it all works out. Although the recent search and replaces are great because they show you the changes. But for something that's more complex, especially if you're not used to regular expressions, keyboard macros can help you interactively do it in small steps.

Prot: Yeah, exactly. Of course, search and replace will be more tricky if you have to go through many files and perform multiple edits in each, because then the concept of regular expressions breaks down. You don't want to think in those terms where it's like, I will have to make a change somewhere towards the top and then somewhere in the middle and then somewhere towards the end. Keyboard macros combined with Dired combined with going to file... Very nice. Just to say another thing about keyboard macros is... Let's say you have written your very nice keyboard macro. You're recording it, and somewhere towards the end, you make a small mistake. Keep going and then C-x C-k C-e to edit your macro. It's a text buffer. You just remove what you don't want.

Sacha: You can save these keyboard macros as well. You can use them in a future Emacs session or even turn them into your first Emacs Lisp function. You can give it a name and you can run it that way.

57:52 Editable grep and occur

Sacha: In the next three minutes before the kiddo runs out for lunch break, I also want to mention, since we talked about making changes in multiple files, that grep and occur are both editable. You can do your grep and you can search for things. And then you can say C-x C-q which turns it from read-only to something you can change, then you can do your search and replace in that, and you can C-x C-q again and those changes can get put back into all those different files.

Prot: It's amazing. On this note, specifically for grep, if you edit many files with the grep edit mode that is built into Emacs 31, it will not save them for you. So C-x s, instead of C-x C-s, allows you to save multiple buffers. And every time, it gives you a prompt and you can type d to see the diff. Like, okay, what exactly did I change? If you have many unsaved files, d to see what you're about to save so you never make any mistakes.

Sacha: Mm-hmm. Taking advantage of these diffing tools is great also. Even if you're new to Emacs or you don't have a programming background, if you find yourself making changes to lots of files, I strongly recommend learning more about version control systems like Git and then using something like Magit or even the built-in VC. If you use VC, you can use it and you have set up something like a git repository. You can use `C-x v =` to diff to see the changes between your file and the previous thing that you had saved. Which makes sense so that you can see, okay, these are the changes. Also it means that you can experiment with different changes. You can experiment with different ways of writing a paragraph or whatever, and you know that all of your previous versions are saved and you don't have "really, really final version two." You don't clutter your directory with a lot of copies of the same file.

Prot: But even if you don't have any of the version control system set up, a very simple thing is diff-buffer-with-file. So you have a file you are working on and now you make some edits. The buffer, what is in memory, is different than what is on disk. You can compare the difference between the two.

Sacha: Okay, I'm going to try to wrap up here because the kid is going to run and say hi very soon. Thank you so much for joining me. Of course, there's a lot more to talk about the Emacs built-ins, but I hope we've given a quick tour of some of the things that are definitely worth learning more about and the situations for which they are absurdly useful. Thanks to everyone in chat also for coming and hanging out. I will post the show notes eventually and get the transcripts sorted out. Thanks.

Prot: You're welcome. You're welcome. Take care. Of course, good luck with everything. Didn't she show up here?

Sacha: If she shows up, she will. It's inevitable.

1:01:01 Emacs Carnival June 2026: Underappreciated built-ins

Sacha: Also, if folks are interested, even if you've never blogged before, the Emacs carnival theme for June 2026 is "Underappreciated Emacs built-ins," which is why we had this conversation. Feel free to write about something and either send [Ross and] me a link, or you can even send me the post and I'll post it on my blog with your name on it and other things like that so you can share your appreciation for these built-ins. All right. Okay, I hear movement. I gotta go. All right.

Prot: Take care, Sacha. Take care, folks. Goodbye.

Chat

  • protesilaos: ​Looking forward to this! Talk to you soon.
  • gr1maldi: ​​Yo, and stuff.🙂
  • charliemcmackin4859: ​​I just checked, there are 11 items in my kill-ring at the moment. Some of them are several lines long
  • charliemcmackin4859: ​narrowing to defun feels easier than trying to mark the function before search-and-replacing… I love narrowing
  • charliemcmackin4859: ​…and I love that you can make those marking tricks part of a keyboard macro
  • hmelman: ​​both local and global marks are useful to navigate through
  • pratikmishra4073: ​​just tried indirect buffer. didn't know it existed
  • hmelman: ​and the fact that things like xref or imenu push the last location before jumping, means popping the mark is an easy way to go back from various navigation mechanisms
  • matthewjorgensen9115: ​​thinking about isearrch wrap around search losing your place. either have scrroll to posisiotn to know the direction and how far it was away, or have mode line flash to say it moved from last to first
  • hmelman: ​Don't need flymake for that just M-g M-n (next-error) which works with compile, grep, occur (I think).
  • hmelman: ​One I keep forgetting about, you mentioned using sexp commands in other languages, works in prose too. C-M-u (backwards-up-list) moves you out of a "quote" or (paren) and then C-M-e to the end of it.
  • matthewjorgensen9115: ​​follow mode alllows the smae file with multiple frames, like a book. follow mode can work with 2 3 or more windows
  • matthewjorgensen9115: ​also works with centered cursor mode which will keep the cusor possion in the middle of the frame
  • RandCode: ​​Damn I am late, hello everyone! 🙂
  • matthewjorgensen9115: ​when highlighting parts of the manual how are you doing this? in bookmarks, bookmark region, using org-remark? other ways?
  • RandCode: ​​Does emacs have a grammar checker like harper's lsp?
  • greggr0th: ​​What are your favorite completion plugins?
  • RandCode: ​​Also, looking fresh Prot ;)
  • protesilaos: ​​Thanks!
  • hmelman: ​dabbrev is underrated. You don't need to pre-define them, just type the start of a word/symbol and type M-/ and it will search the buffer for something starting with what's left of point and expand it
  • RandCode: ​There is so much to learn that I feel like I have been missing out on all of emacs somehow lol
  • RandCode: ​Since you mentioned built-in completion framewworks, how does the built-in (vertical) completions compare to corfu btw?
  • charliemcmackin4859: ​not grammar, but if you have a dictionary server running (like dicod on linux) emacs can be made to communicate with it to give definitions at point
  • RandCode: ​Ohh, that is a cool! ^
  • matthewjorgensen9115: ​​virtico multiform mode allows custom settings command, for example for files I use grid and alphabetical, but vertico recommendations normally. This allows more value of completion knowledge
  • RandCode: ​Thank you so mcuh for this wonderful stream everyone!!!
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You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
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2026-06-08 Emacs news

| emacs, emacs-news

It's Emacs Built-ins appreciation month! I'm coming to appreciate the menu bar more. What built-ins do you appreciate? Write about it and send Ross a link!

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!

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Emacs PDF View: Replace current page with file using PDFtk

| emacs

I needed to replace a page in a PDF with another PDF. This was a bit of an annoying process on my iPad involving copying and pasting pages in Noteful and then re-exporting them as a PDF, but it was easy to do in Emacs thanks to pdf-tools and PDFtk. 

;;;###autoload
(defun sacha-pdf-view-replace-current-page-with-file (file)
  "Replace the current page in PDF View with FILE.
Requires pdftk."
  (interactive "FFile to insert: ")
  (let ((temp-file (concat (make-temp-name "pdf-view") ".pdf")))
    (call-process
     "pdftk"
     nil nil nil
     (concat "A=" (expand-file-name (buffer-file-name)))
     (concat "B=" (expand-file-name file))
     "cat"
     (format "A%d-%d"
             1
             (1- (pdf-view-current-page)))
     "B"
     (format "A%d-end"
             (1+ (pdf-view-current-page)))
     "output"
     temp-file)
    (rename-file temp-file (buffer-file-name) t)))
This is part of my Emacs configuration.
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Emacs Chat 25: Ben Zanin (@gnomon@mastodon.social)

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

: Updated the transcript

I chatted with Ben Zanin about music, Org Mode, Emacs in terminals and on an Android, keyboards, elfeed, and more.

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

Chapters

  • 0:00 How Ben got started with Emacs
  • 2:19 Ben got into Emacs because of twittering-mode
  • 4:30 Emacs as a media playback platform with Versuri and Mpdel
  • 9:13 Emacs on Android with Termux
  • 13:44 Keyboards and other devices
  • 16:44 Benefits of a split keyboard
  • 18:22 Meeting workflow
  • 21:11 Narrowing
  • 22:58 There's even an internal Slack channel about Emacs at Ben's company
  • 24:50 Ben keeps Org capture templates as individual files and adapts them to different meeting flows
  • 28:45 Personal-scale software and the journey
  • 34:07 vc-git-grep for finding notes again
  • 36:55 Add keywords to make things easier to find again
  • 37:47 Keybindings and terminals; wezterm
  • 42:38 Timers: tea-timer, tmr
  • 43:57 Different stages of package use
  • 44:47 Elfeed
  • 48:36 Spoilers
  • 49:53 Comparing different news sources
  • 53:13 Bookmark naming conventions
  • 53:24 Naming conventions simplify building new workflows
  • 53:50 elfeed-curate for annotations
  • 55:46 mytoots archives Mastodon toots
  • 57:06 Mentoring offer
  • 58:02 A local instance of public-inbox can let you use Gnus to read mailing lists quickly

Transcript

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0:00 How Ben got started with Emacs

Sacha: I forgot to ask you how your last name is pronounced.

Ben: Oh, Zanin.

Sacha: This is Emacs chat number 25 and here I am with Ben Zanin. You have a math background and now you're in IT. Where did you encounter Emacs in the journey?

Ben: So the reason I have a math background is that I wanted to get into programming language design and at the time so that led me over to lambda calculus and that kind of thing and at the time it was at the time I was getting into university in like 2005-2006 It was impossible to get into the computer programs, but I could get into math. I figured that would move me in the direction that I wanted to go in, so I did. Got to third year, and then every professor who taught any of the courses I cared about all left the faculty at the same time.

Sacha: Oh no!

Ben: Yeah. Anyhow, that's a different story. But yeah, I got into Emacs because in the process of learning about Lambda Calculus, the Lisp weenies found me. And yeah, I spent a bunch of time learning about that. And it wasn't until like 10 years after I got into Common Lisp and Scheme that I actually got into Emacs at all.

Sacha: That's interesting. Usually people, like, if they're doing Lispy things, they get into Emacs right away because Lisp. But okay, so 10 years after. You're already well-used to parentheses at that point.

Ben: Yes. But I guess it wasn't until about ten years ago, like around 2015 or so, that I started really getting into Emacs. I would still consider myself to be a beginner on that front.

Sacha: Oh yeah? So what got you to get into it more?

Ben: I found that I was looking for more structured data management processes. Basically, I was looking for personal information management. And I kept bouncing off Emacs because I wanted to get into those tasks, but Emacs was such a rich learning process that I kept getting sidetracked, so I kept bouncing off of it.

2:19 Ben got into Emacs because of twittering-mode

Ben: But I have to admit that one of the things that originally actually got me into Emacs was twittering mode. Oh yeah? Because I was looking for a tool that would let me, we'll probably get into this later in the chat, but I was looking for a tool that would let me keep a larger window of context about the conversations that I've been in. The Twitter apps and the Twitter website implemented a really narrow window. I wanted to be able to search back a couple of weeks for stuff that I had seen or talked about previously. Twittering-mode gave me the ability to keep days or weeks of context in a single buffer that I could then immediately search. So I didn't actually get into Emacs as a text editor, I got into it as an application platform, and then gradually learned the rest of it. This is actually fantastic. So I kind of stuck around after that.

Sacha: That is the first time I've heard of someone coming to Emacs because of Twitter.

Ben: No, it's deeply embarrassing.

Sacha: No, it's wonderful. I love that there's just so many reasons why people come and the fact that you could find something that would let you take those notes and see that context and reply to it, and even, as I see in your config, work around slow keyboard response issues.

Ben: And also the fact that that's still in the config despite Twitter itself... I think I abandoned it in 2017, but it takes me a little while to rip things out of my config.

Sacha: Yeah, I see you're a lot more active in Mastodon these days. I see your Monsterdon posts scrolled by my feed every so often. Yeah, so we dove right into that because a lot of the stuff in your config is interesting and your workflows too. My idea for these Emacs chats is to show people the kind of stuff that isn't immediately obvious to newbies when they're looking at someone's config. Because a lot of the stuff is new workflows and how the keyboard shortcuts work together and how this stuff fits into your life. That's not immediately obvious from the code. I've taken a look at your config, but before we jump into the gazillion things I wanted to ask you about, are there things that you particularly love about your Emacs workflow?

4:30 Emacs as a media playback platform with Versuri and Mpdel

image from video 00:07:24.567Ben: I'm probably going to get a little bit of deserved flak for this, but I use Emacs a lot as a media playback platform. I spend a lot of time using Emacs to listen to music through MPV. And I've got some integration with Versuri, which lets me... I think you've seen those customizations where what I've done is I've kind of duct-taped the two together. Versuri is an Emacs package for being able to quickly search through lyrics for songs. What I've done is I've bound Versuri to the point where I've pulled up a page of lyrics, I now have a hotkey that bounces me over to a search of my MPD library for where that song is, and vice versa. I've got MPD rigged up so that when I've got a song currently playing, I can bounce into Verisuri to display the lyrics for that particular song. Something you probably have not seen in my config yet because I haven't finished it yet... What I'm working on is actually integrating Org Mode with MPD, because I'd really like to be able to streamline my process where occasionally when I'm listening to something, I'll take notes either about the lyrics or about the song. I'd like to be able to link from Org Mode directly to either that song, that album, or that particular timecode. I don't have that yet, but I'm working on it. I think I'll probably lean on it quite a bit once I have it.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. I saw your tweet from May, I think, where you're talking about coming up with this way of taking notes. think if you come up with maybe a custom Org Mode link type that can store the annotation and then let you go to it, I think that would be really interesting. Especially if you figure out, okay, like, are you taking notes in the album? Are you taking notes on the song? Are you taking notes on this moment in the song? That could all be very cool.

Ben: Actually, do you mind if I share my screen?

Sacha: Please.

Ben: So one of the things I wanted to kind of note was... Let me... Oh yeah, this is actually going to be further embarrassing. I'm a terminal Emacs user.

Sacha: I saw. Can you increase the font size, though?

Ben: Absolutely, yeah.

Sacha: Resizing your terminal so it's smaller makes everything look bigger...

Ben: Is that better?

Sacha: More. Some of us are older. Thank you.

Ben: One of the things that's kind of unusual about my MPD configuration is I've got a satellite config. Sorry, the line wrap is a little bit off here. What this means is that I have... the household file server maintains the MPD library, but I've got multiple playback nodes around the house. What that lets me do is...

Sacha: You can play stuff on this...

Ben: So what this means is that I'm controlling the... well, in this case, that's a little MeLE Quieter3C that I've got in the living room that's kind of like the the home media server, the home playback machine. Fundamentally, I'm an ops guy, I'm a sys admin, and I've got, unfortunately, a fleet of machines around the house. What this lets me do is easily control each one of them. Instead of each one maintaining its own library of music files, the file server itself indexes them, which means that library updates are almost instantaneous, instead of having to read over the network to pull metadata out of each individual file. So having a satellite setup lets me... The real benefit is that MPD tracks albums, directories, and files as URLs. That means that I have a single global namespace of URLs for all of the media that's currently in the library, which means that I can annotate from any machine, but have it mean one thing. It makes it convenient for navigation, but it also makes it convenient for keeping notes, which I'm currently doing manually and working on those Org link types to be able to make it a little bit more smooth than it currently is.

Sacha: So you've got your central store of music files. You've got URLs for them so you can talk about them. That's just one identifier per song. You've got multiple speakers that you can use your completing interface to say, okay, I want to play this over there. You have Emacs controlling all of that.

9:13 Emacs on Android with Termux

Sacha: Now, is that Emacs on your laptop and you just take it around and you say, okay, I'm going to sit in the living room for a little bit or whatever and play there. Or do you... Ah, there you go. That's what I was going to ask. All right. So Emacs on your phone. The Android port or Termux?

Ben: I have both installed. I think you actually saw this a few months ago when I was running performance comparisons between the Termux version of Emacs and the native port, and found that the native port generally ran anything CPU-intensive roughly twice as fast. But I still use the Termux version because it's... I'm not sure if you played around with the Android terminal virtualization layer at all, but it's not great. I really appreciate the integration that Termux gives me with Android features. For example, being able to query the sensors, such as GPS or temperature sensors, and I can actually pull those in from the Emacs side. And that's something I kind of want to get into.

Sacha: What do you think of using the temperature sensors for? What can Emacs do with that?

Ben: It's not so much the fact that I use the temperature sensors as that when I pull the sensors, that's the most remarkable value that I get out of it. But one of the interesting things is the barometric pressure sensor, which gives me height, which matters because when I'm out and about and if I stop to record an entry in my journal, for example, I'll just pull the sensors and dump them into the header in the entry that I'm writing. The barometric sensor, I'll get the GPS, so that'll tell me what the actual height is at that location on the earth. The barometric sensor also gives me a little bit of insight into the weather. So it's not so much the temperature sensor is what my temperature is, but just like if it's a hot day or not.

Sacha: I am very curious about that setup. So if you happen to share your, I don't know, Org capture for Termux that includes all these things... You don't have to show me the actual stuff, but you know, at some point I think other people will be curious about what kind of benefits they can get from running Emacs on their phones.

Ben: So, I mean, I guess I'll... One of the benefits that I get is the ability to keep shopping. So I'm a little bit of a militant cyclist. One of the things that I often do is leave

image from video 00:12:04.333Ben: notes about things that I need to take care of in particular areas of the city. The nice thing is that I can just drop them directly in commits right as I'm going. So I often have a long list of updates that are from Emacs on my phone, just because it's convenient. All right. There we go for Monsterdon, in fact.

Sacha: Nice, nice. Then that's Syncthing or whatever else to just get it copied back to your laptop or just on your phone?

Ben: Straight Magit mode.

Sacha: Oh, yeah?

Ben: That's one of the things that I found was a little bit clunkier when I was running virtualized Emacs under the Android emulator and also the native Android port of Emacs. They are a little bit more troublesome to get Magit to work. Because I rely on that for syncing back and forth from my phone, that's one of the reasons why I stuck with Termux.

Sacha: Very cool, very cool. I like Termux's little bar of extra keyboard keys that you can have, so you can have a regular keyboard and then you can just have your Controls and your Alts and whatever on that little extra bar. Termux is quite interesting.

Ben: I think I'm probably pushing it harder than it is meant to be pushed.

Sacha: That's the fun of it. I don't exactly know how everything will shake out, but probably with Google trying to lock down the developer ecosystem in a few months, right? They're saying, oh, you know, it's got to be ADB in order to get these unsigned apps on. We'll have to see how it all shakes out. But I'm hoping Termux can survive because I like that one too.

Ben: Yeah, me too.

Sacha: Okay, so you've got interesting music, an interesting music setup with lyrics and playback and all that stuff. You've got your phone, which also runs Emacs and from which you can, you've also set it up so you can control your music from your phone?

Ben: Yes.

Sacha: Okay.

13:44 Keyboards and other devices

Sacha: When I was reading through your toots, I noticed you like to play around with other keyboards and other devices like the 8BitDo. Do you have any of that talking to Emacs too?

Ben: [Keychron B11 Pro is] the keyboard I'm currently using. I got this so I could keep it in my purse and just like walk around with it, but it turns out it's super comfortable and I'm accidentally using it as a daily driver.

Sacha: All right. Name-drop the keyboard for all the people who like the device recommendations.

Ben: It's a Keychron B11 Pro. It runs ZMK. ZMK, I suppose. And if you've seen me interacting with Pete Johanson on Mastodon, he's the lead developer of that firmware package. It's a little bit like QMK, except that fundamentally QMK is a polling architecture, and it works really well for very restricted microcontrollers. ZMK is interrupt-based, which means it is tremendously more efficient in terms of power draw. So if you want a Bluetooth keyboard, you should probably run ZMK on it. Anyhow, yeah, it's fantastic. And I do have a bit of a keyboard problem where I tend to...

Sacha: Many Emacs people have keyboard problems.

Ben: Right? I feel like I'm in good company right now.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, devices, yep, gotcha. And this has become your main keyboard even for regular computing?

Ben: In the last couple of weeks, yeah. It's super comfortable. Because it's so flat, I can get away without having to use palm rests to actually keep in a decent posture, because of the curvature of it.. Like, it's an Alice layout. The key travel isn't too bad. It's actually quite comfortable. I found that I needed a little bit of acclimatization to get used to split keyboards. This one has roughly the spread of a split, but it seems to be easier for my muscle memory. So yeah, I didn't intend to leave it on my desk, but it stuck and has kind of stayed there for now.

Sacha: Does it have any special ergonomics for all the modifiers that we like to do? Or do you just use Caps as Control or whatever else?

Ben: Actually, I don't use Caps as Control and I actually really need to get into remapping that. ZMK has a very rich remapping story, as I expect you to imagine, from a custom firmware. The macros are intense, and you can get really deep in customization. I have done none of that on this keyboard yet, because it's only, I think, a couple of months old at this point.

Sacha: You've been settling in. As you said, this has been your main keyboard for a little while. Charlie Baker says, "yeah, I love the split keyboard. Recently bought one myself. I was getting so much neck pain, you know, shoulder and neck pain from so many hours keeping hands close together." But the split lets his shoulders relax. So probably you're getting the same, like, ha, my arms.

16:44 Benefits of a split keyboard

Ben: The two things that I first noticed when I moved to a split keyboard was one, my wrists started feeling a lot nicer and two, I was immediately able to bench press like 20 pounds more the next week. It was amazing how much of a difference it made and it showed up in the data.

Sacha: Wow. There was a weightlifting talk at EmacsConf last year, I think. So there's a surprising overlap between the people who are checking their weightlifting stats and the people who are into Emacs. Naturally, with Org Mode. There you go.

Ben: Let's not look at those numbers too closely. I'm not too proud of a bunch of them. But yes, I find that Org capture templates let me keep on top of that and not really think about it, which is great because you don't want to think about it. You want to gather the data and think about it separately so that you can stay emotionally divested from what the numbers mean.

Sacha: I know. I'm totally happy to dig into the Org capture, especially if you do any graphing. People always love graphing their progress, right? But if you're like, I don't really want to show my numbers at the moment, that is also understandable and okay.

Ben: I don't, I'm afraid. Sorry.

Sacha: That's okay.

Ben: It took me a couple years to get used to being on camera at all. I don't really like my appearance very much. I'm working on that, as you can see. I've had to work on that to be able to work remotely. It's a work in progress. I'm getting through it.

Sacha: You know us. We're very much focused on text. In fact, you even use Emacs in the terminal. That's very text-y.

18:22 Meeting workflow

Sacha: One of the interesting things actually that I wanted to ask you about since you mentioned meetings is you probably also have the role of designated note-taker. You mentioned in one of your toots that you take notes and people are like, what are you doing that in? How are you taking your notes? And it's Emacs.

Ben: Yes, so actually that's one of the things I should lead off with as an apology. I probably won't be able to share many of my capture templates because I don't use them in my personal life very much. They're mostly on my work machine. I've got capture templates for impromptu meetings where it's just like an exploratory, we have a problem we need to solve, we're kind of talking through a discussion, a separate capture template for meetings with agendas to make sure that we stay on them and that we log decisions, and a separate set of templates for... So I have a team of direct reports and they each have different cares and different topics that we're working to develop in their professional careers. I find that it's really useful to be able to keep some continuity between our conversations. It also makes it very easy to export that entire dataset, share it with them to make sure that they can consult it at the same time. If I got anything wrong, I can fold their corrections in. But all of those templates, unfortunately, are on my work machine.

Sacha: We'll just sketch out the general idea in abstract details and then people who want to implement it for themselves can fill in the blanks. For example, when you're having a meeting with your direct reports, are the tasks related to them in an Org agenda? Are you using dynamic blocks? Is it tracked somewhere else or is it in Org?

Ben: It's straight in Org mode. So most of the touch points that we have are more about professional development and their cares and concerns, rather than specific deliverables. Usually deliverables we manage at a team level. But if there are specific things that individuals are working on, they will be in to-dos under their subheadings in a way that show up on the agenda if we have assigned deadlines for them. But generally, if there's a deadline on a task, it's because I'm doing something and they need to track it, or they're doing something and I need to track it. If I'm the only guy using Emacs, then Org Mode won't work for that, so there aren't a lot of those. But if it's just something that I need to check up on to make sure that something that... Like they've got planned leave for example, or they have a cousin's wedding that they need to go off to, or something that I just need to keep in my brain that's not necessarily deliverable, then it would be appropriate to keep that in a place where it'll only show up on my agenda. So that's the kind of decision making that I apply there.

21:11 Narrowing

Sacha: And you mentioned you have a subheading, I guess a subheading per person or sort of... Or do you use tags to keep track of something that might touch several people?

Ben: Usually a section per person, and that's more of a convenience than anything else. That lets me narrow to just that subheading and share my screen during the meetings. Then I don't have to worry about accidentally leaking anybody else's information into the screen share or anything like that. Obviously we let off with conversations about them being all right with that. But the ability to very clearly and simply delineate "This domain of my notes pertains to this person" and being able to be confident and share that confidence that there will be no leakage means that we can explore topics and talk about them in a way that might otherwise be a little bit more restrictive. So being able to do that simply, and being able to establish a very clear delineation around whose information belongs where and where it should be shared turns out to be pretty valuable.

Sacha: Yeah, and that's a technique I think that especially people who are new to Emacs and who aren't used to narrowing and widening might not know how to use effectively. I think narrow is even one of the commands that's disabled by default. You've got to say, yeah, you know, I'm not scared. I know what to do.

Ben: Yeah, it's kind of bizarre to me that it is, but yeah.

Sacha: I can imagine people accidentally triggering it and they're like, oh no, the rest of my file is missing. But if you know how to narrow to a region, and Org even has those commands to easily narrow to a subtree... I think it's even part of the default speed command so you can trigger it right from a heading. But it's great for that kind of restriction.

22:58 There's even an internal Slack channel about Emacs at Ben's company

Sacha: Okay, so the reason why I was asking about that is because some people are working with people who are not using Emacs, so it's very interesting to see what the kinds of... It's very rare for people to work with other people who actually use... Are there any other Emacs people in your company, for example?

Ben: There's an entire Emacs Slack topic about that, yeah. It's kind of great.

Sacha: What is that like to have co-workers who do Emacs? Because this is a rare experience.

Ben: It's super cool. It's also neat to see the very, very different ways that people use it. But yeah, oftentimes people will talk about problems that they have with particular internal tools, and somebody's like, oh yeah, go check out this repo on GitLab that I published last week where I got sick of it and decided to solve that problem categorically. It's actually super cool. And some of the folks at... Generally, I tried not to mention my current employer at any point. Obviously, it's not secret. It's in the init file. But yeah, I don't tend to get into that deeply. But some of the other people who work at my company, they maintain venerable Emacs packages. So it's awesome to be able to go and talk with some of the folks who I've been working on the code that I've been using for a decade and we are now coworkers. It's lovely.

Sacha: Oh, that's so nice. I'm glad you have that kind of little community in there.

Ben: Yeah. Bunch of nerds.

Sacha: So I suspect some people will be looking up your company after this. I think it's also mentioned in LinkedIn and sort of like, okay, let's see if there's any job openings.

Ben: If it's mentioned on LinkedIn, that is somebody else. I haven't logged into LinkedIn in 15 years and I never will.

24:50 Ben keeps Org capture templates as individual files and adapts them to different meeting flows

Sacha: We do have a question from Shae. Shae is asking, how do you make a capture template to stay on agenda and record decisions? You got any tips for that? I'm guessing this is more of a human thing rather than an Org thing, but maybe you have some ideas on how you keep something on track.

Ben: So I'll actually push back on the "It's a human thing rather than an Org thing". I strongly believe that one of the real values of Org Mode is that it's a very plastic system. Fundamentally, I think that it is a human system because it allows you to express exactly those kinds of trade-offs in a really, really fluid way. I love the personal information management that Palm Pilots provided, for example, but it was pretty restrictive. One of the things that I love about Org Mode is that if you find that a particular person has a particular conversation style, it's really easy to modify your Org Mode capture templates to be able to capture that particular flow that you have with that person. Or with a particular group of a recurring meeting, for example, that tends to flow in a particular way. Super easy to update the templates that I use to capture those particular meetings to make it easier to match the general conversation flow with the notes that I will be taking about it.

Sacha: Wow, that sounds pretty sophisticated.

Ben: Well, I mean, that's the thing. It's not sophisticated. It tracks the human process very easily. So it's really lightweight. So you don't have to have a lot of sophistication to make it very, very useful. You just have to have a feedback loop that you can tune every time with one or two minutes of effort. And that's one of the reasons why I depend on Magit mode so much is that it lets me track those things. But yeah, to answer Shae's question about how do I track those particular things. So if it's a meeting where one of my direct reports has a particular set of topics that we tend to investigate, like somebody who's concentrated on career growth. So we're talking about the areas in which we want to see development. I'll absolutely update the capture templates for that particular person to say, all right, here's what we talked about last time. Here are the things that were done between our last two conversations about how we move in that direction. Were they successful or not? Did it require a lot of effort? So was it something that more effort should be put into to be able to drive down the work over time, to be able to produce those results? But yeah, that goes into the templates and that goes into the cadence of conversations that we talked about in Capture.

Sacha: So that's really interesting. You modify the capture templates with the notes that you want to have easily available the next time you chat with them.

Ben: Exactly, yeah.

Sacha: The capture templates are still defined as a setq somewhere in your thing, or are you going into the customized interface?

Ben: So I actually keep the capture mode templates as raw files that are referred to, and that makes it easier to version them in a way that like, I mean, sure, like my Emacs init file, if you look at the Git history of it, it has a whole bunch of different...

Sacha: I had not considered having capture templates as files files. It worked out really well.

Ben: So you can see that... It's a little bit hard to see with the font this small, but you can see that I've got a lot of changes to, for example, my init file, but keeping them in individual capture mode template files makes it a little bit easier to just look at the history of that particular file and see why particular changes were made.

Sacha: I'm going to try that. I think that's a great idea because it allows you to be a lot more granular about the notes.

28:45 Personal-scale software and the journey

image from video 00:28:28.300Sacha: I saw in that very brief flash of your change log message that you like to write fairly detailed commit messages that talk about why a change was made instead of just "a new function, new command," very terse updates that I sometimes just try to get away with. Tell us more about that, because I think you've had a couple of toots about reading source code and reading commits.

Ben: Yeah. So I guess one of the things that I most appreciate about software in general, and specifically personal software, like personal-scale software that's been written by an amount of people that you could fit into a room to have a conversation about it... One of the things that I most appreciate about that is that almost all software written that way is fundamentally a diary about the way that a person learned how to solve a set of problems that they might not have known about when they decided to at the beginning. It's this fascinating process of tracking somebody's voyage through the problem landscape as they discover other people who have touched on topics that are tangential to the problem being solved by that software package. It's such a personal and fascinating experience to see somebody go from "I know just enough about a problem to be able to decide that I want to build a machine that works on it" to "I have this deeper understanding of how the problem actually exists in the broader set of things that people care about, oriented along the axis of what machinery can do to help solve parts of that problem." The commit logs for a program are like a map through that territory. It's wonderful to read. It gives you a lot of insight into the person doing the navigation. When you see 16 commits on December 24th of 2023, like, that person probably had a little bit of time to work on it. Then, when you see a bunch of commits that are 5 p.m. Monday to Friday, like, okay, this is probably done in a particular way. It's this deeply personal process of seeing how problems are learned about. I just really appreciate that.

Sacha: I think what you're saying about personal-scale software and getting a sense of people's journey as they learn to understand a problem and as they start to prototype a solution... Because you never quite come across the right solution the first time around. You're figuring things out, You're borrowing things from other people. I think that will resonate a lot with lots of people in the Emacs community, because Emacs use is so personal, as you mentioned when you were looking at the Slack channel. I was wondering, in your personal practice, as you figure things out, what kinds of things help you? Is it mostly a matter of actually sitting down and taking the time to write the literate programming stuff around the code blocks or the commit messages, or are there other tools or techniques that help you do that? Are there tools or techniques that help me write down your journey along the way as you think about the code? What's your practice? For example, when you come across something that you want to figure out, how do you go about doing it?

Ben: So it depends on how I'm approaching the project. One of the neat things about software is that it's a document and a device at the same time. You can care about it because of the thing that it does, or you can care about it because of the information that it captures. If I'm digging into a program because it does a thing that I want to learn, then I'll pay attention to the device aspect of it. That usually means that I'll start with its own documentation. If it has a man page, I'll read that. If it has user docs, I'll read those. Usually, I'll start keeping notes in an Org Mode file, because it's easy to hyperlink back to it and add my own annotations in parallel to the actual authoritative source. If I'm reading software primarily as a document, then I'll start by reading the source code and the commit logs, usually the most recent ones, and then I'll jump back to the beginning of the project and read upwards at the beginning, and then fill in the blanks iteratively, if it's a project that's small enough or has little enough history that I can do that. Again, I'll usually start an Org Mode file specific to that particular exploration that will let me organize my notes as I go. I really do rely on the external brain that I can keep in an Org Mode file. I tend to have a pretty decent long-term memory, but being able to bridge the gap between short-term memory and long-term memory is super, super useful. Leaving myself hints that let me dredge things back out of long-term and reload it into the hot cache of short-term really, really helps out, because that lets me maintain that flow state or get back into that flow state. When you've got like the whole program, all the context that you've absorbed up until now and the ideas of the areas that you want to investigate, being able to hot-reload all of that and then pick up where I left off is super useful. But the meat brain can't do it. I need the machine brain too.

34:07 vc-git-grep for finding notes again

Sacha: Tell me about this dredging up process. Are you a lots of little files person? A couple of large files? A project file, there's an Org file in each project that you look up? How do you find things, especially if you don't remember the exact words?

Ben: So it's usually like an Org Mode per category, and they get consolidated. Let me shrink this down a little bit. So usually it's an Org Mode category per file. If there's something super specific, then usually it'll live out in its own place until I get around to...

Sacha: I love that you have an Org File specifically for Mug Cake.

Ben: But that's the thing. It'll live off in its own thing until it gets integrated into the list where the long-term stuff lives. I promise this is pertinent to your actual question.

Sacha: No, no, this is very pertinent.

Ben: Usually, lots of little files while I'm still working on something, and then as that something becomes part of my larger life and has links to other things,

Ben: then it'll kind of get centralized into one of the Org Mode files that has a broader topic purpose basically.

Sacha: If it's very long-term and you can't remember the exact words to find something, how do you generally find find your notes?

Ben: That way.

Sacha: You start grepping various keywords and try to find it.

Ben: Yeah. So one of the things that I don't yet have turned on, and actually you inspired me to look into this, was so... Actually, do we have enough time? Yeah, okay. I'm just looking at the clock. One of the things that I wanted to get into was long-term searching and searchability. Yeah. So I use SQLite's indexing for a lot of things, and I really appreciate its porter stemming because it lets you search for stemmed words, which are kind of approximate matches, which is useful, but less useful than vector databases. You actually put a little bit of work into indexing topics based on vector similarity.

Sacha: Which I haven't gotten back to, so I'm glad to see you managed to experiment with it, see what you come up with.

Ben: I don't have anything to show yet, except that it's an interesting topic. Because I'm word-oriented, I will often remember individual keywords, or I'll have enough patience that I can sift through a list of potential keywords as I'm grepping for stuff.

36:55 Add keywords to make things easier to find again

Ben: If I find that my first three or four attempts at searching for a keyword don't find the topic that I'm looking for, once I do eventually dig up the topic, I will add those keywords that I was searching for just so I can find it next time, expecting that future me will probably behave more or less like current me. But yeah, being able to use a vector database to search for headings that include related topics instead of related words... I'd really like to get there. I'm not there yet, and I think that's going to be interesting and useful. I also think it's going to be challenging to represent Org Mode's hierarchical structure to restrict the training of particular vector sets to be able to cast an increasingly wide net for where I want the searches to run. I don't know how that's going to be solved yet, but I'm going to be looking into it.

37:47 Keybindings and terminals; wezterm

Sacha: @PuercoPop has a question regarding terminal Emacs. "Do you need to change any of the keybindings to avoid clashes with the terminal?" Some keybindings don't work on terminals, or some terminals already have these keybindings set.

Ben: So I have good news and bad news there. The good news is that... One of the terminals that I'm using right now on most of my systems is Wezterm. It's really good. I started off with [meant to say Kitty], and I kind of bounced off that project because of some of the behavior of the lead developers. I won't get too deep into it, but what I found is that Wezterm... It gives me very little friction that way. It doesn't have a lot of its own keybindings, and that's a relief. It means that I really don't have to... I don't think I've had to put any time into customizing Wezterm to get out of the way of Emacs or Screen. I should mention, I am running Emacs within Screen, so that introduces another layer. C-a a, for example, is beginning-of-line for me, even though C-a itself is the default Emacs keybinding. But yeah, I think that I ended up choosing terminal software specifically on that merit, so that it doesn't get in the way. That's actually one of the things that Termux is... The default Google keyboard keeps stealing key bindings. It'll update, and all of a sudden, I can't use a particular Alt key combination anymore, because now it invokes a Google keyboard shortcut for pulling things out of the Android clipboard, for example, which is really kind of annoying. But yeah, in terms of terminals on full-fledged machines, I generally don't have that particular problem. Except for... What was the name of it? It was... It was a zap-to on-the-screen package that alphapapa wrote, I believe, that I... Actually, let me just look it up. Yeah, Avy.

Sacha: Oh yeah?

Ben: So I wanted to start picking this up in 2021, and yeah, control colon doesn't work in terminals. So the mode itself is fantastic, and when I'm using it in a GUI Emacs, it's very useful, and I rarely use it now specifically because of that particular terminal problem. That is self-inflicted. That is not a problem with the package. That is a me problem. But yeah, I think this is the notable one that I bounced off of.

Sacha: Yeah, just trying to find the right, you know, a key binding that will pass. Because you can't get used to key binding in one system and then not have it available in other systems. It's just going to mess with your brain. So yeah, Ray points out, yeah, Google steals Control Shift K, which he uses to kill tabs to the right. So it's like, oh.

Ben: Infuriating.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. And of course, none of the standard keyboards have a super key on the thing, so you can't just tack on another modifier that'll get through.

Ben: That's actually one of the reasons that I picked up this particular keyboard is Brian Carlson. Another Torontonian. He works on Git LFS and some other stuff. He was specifically looking for a keyboard that had a super key that he could remap. So four keys to the right of space, which this one has. And because it's ZMK, it's remappable. I think this might be suitable for his purpose, except that he wants a QMK keyboard, specifically because the development tools for QMK are packaged in W, and that's a plus for him. Anyhow, yes, I agree. Like, not having a super and a hyper key on a keyboard

Sacha: feels like like one of your fingers that are cramped up we need more modifiers well I mean you know pipe organ Tell us about that.

Ben: What is this? Oh yeah, foot pedals. Yeah, and I actually do have these wired into a little Atmel microcontroller running QMK. I honestly tried the foot pedal thing for a little while. It was hilarious. I did not find it useful.

Sacha: I don't have the hand-eye-foot coordination to do that thing at the same time.

Ben: Maybe if I had learned piano as a kid, it would have been good. But yeah, I don't seem to be able to do it. But I gave it the old college try and it was fun.

42:38 Timers: tea-timer, tmr

Sacha: Okay, I had a couple of things I wanted to ask about in your config. You have two types of timers. You have tea-timer and you have Prot's TMR. Do you use them for different purposes? What's going on here?

Ben: So I'm trying them out. I tried TTimer first because it was the first one that I found, and it was useful. I was actually using it in meetings because I would, when I was trying to keep us on topic, I would use that to remind us that, oh, we've got four other topics we need to get through. We're trying to give this one five minutes. We're running up on four. And it was just because it was super low overhead. It was easy to pick up. It was easy to have it displayed on my screen. And it didn't feel like I was... Running a chess timer on everyone. It's very subtle in the mode line. It was useful. But what I found was that when I was... Running multiple timers simultaneously. TMR, just the fact that you can list all the timers and manage them in a separate buffer. It's richer and I appreciated some of its documentation more. I haven't fully switched over to it yet. I'm still in exploratory mode. In fact, this is probably like... So I actually have a bunch more packages installed than I'm currently using. So I'm going to shrink this down a little bit just so that it doesn't line wrap.

43:57 Different stages of package use

Ben: But yeah, so I've got, I think about 140 packages locally cloned. I've got, as you can see in my init, about half of that actually installed. There are various phases. I've got a clone, but I don't have it in my init. Or I have it in my init, but there's another package that offers similar functionality. Or I'm all-in on this particular choice and I'm removing the other ones. It's a gradual kind of progression.

Sacha: Yeah, we're all auditioning packages to see if they fit in our workflow and all that stuff. I was curious also about your elfeed things. You have a few things related to elfeed. Actually, do you want to talk about the thing you just highlighted first?

Ben: No, we'll get back to it in a sec. I'm keeping an eye on the clock.

Sacha: But yeah, elfeed.

44:47 Elfeed

Sacha: Yeah, you've got a couple of interesting things in your elfeed setup, including picking a search from a bookmark or other shortcuts like that.

Ben: So I have discovered in my conversations with the new maintainers for elfeed that my elfeed habits are very deviant. So let me actually start off by going through... You can see that like the top of my elfeed list is kind of in one format and down at the bottom, the ones that are closer to present day are organized in a different way.

Sacha: You've got tags now.

Ben: So my feed list is, I mean, it started in Google Reader. It's kind of been forward ported since then. It's long.

Sacha: I love the comments.

Ben: But one of the consequences of having a long feed list is that I have an enormous elfeed database. And I use it for completely different purposes. So for example, I'm going to show off that little default search. I keep an eye on projects that have releases that aren't packaged by Debian, for example. So I've got this little ATS Mini. basically a small AM FM radio that happens to run on ESP32 and the firmware for this community developed and it's kind of interesting but like that's not packaged by Debian so I pay attention to or I subscribe to the release feed for that particular project. I do keep in keep an eye on the Linux kernel especially these days because The gallop of security vulnerabilities coming out of mythos analyses right now means that I have to pay more attention than usual to fresh updates. So generally I run Debian stable, but I do run kernels from backports and I want to know when those are available. MeshTastic. I was paying more attention to this a couple of weeks ago. I'm not going to reach that right now. But yeah, the local MeshTastic community in Toronto is plagued by a couple of griefers that make it a lot less fun. So I'm paying a bit less attention to that right now. But yeah, so like one of the bookmarks that I have is software currency. Another one is, for example, the YouTube channels that I subscribe to. Thank goodness for Elf YouTube. It is so nice to be able to get the transcripts for things directly in there.

Sacha: There's even a sponsor block integration so you can skip all the promotions and stuff.

Ben: Yeah, I mean, so again, my use of YouTube is also deviant in that I pretty much strictly subscribe to RSS feeds and they're downloaded onto the file server. So when a new recording comes out, it gets dropped there. I'll watch it. And then I've got a little widget that scans through my Kodi database for watched files. Once YouTube files show up in the watch list, they're automatically purged. And it means I just never see an ad. It's not just satisfying. I don't think that I would be able to pay attention if I was being constantly interrupted because of the way that my brain works. But yeah, so being able to quickly search for YouTube is one thing.

48:36 Spoilers

image from video 00:48:40.433Ben: I do have articles that I've marked as spoilers for media that I haven't watched or read yet. Maybe I go to an extreme degree, but I'll try to avoid previews for new movies, for example. I do want to actually go back to them later on. Marking articles as having spoilers that I want to revisit later on is an easy way of not having to worry about it anymore. For a while, back in the days when I was paying more attention to... Enter the Dragon was the sequel to... What was that TV show? George R.R. Martin... Seven seasons and it went badly off the rails in season six.

Sacha: Game of Thrones.

Ben: Thank you. So when I was watching that for a while, several of the sites that I was reading would have individual episode updates. I really appreciated having a list of Elfeed keywords that I could automatically apply those tags to. I wouldn't even see the headlines because it was problematic enough. I've become less...

Sacha: Nice.

Ben: I've been putting less effort into maintaining that now, but the infrastructure is still there, and I can lean on it if I need to.

49:53 Comparing different news sources

Ben: One of the things that I don't have set up right now is a quick search for the municipal topics that I cover. I tend to subscribe to a lot of news because I found that, for example, it's interesting to see how the Toronto Star covers stuff differently from other local newspapers. It's useful to be able to quickly pull up the five or six publications that cover news in the same way and then look through the annotations for them or add the annotations myself. I can see that this particular story was covered by this journalist in this publication in this way, and then it lets me cross-reference so that I can pay attention to topics that are under-covered or publications that habitually leave out particular aspects of news stories. It lets me pay more attention to the trends of publications as well as to the stories that they're covering. The consequence of that is that my Elfeed database is 4.5 gigs. It's common for me... I don't know if that actually shows. It's common for me to have like 65,000 articles in like the six month horizon for the default Elfeed searches. That means that searches and redraws are expensive, even on a relatively performant machine. You've probably seen some of the workarounds that I've got. This little bookmark selector is one of those workarounds. Elfeed's interactive search: super, super useful. But if you're trying to do it like this... Actually, it's not so bad.

Sacha: I love this. When you see someone using Elfeed for 65,000 items, you get a sense of what it can be used for when you're really stressing it.

Ben: And the organization of the bookmarks that I have means that I do have one river of news of all of the things that I want to pay attention to. But it's seven or eight pretty divergent topics with not a lot of overlap. It's neat to be able to think of Elfeed as the thing where news information comes in. The individual bookmarks are the topics that are grouped together that I actually care about and want to read about in concert with each other. If I specifically narrow it down to just Emacs stuff, one of the things that I can easily do is add a bookmark for that search. If I name it... Now that I've got that bookmark saved...

Sacha: And then it's like, bookmark annotation.

Ben: Right. It ends up in my dot file as a git commit.

53:13 Bookmark naming conventions

Ben: Now that that bookmark exists, simply because of the naming (elfeed-search-...), now it shows up in completion.

Sacha: Precisely this sort of stuff. I am under-utilizing bookmarks, I think.

53:24 Naming conventions simplify building new workflows

Sacha: I love this idea of using bookmarks with a naming convention and then writing Emacs Lisp to take advantage of that naming convention to make that easy to jump to, easy to use in other things.

Ben: Yeah, it means I don't really have... When I notice that there's a thing I don't have, it diminishes the activation energy for building a new workflow. It means that I don't have to put a lot of thought into it. I can quickly do it. If it turns out to not be useful, I can quickly get rid of it.

Sacha: Very cool.

53:50 elfeed-curate for annotations

image from video 00:54:52.533Sacha: I had one more thing that I wanted to ask you about elfeed that I want to squeeze in, in the five minutes that I have before the kiddo comes out for lunch break. This elfeed-curate that you're using, this is the first time I've come across it in the config. Are you sharing your notes or your selections with other people, or just for yourself?

Ben: No. It's just for myself. What I'm trying to replicate is, back in Google Reader days, I really appreciated how when you added an annotation to an article that you were reading, by default, that annotation would be viewable by other people in your social graph. That was super interesting. Sometimes you could also add personal-only annotations. Actually, I don't think that's the keyword that it uses. I think it’s just +ann.

Sacha: Also, because you have an Emacs keyword on it, so I don't know whether you have any annotated Emacs ones.

Ben: Yeah. Well, I mean, generally, if I've added an annotation, it will be. So, for example, here. Right? Super useful. Well, super useful for me, anyhow. If I find that there's an annotation that is more... This is inflammatory. It doesn't need to go out on the web.

Sacha: Sorry, did you need me to kill the stream? I have a 10-second window.

Ben: No, it's all good. I'm not worried about sharing this, but it's not something I've posted. What the nice thing is, is that if it is something that I want to share, it's really, really easy to just drop this into Mastodon mode.

Sacha: Very cool.

Ben: That's one of the ways that I use it. Because the annotations are just Org Mode files, you can add links to other things and it becomes just as useful as anything else.

55:46 mytoots archives Mastodon toots

Sacha: You're saying this can flow into Mastodon and from there, once you toot it... I think you're using mytoots that you mentioned in your config for archiving it? Or searching, yeah, okay. Oh, except it's currently not working.

Ben: Yeah, I don't have it loaded right now. So mytoots, it just loads the backup of your export archive. So it loads the... What's the most recent one? So yeah, it was your outbox JSON file, which is the most recent one here. I've got an Org Mode reminder to download it roughly quarterly. My outbox is about 100 megs right now. Compared to 4.5 gigs for elfeed, it's not so big. That's not going to redraw properly. I was just going to show it. My resident Emacs memory size right now is about like five or six gigs. It's a little bit embarrassing. By comparison, 100 megs of JSON in RAM is not so bad, but having an instant search for everything that you posted and being able to bounce back from your local archive to the conversation thread that's live and see anything new that comes in... Again, it lets me exercise that outboard brain kind of idea. So yeah, mytoots is super useful.

Sacha: I like it a lot.

57:06 Mentoring offer

Sacha: The last thing that I want to ask before the kiddo (because I have two minutes) is that you have a mentoring offer pinned in your Mastodon, too. Have people taken you up on it, especially if they've taken you up on Emacs? Is that ongoing or forgotten about or whatever?

Ben: Not forgotten about. Very much real. Still open. I haven't refreshed that offer recently, but it's still pinned for a reason. I think maybe a dozen or so folks have asked for that. 9 or 10 success stories, I think. Nobody's asked for Emacs tutorialship yet. That's fine. Again, I love Emacs. I use it. I don't often recommend it. But if anybody was curious about that, I would be very open to the idea.

Sacha: All right, so if people want to also develop a very interesting elfeed setup, they know who to talk to.

Ben: Please, I would love that conversation.

Sacha: Thank you so much. Yes, go ahead.

58:02 A local instance of public-inbox can let you use Gnus to read mailing lists quickly

Ben: Oh yeah, there's just one last thing I want to mention, and I realize we're right up against time. I use Gnus. I use mu4e for email, but I use Gnus for reading mailing lists. I just wanted to strongly recommend to anybody who is thinking about it... This is amazing. You gotta do this. public-inbox lets you keep a complete local archive of the entire mailing list. Searches are instant. Tracking threads is instant. Check it out. It's fantastic.

Sacha: That's great because Emacs-devel has a gazillion threads. How do you even keep track of all this stuff? But if you've got Gnus and if you've got this set up, then you're no longer dependent on the good graces of Gmane being around as an NNTP to mailing list gateway. @JonKishore11 wants to know if you have a YouTube channel. I'm guessing you don't yet.

Ben: I don't really like my face very much.

Sacha: Ping Ben on Mastodon and ask about this mentoring thing and then share your notes so we can all learn from it. Thank you so much for today. I look forward to chatting with you more through toots. What is the verb, you know, in the fediverse? All right. Thank you so much.

Sacha:

Chat

  • sachactube: ​​only slightly panicking behind the scenes 🙂 Nudged Ben by Mastodon in case we got our wires crossed
  • sachactube: ​​yay, he's here, just getting sound sorted
  • symbiopoyesis: Good morning
  • x_goose_x: ​​hey gnomonnnnnn
  • CharlieBaker707: ​yay! love the split keyboard. recently bought one myself. i was getting shoulder and neck pain from so many hours keeping by hands close together, but the split let's my shoulder's relax.
  • ShaeErisson: ​How do you make a capture template to stay on-agenda and record decisions? Any tips?
  • PuercoPop: ​​Regarding terminal emacs, did they need to adapt any keybindings to avoid clashses with the terminal keybindings?
  • AyanRaza-n1x: ​​is that the creator of emacs?
  • Ray-On-Emacs: ​Yes! Google steals C-S-k, which I use to kill tabs to the right on Vivaldi!
  • CharlieBaker707: ​elfeed is like a distraction alleviation machine. I agree with Ben, I don't think I could consume any of this information outside of Emacs. Ads and even varying formats distract me too much.
  • JonKishore11: ​​do he have YT
  • sachactube: ​​Thanks for hanging out, everyone! =)
  • gnomon027: Thanks so much for running this whole series, @sachactube !!
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La semaine du 25 au 31 mai

| french

lundi 25

Ma fille était un peu triste parce que j'avais mangé mon petit-déjeuner avant qu'elle ne se réveille. Elle m'a demandé si je pouvais l'attendre pour que nous puissions manger ensemble.

J'ai emmené ma fille chez l'oculariste pour polir sa prothèse oculaire. Après le rendez-vous, elle a voulu rentrer au lieu d'aller chez College Optical pour commander des lunettes de soleil correctrices.

Pour le déjeuner et en guise de récompense pour le rendez-vous chez l'oculariste, nous avons mangé des nouilles instantanées. Ma fille m'a donné l'autre moitié de son sachet d'épices aux fruits de mer. Nous les avons enrichies avec du gâteau au poisson et aux algues. Elle a découvert qu'elle n'aimait pas le mochi à la crème glacée, donc elle a eu de la crème glacée à la place.

Après l'école, elle n'a pas voulu aller au cours de gymnastique parce qu'elle était un peu fatiguée. Au lieu de cela, nous sommes allées au parc pour jouer avec une balle, une corde à sauter, un grand dé en mousse, et la pataugeoire là-bas.

Pour le dîner, ma fille a voulu du sushi au crabe comme au restaurant que nous avons essayé vendredi.

Mon mari, ma fille et moi avons joué au Scrabble. Maintenant ma fille peut trouver ses propres mots avec quelques indices. Nous avons joué juste pour le plaisir, donc nous n'avions pas compté les points. Pour notre premier jeu, elle a voulu échanger des tuiles avec mon mari et moi, donc nous le lui avons permis. Pour notre deuxième jeu, mon mari a dû aller faire autre chose, donc elle et moi avons joué. Elle a voulu inclure les noms Pokémon, donc nous nous sommes amusées en plaçant les mots comme « Ekans », « Abo » et « Jolteon » (l'anglais et le français sont également permis) même si les mots anglais normaux sont aussi possibles.

mardi 26

J'ai terminé la transcription de ma conversation avec Matei qui est anthropologue. Je la lui ai envoyée pour relecture avant de la publier.

Un des chats de notre voisinage m'a rendu visite, donc je lui ai donné un bol d'eau.

Ma fille et moi sommes allées au parc pour jouer seules. Nous avons joué avec la balle et à la pataugeoire.

J'ai appris que la prononciation du verbe « interviewer » en français a deux sons « v ». C'était intrigant.

mercredi 27

L'école a eu un remplaçant, donc elle a choisi de sécher les cours. Le matin, elle et moi avons travaillé sur ses devoirs dehors. Elle était de bonne humeur. L'après-midi, elle était un peu triste parce qu'elle attendait une réponse de son amie, et elle s'est blottie sur le canapé. Une fois qu'elle a finalement reçu une réponse, j'ai emmené ma fille au parc pour jouer avec ses amies. Elle s'est très amusée, donc j'ai eu vraiment du temps pour penser pendant qu'elle jouait.

J'ai finalement envoyé les factures pour le mois de mars et d'avril.

Ma mère est restée à la maison parce qu'elle avait fait une petite chute.

jeudi 28

J'ai discuté avec Protesilaos sur les recommandations sur Emacs pour divers utilisateurs.

Ma fille et moi avons joué au Scrabble sur le porche pendant la pause déjeuner. Nous avons aussi joué au Scrabble avec mon mari après le dîner. Nous avons commencé à compter les points, bien que nous ayons toujours joué en coopération.

vendredi 29

J'ai interviewé Omar Antolin Camarena sur sa configuration et ses flux de travail sur Emacs. J'ai travaillé sur la publication des transcriptions vers le format PDF. J'ai ajouté la fonctionnalité d'exclure des sections par format selon les étiquettes.

J'ai pratiqué la prononciation française.

J'ai emmené ma fille à un cours de rattrapage de gymnastique aérienne.

samedi 30

Ma fille s'est amusée toute seule à faire des bulles et à jouer avec de la mousse à raser.

Ma fille a voulu des vêtements neufs et un jouet anti-stress, donc je l'ai emmenée dans différents magasins. Elle n'a pas aimé le Thinking Putty au début qu'elle a choisi parce qu'il a des paillettes. Nous sommes prudentes avec les paillettes pour éviter de gratter son œil si elle le frotte. Après avoir joué avec le Putty, elle a décidé qu'elle l'aime, et elle va simplement bien se laver les mains.

Pour explorer de nouvelles saveurs, nous avons mangé chez KFC.

Pendant qu'elle regardait des émissions, j'ai ajouté une commande à mon logiciel pour effacer des images incorrectes afin que j'en téléverse une nouvelle.

Nous avons joué à Donjons et Dragons ensemble pour nous exercer au rôle de meneuse de jeu. Mon roublard halfelin a vaincu un méphite, mais le mimique dans l'autre pièce était trop pour moi. Du côté de ma fille, elle a aidé Cornflower avec les devoirs de la ferme.

Mon mari et moi avons discuté des voyages. Même si voyager est bien recommandé pour se découvrir soi-même, il y a d'autres façons de le faire, donc il vaut mieux bien réfléchir. Pour le moment, je pense qu'il vaut mieux que j'aide ma fille à apprendre à apprécier ce qui est proche.

Ma fille a dit qu'elle a du cérumen, donc elle a utilisé de l'huile minérale pour le déloger. Ça a marché.

Après le dîner, j'ai fait les courses seule.

dimanche 31

Mon mari était trop frustré aujourd'hui, donc mon mari et ma fille étaient tous les deux grincheux. Je me demande ce qui se passe.

Quand même, pendant qu'ils se débrouillaient, j'ai travaillé sur les transcriptions de mes entretiens récents. J'ai aussi poussé des mises à jour de mon outil pour écrire le sous-titrage. J'ai oublié de vérifier mes changements avec les tests, mais heureusement, il y avait juste un bug et le bug était dans le test au lieu du code. J'ai aussi restauré les articles que j'ai accidentellement effacés. Ensuite, j'ai recherché des machines à coudre pour ma sœur et mes nièces qui habitent aux Pays-Bas, parce que leur ancienne machine était abîmée.

Ma fille s'est très amusée en jouant comme la meneuse de jeu dans un jeu de Donjons et Dragons avec sa tante. Elle veut être la meneuse de jeu pour un jeu avec ses tantes et ses cousines la semaine prochaine, donc sa tante lui a offert l'occasion de s'entraîner.

J'ai appelé ma mère. Elle m'a dit que ma tante lui demandait à plusieurs reprises si nous lui rendrions un jour visite. Eh ben, ma tante ne nous aidera pas à élever notre enfant si je suis malade, donc son opinion ne compte pas pour moi.

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More posts about french

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.

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You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
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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

NOTE Matei is an anthropologist; ethnographic research

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.

Matei: That's, broadly speaking, what I would be interested in doing with you.

Matei: 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. I find myself doing it and kind of sort of worrying about doing it. 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 Emacspeak 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.

Sacha: 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. Before 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.

Sacha: It's one of the packages that was popular before Org Mode. 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, as very idiosyncratic as they are sometimes... It 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. Anyway, 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.

Sacha: 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

Sacha: 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 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.

Sacha: 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

Sacha: 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

Sacha: 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

Matei: 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 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.

Sacha: Although he did get very interested in Org Mode at some point, so he found the appropriate Vim plug-in for it. That was amusing. 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

Sacha: 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.

If you want to chat about Emacs and AI, you can e-mail Matei or check out Matei Candea | Anthropology.

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You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
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