Emacs Berlin
- (off-topic conversation about bikebrigade.ca)
- Panel discussion for EmacsConf?
- Multiple speakers covering the same questions, gathering people with very different experiences, showcasing different perspectives
- Overall topic + a few questions
- Some ideas for overall topics:
- Emacs for different applications
- Missing features
- Community
- What got you into Emacs? What works well? What could be better?
- How can we make the Emacs community even better?
- What are other communities doing well? What ideas can we experiment with?
- Different places: Reddit, IRC, user groups; differences between communities, ideas for making things better
- Onboarding experience
- How do new users experience Emacs? What's the current state of the distributions, what can be improved?
- Hard to keep track of what's going on
- Also the intermediate experience - how to get people past the tutorial stage
- Pitching Emacs as an editor that rewards you for crafting
- How to get into package development
- What are the main ideas floating around?
- Emacs UI, experience, missing features, growth
- What do you want to see in Emacs?
- Another topic idea is how to get involved in package development. Existing package maintainers can ask for help. And users and developers can get an opportunity to contribute.
- potential penalists are people who started contributing recently
- Workflows
- here's a conference topic that would start fights "late binding for configuration is a waste of time" 😉
- another conference topic: "the state of the art in Elisp package distribution"
- Different emacs distributions like Doom, Spacemacs, etc
- Moderator + a few people, plus everyone in the chat
- Programmer, writer, mathematician / scientist, lawyer, etc., new user, medium timer, old-timer, starter kit user, left Emacs and came back, uses right-to-left or non-Latin text or multibyte characters, vim bindings
- Not lightning talks, more like a discussion
- Does not require a lot of prep
- Moderator might need to keep the discussion from meandering too much
- Possible outcomes
- Lots and lots of questions! Some kind of asynchronous discussion, maybe like Etherpad + after-conference follow-up
- Moderator prioritizes questions that might be a good collection of perspectives
- More people see themselves represented, find people to connect with
- "It's not only my problem"
- Maybe we have a few "Oh yeah! You should check out..." quick wins in the conversation.
- Maybe we have concrete steps forward. "If you want to work on this task, sign up here."
- Emacs development sessions at EmacsConf also get a lot of questions
- How to find participants
- Call for participation, e-mail the panel organizer (maybe indicate categories, answer questions), include in Emacs News and post in the usual places (Reddit, user groups)
- maybe Emacs survey type of form here as well
- Summarizing panel that includes speakers, near the end of the conference?
- Emacs survey? for actual feedback
- Treat it as a large user group session, everyone piles into chat / Etherpad?
- Might be a bit crowded/overwhelming, may be a good idea to have a few people prepared in advance
- Exact details still need to be figured out
- config, dotfiles
- Guix, Nix reproducible systems
- SystemCrafters has a lot of videos about Guix, I think
- Guix - default setup restricts non-free software
- Guix learning curve is pretty steep https://guix.gnu.org/
- Configure your system and home directory, etc. with Scheme
- Package manager is straightforward
- "Emacs. We like learning curves. We already have one. Takes a lifetime."
- https://systemcrafters.net/craft-your-system-with-guix/how-to-organize-your-config/
- GNU stow: directory full of files, then symlinks to them https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
- well, also https://lmod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ or https://docs.easybuild.io/
- Emacs configuration bundled with Nix configuration? https://rapport-org.gitlab.io/emacs/
- HPC: lmod https://lmod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, easybuild https://easybuild.io/, etc. might be more mature
- What about just putting dotfiles in a git repo? Lots of different files in lots of different repos, gets a little messy.
- Some people have one repo for the home repository with a .gitignore
- How to prevent git seeing new files by default: just ignore everything:By default, do not consider any new files to add:
- Important to not forget to add files
- Declarative config management is great for rolling back when you have mistakes
- See also "Org Mode, literate configurations" section below
- Guix package manager can be used instead of using it as a distribution
- Big change is getting used to modifying the configuration instead of directly installing programs
- https://www.city17.xyz/bye-bye-guix-see-you-in-12-months/
- one day I'll try it again 😁
- how about kernel configuration required for guix? is it still needed?
- Emacs package installation and configuration
- Steam Deck, Arch Linux... package management?
- I'm liking these built-in notes too... =) No need to arrange my windows to keep an Etherpad handy. (TODO Figure out how to expose the per-meeting Etherpad for EmacsConf in case people are not in the meeting, and so we can automate it)
- the question is whether it is saved after the metting ends
- Someone can copy and paste it, and there's also a download button, but yeah, we'll want to make sure it gets properly archived and followed up on (we can put it on emacs-berlin.org for example)
- can we somehow make this the only way to chat? otherwise, it is slightly awkward to spread between notes and chat
- I think the moderator can disable public chat, but probably it's okay to leave open and people will figure out where to be
- looks like the downside is that it is hard to keep track of what has been added to tsacha chua he notes. chats is much simpler in this regard
- yes, notes threads by topic and chat threads by time
- maybe the notetaker(s) can copy chat over and organize things periodically
- https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Carnival
- #emacs-til on libera.chat https://libera.chat/
- Might be neat to have a planet.emacslife.com bot for IRC? There are bots for Mastodon and Telegram
- Planet Emacslife - split off maybe an Org-related aggregator?
- for maybe yantar92's chat bot
- RSS filters - maybe Yahoo Pipes for a quick prototype? http://www.pipes.digital/ or some other tool
- TODO Sacha: make an Org-specific feed and let yantar92 know
- back to configuration. Org Mode, literate configurations.
- yantar92 shared screen of using #+begin_src conf :tangle /sudo::/etc/portage/package.use/qutebrowser ... #+end_src
- Quick demonstration of tangling with C-c C-v t (org-babel-tangle)
- Note about detangling, comments
- To automatically add comments that link back to the Org file that tangled the file you're looking at, see org-babel-default-header-args and add :comments with the value of "link"
- Q: Does it support string interpolation, etc?
- Benefits: change variables etc. in one place
- Tip: you can set :tangle for a subtree using the header-args property (per-language example: :header-args:emacs-lisp+:) :mkdirp yes is also handy
- also see the Org Mode manual section on noweb if you want to talk about config snippets in a different order
- common pattern: define some blocks that aren't tangled, then define a tangled block that uses noweb to include those blocks in the correct order
- noweb history: https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/noweb/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_(programming_system)
- Possibly related: https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/doc/ Literate Documentation with Emacs and Org Mode
- grapheme segmentation, kitty terminal
- kitty is capable of representing multibyte characters, but Emacs is not capable in the terminal. Bug not present in GTK version. cursor is still on emoji; please report, especially if it can be reproduced with emacs -Q. Old bug #70000 reported last year, Eli said there needs some kind of protocol to ask terminal emulators about support for character composition. Probably still waiting for a solution?
- maybe terminfo could help Emacs figure out the capabilities?