path: root/2020/info/06.md

# Trivial Emacs Kits
Corwin Brust

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Techniques to help new users bootstrap a more gentle introduction to
Emacs, one (short) init.el file at a time.

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-   Actual start and end time (EST): Start: 2020-11-28T10.45.48; Q&A 2020-11-28T10.57.38; End 2020-11-28T10.59.48


# Questions

## What makes the Emacs community unique (special/different?) from other communities (if anything)? And/or, are there other communities that are similar in your view?

## Do you use Emacs as a community building tool?
- Yes, Corwin uses Emacs as a community building tool.
- Corwin: "Heck yeah, Emacs is a community building tool"

## Are you suggesting there is value in "Emacs for scientists", "Emacs for programmers", "Emacs for writers" etc.  &#x2013; i.e. different defaults for different groups?

[Corwin] Implicitly, yes.  My argument is that we should rethink the problem of building and maintaining Emacs confirguration sets each time we assemble a team to work on something.  That gives us a new chance, each time, to maybe produce new data that helps us make more informed decisions about how to make our own personall approaches more robust (and easier to read), but also to help "chip away" at the huge work of making Emacs more easily configurable for new users.

## What is the background you are using? What is the tool you are using to present?

[Corwin] Wallpaper Engine on Steam is probably the thing that's grabbing attention.  I haven't tried it under GNU/Linux.  My family are (mostly) Windows users right now  ****heavy sigh****  I don't want to get into my tool chain a huge amount, but I will talk about it some as/durning the Welcome to the Dungeon talk tomorrow.  For now I will say I'm using a mix of free (free and not-free but too easy to avoid tools on my one pretty good computer).  I would love to have the time to invest to use more (only) free stuff but sometimes we we can't afford the freedom, in terms of the learning curve.   I think this is the most important problem space in free software, FWIW.

# Notes

-   <https://github.com/dungeon-mode/game> co-founder
-   Initial "trolling" by showing presentation notes in different editors: vim, Notepad++, VSCode, sublime
-   LISP wasn't on the list.
-   Disagreement is not the barrier.
-   Emacs is threatening as something that addresses many different needs/use-cases.