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# Emacs as a Highschooler: How It Changed My Life
Pierce Wang
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Could Emacs be humanity's solution to the turbulent years of
adolescence? So much more than a text editor, Emacs changed the way I
approach everything at the age of 15. In the two years since
discovering Emacs in my sophomore year of high school, I have been
constantly amazed at what Emacs is capable of. In this talk, I would
like to share this journey of discovery and what I've learned along
the way, beginning with what led me to Emacs. I will reflect on my
experience of the Emacs learning curve and then also talk about the
many ways that Emacs has shaped my life as a student, programmer,
violinist, and a productive and happy adolescent. In each case, I
have thoroughly enjoyed figuring out the best way to make Emacs work
for me. Finally, I will reflect on my journey thus far and briefly
talk about my plans for the future.
<!-- from the pad --->
- Actual start and end time (EST): Start: 2020-11-29T13.06.20; Q&A:
2020-11-29T13.16.52; End: 2020-11-29T13.21.51
# Questions
## Q6: How would you introduce other classmates to Emacs? Meaning what's the "gateway" drug to Emacs?
Would probably start with doom or Spacemacs.
Try to find their reason for using Emacs.
## Q5: What made you use Vim in the first place? Were you looking for a note-taking system in plain text (such as Markdown), or were you using it for programming?
Used vim first time mainly for programming not for Markdown.
## Q4: I tend to think that life in school-age is somehow simple to organize since categories are easy to distinguish (years/classes, hobbies, …) in contrast to business life (many projects in parallel with many touch-points in-between them). From your point of view: do I have wrong memories on my time in school or did school change that much?
School makes it easier to have a structured system.
## Q3: Assuming you keep real time notes during your lessons how do you manage to keep up with the lecturer's speed. I can write LaTeX fragments pretty fast but I am not yet at the point that I can keep up with them. What are the tricks/snippets you use? Oh and do you have a git repo with your Emacs dots that we can see?
Types pretty fast (~110 wpm); for math/science uses CDLaTeX, YASnippet
expansion, and LaTeX fragments.
Emacs config! <https://piercegwang.github.io/emacsd/init>
## Q2: What do your friends think :) ? (Do you collaborate with your friends?)
Overwhelmed them by the positive experience at first :). Now that the
configuration is somewhat stable Emacs doesn't come up as often in
discussions, though. [someone can probably come up with a better
summary of this answer]
The general concensus is that it's an amazing piece of software, but
they think it's too complicated for them to use. I think they also
still have PTSD from the initial days when I was talking about Emacs
**all** the time (whooops).
## Q1: Do you use Emacs for school assignments?
Answered in talk: yes, Org mode, export to LaTeX -> PDF.
One Org mode template file with latex-fragments that is used for
exporting.
# Notes
- Discovered Emacs from:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWD1Fpdd4Pc>.
- Tried various note taking tools - settled on Org mode in Emacs.
- YouTube channel: <https://www.youtube.com/user/eywang/>.
- Emacs config: <https://piercegwang.github.io/emacsd/init>.
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