path: root/2020/info/26.md

# Emacs as a Highschooler: How It Changed My Life
Pierce Wang

[[!template id=vid src="https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/emacsconf/2020/emacsconf-2020--26-emacs-as-a-highschooler-how-it-changed-my-life--pierce-wang.webm"]] 
[Download .webm video, 720p, 155M](https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/emacsconf/2020/emacsconf-2020--26-emacs-as-a-highschooler-how-it-changed-my-life--pierce-wang.webm)

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?+1+1+1


### 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?+1+1


### 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, &#x2026;) 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>