WEBVTT
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My name is Corwin Brust
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and I will be talking about getting
started with Emacs today.
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I have been an Emacs user for a long
time.
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First of all, thanks and a huge welcome
to the conference
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from me and and on behalf
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and back to the other people
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that have been helping to organize.
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It's been amazing just to be involved
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with that and just, kind of, see
backstage.
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So I've used a lot of different editors
in my time.
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That's about 25 years as a professional
software engineer.
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And most of that time I've been using
Emacs.
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I'll talk a little bit in a minute
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(if I can ever find my slides)
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about how I got into Emacs,
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but I think if you've used Emacs and a
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lot of other editors for a long time,
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something that you notice right away
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is that you get good with it in a way
that stays meaningful.
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You learn new things. Those things
stick with you.
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You learn how to make it do new tricks
and then keep doing those tricks.
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I want to mention that this
conference--oops,
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this talk isn't about how to adjust
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your configuration specifically.
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I don't have a bunch of good code
samples in here.
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There are other great talks at the
conference,
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particularly Andrew's, that I looked at,
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that looked like they might be more
aimed at that
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"hey, I'm just getting started with Emacs,
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what are some things to try to make
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it more comfortable for me starting?"
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This is about how to think about the
problem space.
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Hopefully, a good warm up as we start
thinking about
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some of the lightning talks a little
later on.
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I'm just gonna quickly make sure
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I can see my IRC buffer in case
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I run into time. I didn't get my
stopwatch started for this one.
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So all right, let's dive in.
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We assume that we want to
install packages
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and maybe configure some features.
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This is particularly from the
perspective of
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where we're working
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with a bunch of people on a team
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and we want to get something done.
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Some of us probably already have mature
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Emacs workflows.
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Others are installing it for the first
time.
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So the first question is, you know, in
that context:
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what's the value proposition?
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Why should I mess with my machine,
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my mature Emacs configuration,
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and impose my ideas over the way
somebody else is learning Emacs?
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Well, it can be.. I'm off my slides here
a little bit.
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It can be a little bit tricky
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to learn Emacs. One thing that
helps us a lot
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is if people that we're working with
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can tell us, kinda, keystroke for
keystroke at times,
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what to do and explain what everything
is doing.
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Using the same packages can really help
us working together on a project.
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Speaking from my personal experience,
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it took me decades to get to the point
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where I was excited to program
in Emacs Lisp.
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I've programmed in a lot of programming
languages,
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but Lisp wasn't on my list.
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I looked at my config that I was
copy-pasting around
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from generation after generation of
.emacs file,
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or recrafting it from hand and from
Internet searches,
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to get the things that I needed when
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I would quickly go install Emacs at some
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new job or contract,
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and be able to to quickly get through
that workflow
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that caused me to install the program.
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You know, just little simple one-liners
that got committed to memory
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over decades eventually just led me to a
sort of "hey what's going on here."
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And I credit Jeff Goff, my good friend
who died earlier in 2020,
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for my lifelong love of Emacs.
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Perhaps Erik and I will talk about that
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a little bit more in another talk we
have scheduled,
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but Jeff was a huge influence on us
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in a number of ways,
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and a huge contributor
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to the Raku programming language,
which is very cool.
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So, understanding how to make
a good decision
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about splitting up configuration in a
way to share it across
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people with really different uses of
Emacs...
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That's actually a complicated topic
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and I want to sort of back off and stare
at it for a second.
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I think Emacs is about people, so that
means it's about community.
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And community means we're going to
invite disagreement.
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In fact, that disagreement isn't
necessarily a road-block to our project.
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In fact, some of the work that a
community project can invite us to do
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is to get closer to each other
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by inviting those disagreements,
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by learning from them--learning from
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different people's styles and from how
they argue,
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and thinking about why they have that
perspective
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and what technical benefits
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that perhaps radical point of view might
carry away.
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Some people are really aggressive
arguers,
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and others are very passive and really
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couch their ideas in distancing terms,
to say,
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"well probably, this is a good idea"
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or "please double check me."
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Those don't always necessarily indicate
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how certain a person is,
because we're different.
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We have different ways of communicating
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ideas like certainty or excitement.
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When we think about a bunch of
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really diverse programmers
approaching Emacs,
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probably one of our first really big
challenges is just
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to pick what we're going
to go after.
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There are a lot of existing kit installs
and things like this.
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My argument is that you could actually
get pretty far
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just trading files around.
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Maybe the more valuable conversation
to have
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is making the hard decisions
about, well,
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"should we have vertical completion,"
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should that be the out of the box,
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and the people that want
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the traditional splayed out over a
single line completion,
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for example in the mode line,
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those people are going to add a line of
config to their own setup?
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The way to get there?
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I mean, how do we find out what works?
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We don't want to slow down the people
that are super productive with Emacs
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by asking them to completely
break their workflows
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and make it easier for new folks.
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At the same time, we do want to make
sure those new people
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are excited by Emacs and not turned off
by having to learn
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the entire jungle of Emacs history in
the form of its unique
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technical stylings for things like
frames, buffers,
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and other unique Emacs viewpoints
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on important interface concepts,
especially.
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The encouragement here is to keep
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the initialization for a project team
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together as a crucible.
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Rather than necessarily following
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our defaults of finding the simplest
configurations
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that generally work and letting people
customize it,
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what if we tried to look
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for fairly specific configurations
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that we'll expect essentially all of our
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developers to be using,
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at least when they submit bug reports.
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In particular, with this,
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I think that degree of experimentation
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can drive back into the Emacs
development process.
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In the development mailing list...
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I'm hoping I'll get a timing cue here.
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In the context of Emacs development as a
greater entity,
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we see some of these struggles.
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Should we change this default?
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Sometimes we can have the sense that
defaults in Emacs will never change.
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The conversation is too difficult.
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I think one thing that can help us get
there is evidence
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that says, "hey my 30- to 40-person project
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is using this set of bindings,
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and here's what we learned
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about brand new Emacs users
trying to come in
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and get work done with that."
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(Amin: Yeah you still have
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a couple more minutes.)
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Oh, beautiful. Okay, great.
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I will try to get through my last few
slides that I cut
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in my last walkthrough, but I think I'm
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going quicker today, thank you.
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Thank you.
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So let's just recap real quick:
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in theory, Emacs works out of the box.
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That means we're free to experiment.
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We can throw it all away and start over.
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As an organizational principle...
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I don't know what I was thinking on that
slide, excuse me.
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Bringing it back around to the free
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and open source software community,
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our goal is to enable users
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to unlock their computers, to do as much
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with them as possible.
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That's the context to take with project
initialization, but sometimes
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it could make sense
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to put some gloves on.
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I've thrown up on the screen here
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just a couple of other ideas,
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ways to maybe think outside of the box.
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As you're putting together project nets,
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my words of encouragement are to
experiment with it,
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try different things, and think really
specifically
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about how different the development
users might be from each other
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as you define standards for configuring
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the user environment of Emacs
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specifically for developing on a
project.
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That's pretty much my talk.
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If there's any time, I would take a
couple questions.
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(Amin: Thank you for your
awesome talk, Corwin.
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I think we have one or two minutes for a
few questions.
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Do you have the pad open or would you
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like me to read the questions for you?)
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Corwin: Oh, I managed to close the pad
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and I am trying to open it again.
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All right, there it opened.
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Bringing it onto a screen where I can
see it.
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Will you read me the first question
while I drag windows around, please?
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(Amin: Sure. It says, "do you use Emacs
as a community building tool?")
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Do I use Emacs as a community building
tool, or how do I?
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(Amin: It just says do you.) Yes, absolutely.
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I think Emacs is an ambassador to the
GNU tool chain.
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I think that in the fullness of time,
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we will see an Emacs
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that makes iOS and Android and other
closed-source tools dream.
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That's why they mock us and call Emacs
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an operating system. It's because
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it could be, if we cared for it to be.
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It's quite a threatening product
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from the perspective of how many problem
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spaces it can address,
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how many types of users it can satisfy,
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the things that we can do to make
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it robust in those environments.
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I mean, we're always thinking about the
weak points,
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but is Emacs a community building tool?
Heck yeah.
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(Amin: There's like one or two more
questions.
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I think they're more long-form so it
might be better
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if you took them off stream so you could
keep the schedule on time.)
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I would love to take those questions
offline.
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I will respond to you
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in writing if we don't get to it
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in a breakout room.
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Thanks so much for joining us.
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I can't wait to see the rest of the
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conference. See you there!
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(Amin: Awesome. Thank you again so much, Corwin.)
