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