hello and welcome to my
Emacs conference lightning talk today
I'll be talking about
my journey into Emacs as a high schooler
and how it has changed my life
right so who am I I am a senior at
stanford online high school
and I am also a violinist
I started violin when I was two and a
half and I have been
keeping it up ever since violin is a
huge part of my life
and I am very much a musician at heart
I am also a somewhat capable programmer
I've done a lot of informal programming
in the past
and this year I'm taking my first ap
compsci course
in my high school and so
I've done a lot of side projects
mainly in python and some very short
scripts in e-lisp
and last but not least I am a tinker
I love to play around with things and
see what I can do better and just
have as much fun as possible
so how did I find Emacs
I discovered it actually through a talk
funnily enough
at a vim conference given by aaron
bieber
titled evil mode or how I learned to
stop worrying and love Emacs
I watched that talk a couple times over
just marveling at all the wonderful
things that he could do in Emacs
and being a previous vim user myself
I found it very enticing to be able to
have
the evil mode package and very quickly
switch to Emacs
at the time I was also in my sophomore
year and so
I had had sort of a note-taking system
in the past
but it was not good um and I needed a
more organized note-taking system
my parents had suggested paper for a
while and
there was the whole organization
part of that but that did not really
work out for me
and so I was trying to find this better
note-taking system
and it was very hard
I had two main criteria which I did not
define at the time
but I realized was really what I was
looking for
first of all it had to be flexible
enough and second of all it had
I had to have control over the data and
so
through this process I actually went
through a bunch of note-taking softwares
rather systematically I went through
google docs
which very much did not work out
I also went through evernote which also
was not
great for me and one note which I
settled on for a little while
but it did not meet these criteria
particularly the second one I had taken
some notes
and I wanted to export it and onenote
did not let me do that
it was pdf horribly organized pdf
and that's when I knew I needed some
change
so I discovered Emacs through this talk
and through the wonderful features of
org mode
this is my first journal entry in Emacs
I had been playing with it for one day
and I was on the org agenda and I
happened to press I
which for the Emacs combined is the
default for
diary entry and so I was very excited
um and I shouldn't stay on the slide too
long unless you read it
um so let's move on to the next one
um so the learning curve for me I think
particularly being an xbm user
evil mode made it very easy to switch
thankfully I there was the emax
reference sheet
and having evil mode to
switch between um
texts and whether it be editing a text
file
or going to other parts of just Emacs in
general
I think vim really helped with making me
feel comfortable within this new
environment
and so having that experience I also
wasn't
new to the keybind-based world I have
been very comfortable with computer
and the keyboard for most of my life
and so it was not a totally new
environment for me
I also spent a lot of time looking at
the Emacs reference sheet
just thinking about trying to find
all of the different functions if I
didn't know what something was
then I queried it in Emacs and then I
figured out what it was
and that was one of the best ways for me
to discover
all of the capabilities of Emacs
thirdly of course the self-documenting
feature
or nature of Emacs and narrowing
frameworks such as helm
really helped find things especially for
mx
for a while I was just
I would go about my day and if I pressed
to keep mine that I didn't know what it
did
I would do the losses and
see the list of key binds that I had
pressed and
tried to find that one and query the
function
and what not so
yeah and now we jump to now so
there there is at least one moment in
each day when I think
how would I live without umax
particularly now during my senior year
in high school
things are very busy with school violin
and other side projects it's pretty
crazy
and so Emacs
and org mode has really helped me stay
on track with everything
and the flexibility of these software is
being able to have things in different
files notes within the tasks
all of that stuff has been truly a
lifesaver
and so I think I can confidently say
that I have found Emacs to be
the perfect software for me
over the past two years of using Emacs
now it is about two years and two months
I have built a fairly well organized
2000
plus line org literate config
and so I actually I started with an
e-lisp config
just the vanilla e-max with evil mode
and I built it up
from there eventually I switched to org
literate configs
and used that to organize the snippets
that I was putting in there and so
yeah this is really my workflow now
currently about 90 of everything I do on
my computer is in Emacs
the most notable things of course the
list is far
too long to put on one slide but I do a
lot of my programming in Emacs
mainly python and e-lisp
because of my ap comp sci class I have
to do java as well
and thank goodness Emacs has wonderful
support for that as well
also I do all of my school assignments
more or less in Emacs essay writing I do
an org mode and I have some template
files
template org files which I just include
at the top
and then I can export easily to latex
and a beautiful pdf
math physics same thing latex fragments
are a lifesaver
and also really pretty
and I take notes on basically everything
at first I had things separate and then
I started
sort of putting it all into onenotes.org
file or most of it into one
file and that has actually worked out
surprisingly well
especially with all the searching
features of agenda
and whatnot um and I also use mail
I recently made the switch probably
about one or two months ago
and it has been one of the best switches
I've
I've ever had especially given
connecting to tasks all of this
wonderful stuff
just putting even more in Emacs is
always a good thing I found
so reflecting back on my journey I think
one of the most important things was
just having a reason to use it
when I came to Emacs I had something
that I was looking for
and as soon as I found it I delved right
in
and I I started using it for that thing
and so I was sort of forced to
take the time to read the docs and
figure out what functions I needed
to function and how
I was going to put my workflow
and also of course the desire to tinker
and yeah so really what's next for me
is just wanting to become a more active
member of the Emacs community
I want to give back and I think this
talk is sort of the first step to that
being a more active part of this
community that has
indirectly perhaps um but just like
really helped me become a better and
more organized human being
um I have some package ideas that I'm
slowly working on and yeah I just hope
to spread the word
so thank you very much for listening to
my lightning talk
if you'd like to contact me here are
three modes of
or two modes of communication I will be
on irc more
soon and you can always email me if you
have
any questions you can also search me on
youtube
pierce wong violin thank you very much
and
I hope you enjoy the rest of the
conference