Okay, so we are live now. So hi, everyone. Sorry, we were doing some last minute verification
with Blaine. We wanted to share screens, but somehow the Firefox gods are not in our favor
today. So hi, Blaine. How are you doing?
I'm doing great, Will. This has been a great conference. I've seen some talks this morning
that are going to change my life. I just can't wait to start applying some of the packages
I've learned about.
That's amazing. And it's only day one. We've got more of this coming today, too.
Exactly.
So, Blaine, we haven't had the chance to tell you, but do you have the pad open on
your end?
Let's see.
Oh, yes, because I asked you to close Firefox, so you don't have it. Do you need the URL,
maybe?
Yeah, that would be great.
I will put it into BBB, the chat right on your left.
Okay. I see it. So if I click on this and open a new window?
Yes, don't worry about it.
Okay. So I have some questions. Oh, that's fantastic. This is kind of a silly question,
but I'm curious. Do you have a favorite color theme?
So I do. I've been using a color theme that is sort of light green. It's from a set of
themes that Prot put together and made available this fall on Melpa, and in some of the slides
you'll see that I have this, like, white background, but I'm currently using a sort of a mint green
color, which I find actually has great contrast, and I had to install some fonts for the Mac
to be able to use that theme, but Prot provides detailed instructions, and it was pretty easy
to do.
Okay. Let's see. To your knowledge, so the second question is, to your knowledge, are
recent coming security changes in Chrome going to impact browser extension?
Oh, that's a great question. I, to be honest, I don't know. I'm not aware of that issue
because I ran and I installed some extension I probably shouldn't have installed in Chrome
a couple weeks ago, and I've been getting pop-up ads, and so I switched to Firefox,
but so far I have used GhostText in a number of browsers. I can vouch that it works in
Safari, Chrome, obviously Firefox, Brave, and then amongst the Firefox family of browsers
there's WaterFox and IceCat. It works in those two.
So if Chrome's security issues become a problem, then there are other browsers for which maybe
that problem won't be an issue.
Is this, a third question is, is this browser, is this browser agnostic, or do you have to
use Chrome?
That's a good question. So obviously, as you've seen that, or just heard, it works in a number
of other browsers. There's probably at least ten other browsers in which it will work.
So there's sort of three families of extensions, one for Safari, one for Firefox, and one for
Chrome, and often one of those extensions will work in a different browser.
You mentioned, fourth question is, you mentioned a couple other solutions to allow Emacs editing
of text areas, pointers. Well, unfortunately, I didn't do my due diligence in researching
those other solutions. I'm aware that there's something called Emacs Everywhere that's supposed
to have a similar capability, but I haven't dug into using it, so I can't say anything
about it.
I'll have to say that. So because you're setting up a server from an editor, and you have this
extension in a browser, things don't always mesh. You may have port 4001 occupied by some
other server from Emacs or another application, and so you have to sort that out. That can
happen from time to time. I've had trouble with the Emacs server sometimes using that
port, but I think you can redirect that Emacs server to another port to avoid that issue.
That would be the greatest difficulty is just getting the two sides talking to each other
through the web socket, but once that's going, I use it every day, and I'll go for weeks
without any issue, and then, of course, I'll be changing something about Emacs configuration
where I'm turning on some new server that fires up when I start Emacs, and then I break
it there, or something along those lines, but the great hazard of fiddling with your
Emacs configuration, just a hazard of being an Emacs user. Let's see. Why not save text?
So I have a fifth question, which is why not save text from Emacs? I would like to hear
some solution to the issue I ran into. So if I am editing a document in a web browser
and then via Emacs, and I save that to a document on disk, then I, okay, that's great if I'm
not going to make any more changes, everything's fine, that works great, but if I then decide
to make more changes in the browser, and then I try to save those changes, the copy on disk
is out of sync with the copy in the browser, and I've had the connection break when I do
that. So I heard that there might be a way of solving that problem. I'm not, but I have
not implemented the solution. I forget what the suggestion was. Maybe somebody in the
audience has an idea.
Speaking of the audience, we have opened up the chat now, so if you want to join the current
BBB Discord room in which we are and ask questions directly to Blaine, feel free to do so, otherwise
we're still taking questions on the pad as long as we have them, although right now I
think we have answered all of them. Am I wrong, Blaine, or did we answer all of them already?
You're correct, we've answered all of them.
So we're going to still discuss for about 2-3 minutes. If people want to add last questions
to the pad, feel free to do so. If you want to join us in BBB, the link is at the top
of the talk of Blaine, Euclid Maxco 2022. You know everything now. We are at the end
of the day, and you can tell it's the end of the day because my accent is getting significantly
Frencher as a result. It's not getting any better since last year, I think. I wish I
could contribute, Blaine, more to your talk, but I feel like I'm way out of my league.
I'm the guy who plays with Org on the side, and I tune into your talks every year, and
I see molecules, and I see stuff that I can barely comprehend, and I feel very humbled
as a result.
Well, I'm just trying to make my talks kind of unique.
You are succeeding amazingly well. It reminds me, have you been talking with John Kinchin
or something? Because you seem to be evolving in seminal fields, in a way, with Emacs.
I have been. I'm a fan of his. I have installed CyMax and his configuration for Emacs, but
I haven't. I've just started poking around with it, and I've used his configuration.
I've got it up and running, and I've used GhostText with it, and I was trying to tap
into his OrgRef package, which is super powerful for managing bibliographies.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's very inspiring.
I'm glad to hear you're very much inspired. Go on, please.
He's very amazing. He's very accomplished in Emacs and a very accomplished teacher,
and he has now, as you probably know, a series of videos on YouTube that he's been putting
together about programming. So he's teaching students at Carnegie Mellon University how
to program in Python via Emacs, and he has been sharing these videos on YouTube, and
they're like just 20-minute videos, kind of short snippets, but you can learn a lot from
them. It's really fantastic.
It's an amazing journey, isn't it? You start from a field that has nothing to do whatsoever
with Emacs, and yet you find yourself so attracted to the idea of programming and making your
workflow easier that you end up actually transitioning into a little bit of a programming role or
teaching programming role. I mean, I was studying literature. I was all well and good in my
English faculty, and then I decided to say, oh yeah, let's try Emacs, and 10 years later
I find myself spending more time working on Emacs than working on my literature papers.
My history is that I developed a dozen years ago, started teaching students how to do molecular
graphics, and then I got into Python programming to develop tools to make it easier for them
to use molecular graphics, and then evolved into making these snippets available for a
wide range of text editors that meant learning about – so I prepared these snippets for
about 20 different text editors, leading ones, and of course I saved for the end Emacs. First
I went through Vim and the month of hell of rewiring your brain to do the Vim key bindings
and then on to Emacs, which I call the ultimate text editor, because there is no other text
editor beyond Emacs. It's the end of the line.
I absolve you for your herrings with Vim as a result of the last comment you just made.
Actually, no, I have new write of that solution. I can agree to your solution. You'll have
to ask RMS tomorrow.
Well, I spent a year in evil mode, but I switched about half a year ago to just Emacs key bindings
and bye-bye Vim. I use Vim when I log into remote servers and have to edit something
really quick, but I've probably forgotten most of the key bindings. There's only about
a dozen you really need to know to get the essential work done. But yeah, it's been
quite a journey.
Sorry for the interruption. We do have one question, a very simple question about what
was the key binding for Linux Firefox. Do you have it on top of your mind?
So Linux Firefox.
I'm not sure what they're referring to as well, which is why I threw you this purple,
hoping that it would make sense for you.
It's Control-Shift-H.
I hope this answers your questions. So I think Control-Shift-H, yes. Well Blaine, I see some
people have joined on BBB, but no one with a microphone still. I will tide you at the
end. We are reaching the end of the day. We are reaching closing remarks and I will be
making a plea for more people to join with a microphone. Last year we had pretty much
the same setting. We were opening the room afterwards and people were showing up with
the microphones and we had lovely discussions. So in this year, it feels like everyone's
a little shy, shouldn't you know? That's the whole point is for you to talk and for
us all to listen. Well Blaine, that was very insightful. Thank you so much for both the
presentation and the questions. Go on.
We have a question in the panel on the left and blue button. So how long have I been using
Emacs? I made a commitment to use it full-time about 18 months ago, maybe 20 months ago.
So I'm a newbie. I'm still in the steep part of the learning curve.
You just have to provide context for the people. Blaine presented something at the last year's
EmacsConf and it was as impressive as this year's presentation. And afterwards he told
us, oh yeah, I've been using Emacs for six months or so. And that's where everyone's
jewels dropped to the floor because some people have been using Emacs for 10 years and we
couldn't even imagine doing some of the stuff you're doing with it.
Thank you.
Do we have any other questions? I think that's pretty much it. I'm not seeing anything appear
on the other screen. I think we're pretty much good. So Blaine, I'm not going to keep
you any longer. We are probably going to bring this Q&A to a close. Thank you so much for
all the answers. What are we going to do for the stream? We still have a talk going on
on the dev channel currently. And then we'll be going to the closing remarks for the day
at about 55 of the current hour. So we are going on a break for 20 to 25 minutes. So
Blaine, sorry for keeping you off stage as I'm making the announcement, but it's the
best way for people to see my face as I do it.
Thank you very much, Leo. I appreciate it.
And thank you so much for all your time and all your answers. I will be closing BBB now
and we will put some music on and some announcements and see you at the top of the hour for the
others or 55 rather than top of the hour. All right. Bye bye everyone. Bye bye Blaine.