And I believe we are live. Hi, Daniel, how are you doing? I'm
doing great. It's cold outside, but it's nice in here, yeah.
I can assure you it's very cold in my own place as well. We do
EmacsConf always in December and that's always when it's
particularly cold where I live and I assume where you live as
well. So, don't worry, we'll try to keep you warm with
interesting questions. But first, thank you for taking the
time out of your busy high school life to make a presentation
about Emacs. Do you have any thoughts about the process of
recording something for a conference? Because I assume
it's one of the first ones you're ever doing.
I think it was not as difficult as I thought it would be. I just
recorded in my basement and prepared some notes
beforehand. I think it was definitely helpful to have Emacs
as a tool for that, because I made my presentation with
Beamer. Right. I mean, it's amazing to see so many of the
tools because, you know, you've shown Emacs, but you've
shown Beamer. You've shown tools that are about twice as old
as you are yourself, which is amazing when you think about
it. But I think many people in the audience can actually
relate to your discovery of those tools because we were
pretty much, I mean a lot of us were your age when we started
playing with those tools so it's like there's a little bit of
nostalgia that we feel looking at your presentation
because we are, we can see the excitement behind everything
you've touched and that's great for us because it brings us
back maybe 10 or 20 years in the past and for others perhaps 30
or 40 years so that's kind of amazing.
How about we start taking some questions? So, just for
timekeeping, we have until 20 of the current hours, which is
8 minutes and 30 seconds to cover as many questions as
possible. Now, if we might take the first one. So, Corwin,
can you scroll down to the questions? Yes. I'll be reading
you the questions just to make it a little easier for you,
Daniel, to answer them.
I use Org-roam for notes and find it
very useful. Have you considered it? Uh, yeah, that's
actually where I started out for taking notes. Um, that,
that I moved to Denote because I didn't use all of its
features, um, for, Org Roam, I meant.
Uh, I also didn't, didn't really like the dependency on an
external database. Uh, it just like took a while for, um,
stuff to index if I moved it between like, uh, using sync
thing. laptop and my desktop. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely
something, I mean, I co-maintain Org Roam, so I'm fully aware
of this problem with it. And yeah, SyncThing is not great to
sync a database, a SQLite database that we use. And, I mean,
whichever solution you use, whatever works for you is good.
Orgrim was kind of thought in terms of scalability for
people who had, you know, thousands of notes with thousands
of links inside of them. so perhaps it's not adapted to your
note-taking style right now, but perhaps it's something to
keep in mind, you know, it's many tools and you use them when
you need to. Colin, if we can switch the questions, I'm
switching to the second one.
Do you use the Getting Things
Done methodology as part of your Org workflow? So there's an
interesting thing about that. I started with Org first and
then I heard about Getting Things Done, so I didn't exactly
design my workflow with that in mind, but I sort of
reinvented it, I would say, not really, but I do a lot of
the similar things, but I don't have the different TODO
states like...
I don't know an example because I didn't really look into it
that much, but it would be like NEXT isn't the next thing
you're going to do. But I don't think I...
where I just write what I need to do and then schedule it and
then look at my agenda for the next thing. Yeah, I mean, part
of the beauty of using Emacs, Org Mode or using a methodology
like Getting Things Done is that I think you need to find room
in the method or the tool for you to organically do what you
want. And it's okay to not do everything in a Getting Things
Done methodology. I know a lot of people take issue
with the tickler file, where you're supposed to put stuff to
review in the future. For instance, if you don't want
to work on this particular topic right now in your life, you
decide, oh, I'd like to revisit this topic maybe in six
months. And then you have this tickler file, which has
entries and folders for each month of the year. And when six
months comes and you find yourself at the beginning of the
next month, you open the file and you see, oh there's the task
I left off for later. A lot of people don't like to do it this
way, some people really like it, but part of the beauty of
having tools which are very modular like Emacs and Org Mode
allows you to have, well, you just adjust the method for
something that works. And there's something to be garnered
as well for applying these lessons to how you organize your
life, not merely in front of a computer, but also how you
manage your tasks elsewhere at school, iSchool or
elsewhere.
All right, moving to the next question. Org-fc and org-drill
are Emacs Org Mode-centric flashcard solutions. Have you
looked into them? I think I looked into Org-Drill, but I
wanted to use Anki because of... I wanted to use it on my
phone, but then I realized I had to pay for the app, and then I
didn't want to use it on my phone anymore.
but it's just something that I used before without work mode
for a little bit. And then I liked it,
but yeah, it works pretty well with Org mode. So I didn't
find a reason to switch to one of those because like I might be
not at a computer one day and have to learn something. Yeah,
that's something that you call premature optimization.
And if you continue as a software engineer at university,
you'll get to hear plenty of this. But yes, Anki is also a tool
that I've used a whole lot in my learning journeys, be it
about languages, be it about literature, be it about
whatever really, and it's a very good tool and I recommend
people to look into it, especially since they've released a
new algorithm to manage learning a little differently than
the old one. If you're familiar with SuperMemo, I really
invite you to look into the advancement
in Anki in recent years.
Moving to another question, what do other students
think about your approach and what are they doing instead,
if anything? And your teachers, what do they think? So for
other students they usually are just confused about what's
going on when I show my computer because they know that I use
Linux but they don't know what it is so they're just assuming
everything on my computer is I'm either hacking or like
doing some Linux thing and
I don't really bother to explain it to them so that's kind
But for I love it. See my see my prior videos. That's that's
wonderful. Pardon me. Pardon me for breaking in, Daniel.
But I just since I have, I want to say wonderful
presentation. I love your spirit, your tone and great
thought there.
For my teachers, I think...
because if I write an essay or something, I usually paste it
in Google Docs. But recently, I got more confident, which is
export to LaTeX, and I did that for my physics labs. My
teacher was pretty satisfied with the results for the math
formatting. So I think they don't really have a problem with
it, where it's actually more convenient, maybe.
That's really great to hear and if you continue at
university, which I'm almost sure that you will, your
professors, you'll be pretty much using the same tools as
they are, so you'll find yourself in a like-minded crowd of
people once you get to university. We are a little short on
time because we need to move to the next talk in about one
minute. There are still some questions and Daniel, I would
invite you to stay and maybe answer them in a room so that we
can gather as many of your answers as possible. But before we
leave, I just want to give you the opportunity, if you have
any last words, to share them with the crowd.
Well, for the students who may be watching this, I hope that
you give Emacs a try. And good luck if you decide to use
something else because it's probably won't be as great.
It's very good to be so young and to already be convinced that
Emacs is the best thing. For some of us, it took us many
decades to reach this conclusion, and I'm so happy
to see young people. I used to be a teacher,
by the way, so I used to teach people your age,
but I'm so happy to see people your age
interested in Emacs because it makes me hopeful that in the
future we'll have people carrying the flame and standing on
the shoulders of current people. So thank you so much,
Daniel. We'll be seeing you soon. We wish you good luck with
your studies. And for EmacsConf, we'll be moving to the next
talk in five seconds. See you soon. And I want to reassure
you, we'll post all the Q&A info when we do post this video.
Yes. So Daniel, as I said,
if you want to stick around a little more with
Corwin to answer the questions, that's all fine.
I'll be moving to the next room to get ready for the next
talks. So thank you, Daniel. And I'll see you later.
All right, the cops are gone. Wait, no, I'm just kidding. No,
but if you'd like to walk through a few more of these
questions, I'd be happy to record that. You're not
obligated to do that. You could also, the pad's there. You
could just type out your answers or whatever you prefer to
do. I guess I can answer them still. Cool.
So we're here.
What was your biggest source of frustration, friction,
confusion when getting started?
I honestly don't really remember. It
somehow just clicked one day and I figured it out.
All right, it takes us pretty naturally to the next one.
How did you come across Emacs? What got you into it? I could ask
this question quite
similar to how I stumbled into Linux, where I was... I heard
of it before, but I saw screenshots of it
or something on Reddit, and I was like, oh,
that looks pretty cool, maybe I'll look into that.
And then on YouTube, I would see videos
about Doom Emacs, and then the Doomcasts video,
I think that's what really got me into it.
Okay, I did my best to capture that. So what's the situation
with respect to the mobile use, if that's applicable? And
Orgzly is,
sorry, was it not Doomcast? Is it System Crafters?
Sorry if I botched the note. Oh yeah, System Crafters was
also one of the things I used for getting into Emacs from
scratch. I'm sorry if my dog is barking.
the, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name, but Protesilaos,
I think that's how you say it. I always say Prot just to get me
out of that problem for what it's worth. I'm not sure that I
can say it properly either. Yeah, his videos were really
great for getting started with each, each individual
component of
something like there's entire videos just
about completion and about a tool called Embark. And like, I
would just watch those videos
while I was doing the dishes or something.
and I would learn a lot from that.
Awesome. I love it. What about the mobile...
sorry, did I get that question out there already? Oh, no.
I don't use Emacs or any Org Mode things on my
phone. I have an iPhone, unfortunately.
But for org files, I couldn't really get it to sync over
without using a paid app.
And I didn't really look into it
that much because I have a computer with me
almost all the time.
Usually I carry around a notebook. And if I really need to
know something or remember it for later,
I just write it down.
I've seen people get started with e-ink tablets, and they
sync it with SyncThing because it's Android, but I don't use
that, so I can't really attest to how good it is.
So has using Emacs led you to an expanded interest in
programming and computer science? Sorry if
I could have got that out of the presentation.
I think Emacs is what got me
started with Lisp specifically.
Otherwise, I probably would have not really looked into it
that much, other than like maybe dabbling in Scheme
from the Structures and Interpretations of Computer
Programs book. But I probably wouldn't have seen that if I
hadn't discovered Emacs either so.
I was already into programming
before Emacs, and I had used VS Code for a little bit and then
Vim. But I think I've done most of my programming
inside of Emacs, in terms of lines of code written,
projects made...
So maybe we'd jump from there, right, to, you mentioned
exporting notes, essays, and so on, handing them on to other
people. How does interaction with others work in technical
terms? We mostly find workflows centered around like
Microsoft products, and that makes sense to me. I have a day
job where I have to work with a bunch of Microsoft products,
and I know the workflows for that. So how do you manage your
kind of Emacs-y you know, workflows, um, you know, in terms of
sharing with people. Yeah. So for sharing with like my
teachers or something, I would, we use like Google at our
school. So for, I'm very fortunate that I don't have to deal
with Microsoft other than with a very niche situations in
which I can just use LibreOffice and then convert to Doc X or
something. I heard that chef. That's, that's how all my
vendors, uh, my vendors all roll their eyes when they were,
oh, you're a Microsoft shop. Yep. Heard.
Then they're all Google shops too, in education.
Great point. For Google, I just... If my teachers wanted
a Google Doc or something,
I usually just copy paste
whatever I wrote in Emacs
and then still keep it, anyway, as a side thing
because I don't really trust the cloud
that much in terms of using
it for later if I wanted to look at it. But for that, I don't
really have too much problems. Hopefully, I will find a way
to figure it out when I get into university.
Awesome. Okay, well, I know we did it once already, but since
this will be the end of the video, let me just open the floor
one more time for parting thoughts.
I'm not sure that I have any. I mean, you said it pretty well,
right? I hope my peers see this. I hope they realize other
tools are kind of inferior from a gets things done
standpoint. Saw your talk. Heard that message in this Q&A.
I think you did a great job. You don't have to say more, but
just offering you the chance. Thank you.
Well, thank you, Daniel,
and thanks to everybody watching this video
during the conference or after it,
and appreciate and look forward
to your talks in the future, Daniel. Thank you.