Hello, my name is Daniel Pinkston. I'm in my last year of high
school, about to go to university. About two and a half years
ago, I discovered Emacs. My life has now been separated into
two chapters: before and after Emacs. How could this tool be
so impactful? Well, you'll just have to see. I made this talk
for people who ask questions like this, but don't know where
to start. When I started using Emacs for school, it took me a
long time to find what I liked. There wasn't many examples of
a full process for an organization. This talk was made to
guide students like me, those who wanted more from their
software workflow that they can learn and adapt from. My
main idea was essentially explained by Zaiste in his
EmacsConf presentation in 2019. He said something to the
effect of, one of the great parts about Doom Emacs as a
starting point is that it shows beginners how different
packages mesh with each other. He says that people often
have trouble seeing how to develop workflows using the
thousands of packages Emacs has. In this talk, I introduce
some Emacs tools and how they work together to improve a
student's academic workflow. Let us commence. If you are
watching this talk and have never heard of Emacs, it's a
customizable text editor. When you become more
experienced, it becomes your entire operating system. You
just live inside of Emacs. It's also free as in free pencils
and open source, which means that you don't have to pay to
download Emacs and its source code. Emacs doesn't charge
you a monthly subscription, nor does it steal all of your
information. Yeah, I know, it's pretty crazy. In this talk,
I introduce some Emacs tools and how they work together to
improve a student's academic workflow. Earlier I read this
post on this website that said, I can only imagine the great
things you'd be able to learn and retain in your brain thanks
to the great Emacs ecosystem. You've made the best choice,
with far-going implications. I promise you not once, not
even subtly, have I ever regretted having invested in
learning Emacs. It's the best gift anyone can present to
themself. You will forever feel indebted to your younger
self for this gift. I guarantee that. I think that this is a
real testament to the true power of Emacs. There's simply no
other software like it. It's a complete and fitting
solution for those who are willing to master it. Hopefully
by now you're invested in learning Emacs. But before we jump
into the technicalities of everything, we should outline
the main things that you need it to do as a student. The best
students have their system figured out so that it can do
these things quickly and efficiently. They should have no
problem quickly organizing what they need to do along with
capturing information from their classes. But you may be
wondering, how does Emacs do all that? Well, it does it with
Org Mode. It was built to be an outliner for note-taking and
list management, exactly what a student needs. One of the
key features is that it's plain text, which means that you
can migrate it between computers, and it's not a
proprietary format. For those of you who have heard of
Markdown, Org is similar in that it's a markup language.
However, it's a bit older, and it goes way beyond Markdown's
simple text formatting, with its scheduling, task
management, and organization features, all captured
within plain text simplicity. This slide shows off one of my
notes from a heavily customized Emacs window. Yours
probably won't look like this from the start, but you can
personalize its appearance with custom themes.
It's finally time to get into the technicalities. What you
need to do with your notes in Org Mode is create, search, and
possibly publish them. I prefer Denote for creating my
notes, but there are many Emacs packages for that. Denote is
just lightweight and gets the job done. I used to use Org
Roam, but I didn't need or use all of its features. I also use
Anki, a free and open source flashcard program, but of
course, I make all my flashcards in Org Mode. For searching,
I often use find and grep, which are both standard
utilities on Linux. Other operating systems probably have
a tool to replicate this functionality. The final item is
exporting. There are many scenarios in which I want to
publish my notes to share them with teachers or peers. One of
my favorite features of Org Mode is the exportability of the
notes you make. This presentation was actually made in Org
Mode, and so are all of my lab reports and essays for school. I
also write my webpage articles in Org Mode, which a program
called Hugo converts into static HTML. So far, you haven't
actually seen what it's like to use these tools. Here's a
quick demo of how I track what I need to do. First, I always
open up my todo.org file in my denote directory. For school
assignments, I have a heading under Inbox where I have
entries for each class I'm enrolled in. Each class's
heading has a tag on it, which the assignment inherits as a
subheading. Here's an example assignment. I have a test in
physics next next Wednesday and the deadline to finish
studying for it is the day that I'm taking it. When I plan my
studying, I run the keybind for org-schedule to schedule the
day on which I will study it. I can also mark it as the highest
priority, making it the most important thing to do. I can
also open up my agenda to see my tasks. I've cleaned it up as to
not reveal any of my nefarious plans. This agenda is
customized, but there are many tutorials on how to do this.
My agenda has been the most transforming part of my student
experience, and I've gotten a lot better at managing what I
need to do. Next, I'll show you what I like to do to take notes.
The main entry point for a new note is always starting with
M-x denote. You fill out a couple of customizable prompts
that will ask for values of the note. I'll start by making a
new note, which we'll call test note. Then we'll give it a key
for what category it's under. For this, I usually put the
subject of the class that I'm doing this note for, be it
programming, English, history, or science. Try to keep
them short. And then Shazam, we have ourselves a brand new
note which we can start typing away in. The cool thing about
the note is you don't have to manually name your note files.
It uses a standard convention using the time, the title, and
the keywords of the note to make it unique. You can even make a
meta note, a note about notes, to show a list of notes under a
certain keyword. The final step in creation is flashcards.
There is a great package called Anki Editor that makes Emacs
able to push cards into Anki. There isn't much to
overcomplicate here, it's just content on front and back,
sometimes with images and complete the phrase. You can also
set up LaTeX math formatting, but I don't really use it that
much. If you're living in Emacs all the time, you may want
some creature comforts. These are some of my favorite. Org
Download is a package that allows you to paste images from
your clipboard into an org file.
Logos is a text narrowing tool that helps you restrict what
text you can see and focus on what you're writing. It extends
Emacs default narrowing, also adding functionality for
quickly switching to headings for a presentation look. It
can remove your mode line and center your text for better
focus. org-fragtog allows you to move between previews of
your LaTeX formulas and the unrendered syntax.
pdf-view-mode is a fully fledged PDF reader, complete with
annotations and org syntax, highlighting, and clickable
links.
Something you may want to consider is digital versus
handwritten notes. There have been several talks in the
past about how to integrate handwritten notes into Emacs,
such as retyping them or scanning them in with an OCR tool. I
don't think that type notes are the only way that you should
take notes, but if you do try writing, at least get some nice
stationery. I've seen people ask online to YouTubers and
Twitch streamers asking, what is your keyboard? What is
your window manager? I understand that they're curious,
but cosplaying as a productive person by using the same
tools won't accomplish anything. Emacs will not make you a
productive person. It can be a significant time investment
because of how customizable it is. However, I believe it
will make it easier for you to be productive, as it certainly
has for me. This was just an example workflow to show
prospective students how they can use Emacs for their
needs.
Even if you don't end up using Emacs in the end, you can still
apply most of its ideas to other software. It just won't be as
customizable and extensible as Emacs is. Thank you for
listening to my talk. It's been a great pleasure to finally
take part in this conference in some capacity, and I'm glad I
was given a chance. To all the students who may try Emacs in
the future, good luck because there might not be any going
back. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an
email. Thank you for your time.