path: root/2023/captions/emacsconf-2023-writing--emacs-turbocharges-my-writing--jeremy-friesen--main.vtt

WEBVTT captioned by bala, checked by sachac

NOTE Intro

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Hello everyone, I'm Jeremy Friesen, pronouns he/him,

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and today I'll be talking about

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how Emacs turbocharges my writing.

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Quick intro: I've been programming since 1998

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and blogging since 2011.

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In May of 2020 I switched to Emacs,

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having previously used a long list of different editors.

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Curious about how Emacs impacted my writing,

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I wrote some stuff on my personal site and

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found that I blogged about 95 words per day prior to Emacs,

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and with Emacs I'm blogging about 340.

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Now, this is not a fair comparison, many things changed.

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A pandemic removed 2 hours of commute every day

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as a big contributor.

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Ultimately though, I've used Emacs and extended it

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to reduce barriers to capturing and writing and thinking,

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and I'm always on the lookout for minor refinements

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that help me stay in my thinking.

NOTE How I got here

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How I got here was I started in WordPress,

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then I moved to Jekyll, and then to Hugo,

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and through that process I started writing in Markdown.

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And when I was learning Emacs,

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I also didn't want to learn Org Mode,

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it felt intimidating because it could do so many things.

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I later learned Org Mode grows with you,

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and that's where I'm at now.

NOTE Friction

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But I didn't realize that friction

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between writing Markdown for my public blog

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and then adopting Org Mode locally

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for writing and time tracking and things like that.

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And also, where did I put things,

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because migrating the formats was just a little clunky.

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So ultimately I spent some time thinking about the data flow

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and where I would put things,

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this kind of pre-thinking,

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where does stuff go when it comes into and out of my brain.

NOTE Domains for notes

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So I have many domains where I'll write towards.

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The ones for this presentation are going to be

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blog posts, epigraphs, glossary, and melange.

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Melange is, I don't know where it goes,

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but now I do, I just throw it in melange.

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So I began exploring Org Mode via Org Roam,

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but I've ultimately switched from Org Roam

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to the simplified Denote package.

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I didn't use a lot of the functionality

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and I appreciate the plain text reality of Denote.

NOTE Demo

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So let's hop into the demo.

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I'm going to split my screen.

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Over on the right is going to be

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where I'm going to be live typing stuff.

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So let's get going.

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You'll notice I don't do a lot of screen splitting.

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It just makes it easier to focus.

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So let's create a note.

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All right, I have bound hyper to my command key,

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my right command key.

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This opens up a whole world.

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I'm going to create a blog post

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and we're going to name it the ever popular "hello world".

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It's Emacs.

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Great.

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We've saved it.

NOTE Dabbrev and hippie-expand

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One of the things I encourage everybody to do

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is to watch Jay Dixit's presentation, Emacs for Writers.

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It showed me the utility of Dabbrev for quick auto correction.

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And I also love using hippie-expand.

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When I watch VS coders code, it's always a little sad pants

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because they're thinking about coding or writing

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in terms of their code.

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But I have found as a programmer, I tend to write more tech,

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more like English instead of programming code.

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So I think it's important to understand these tools

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that help me write better.

NOTE Links

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All right, we're going to go with links.

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Links are foundational for the web.

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I'm going to insert a public link,

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which is a role playing game that I love,

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Worlds Without Number.

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And I'm going to go ahead and describe it.

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A role playing game.

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But I don't want to always say role playing game.

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I'm going to abbreviate it.

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So I wrote a function that will transform it.

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And let's take a look at what that looks like on the inside.

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When I do this real quick, it's toggling it back and forth.

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And I'll just keep doing that.

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I also have the idea of public notes and private notes.

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Public is things that's going to have a URL.

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I met a person at a conference.

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He gave a talk on something that I thought was very useful.

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I didn't write down what he talked about on his note.

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I wrote it where it was more relevant to the topic.

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And I can use a backlink to go find that.

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Next up, I demonstrate the abbreviation.

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I also have dates.

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This is a semantic date in HTML5.

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I can just have the year.

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I can also just have something like that date is today.

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And we have date links.

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I don't have backlinks built up for that,

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but I have ideas of how I go about doing it.

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And last up, thank you Frank Herbert,

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I want to introduce epigraphs.

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So this is epigraph.

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I just have that, any sufficiently, dot, dot, dot.

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And that's my epigraph.

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Backlinks, I mentioned that.

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Let's go take a look at Jonathan, right?

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He's a Rubyist, but importantly is the backlinks.

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He gave a talk on, that's right, PDFs.

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I can go look at what he spoke to

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and I can reference that because I will remember

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that talk or I will remember, oh, I need to look up PDFs.

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Oh, I have something in PDFs.

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Again, it's about stumbling upon data in a good way.

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So thinking of making linking easy helps me

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create more and more ways to find things,

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both by links, backlinks, indices, file searches, and so forth.

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It's all about information organization.

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Next up is a really cool function of org capture.

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So let's take a look here.

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I'm going to start a clock.

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It's running.

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And I'm going to bring up my browser.

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And I'm going to go ahead and capture to the content to clock.

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And it brings up this block quote, which is lovely.

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And boom, I'm going to save it.

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I'm going to close this.

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We're back here to my "hello world".

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And it has grabbed a block quote for this.

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Again, it helps me gather stuff up quickly.

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I've bound that also in my RSS feed.

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We're going to skip over macros, blocks, and the abstract.

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And we're going to get into the export

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because this is where we can see the magic

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that happens because I want to take things

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from private to public.

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So I have bound a key.

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These are my menu of things I don't want to forget.

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I will export.

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And here we go.

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Here is my blog post in markdown format with Hugo shortcodes.

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So let's go take a look at what that looks like.

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Localhost.

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I'm not writing in Rails.

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"Hello world" right there.

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This is the epigraph.

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And I have a mention of Worlds without Number.

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And I have mentioned this as a abbreviation.

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So I include the first time this text.

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Here's also Jonathan.

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He is not a public reference thing.

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Also, I have these things here.

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And here's my captured information

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along with the citation link to it.

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Again, helpful to be consistent.

NOTE Conclusion

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In conclusion, when I started learning Emacs,

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I quickly shifted to vanilla Emacs and just started writing.

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As I wrote, when I needed to do something that I'd previously

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done in a text editor, I'd find an experiment with a package.

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I continue that mindset.

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As I write, I'm attending to what I'm doing.

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And eventually, I realize if I were to just write

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a function that does this one thing,

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I'd have a smoother writing experience.

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This helps me practice my craft, extend my editor,

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understand its capabilities, and begin exploring other things.

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The goal of this is all to minimize the distractions.

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As I'm thinking about it, I wanted to quickly add it

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and then move along,

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basically creating breadcrumbs for me

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to follow my thoughts in the future.

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And one of those functions is

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I'd like to write an extender for my abbr,

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abbreviation export to work in Latex.

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It's like halfway there.

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So I'm looking forward to getting that done

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when I have some time and can prioritize it.

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But for now, thank you.

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And I look forward to your questions.