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Emacs Chat 21: Amin Bandali

| emacs, emacs-chat-podcast, emacs-chat

I chatted with Amin Bandali about Emacs and life.

View it via the Internet Archive, watch/comment on YouTube, read the transcript online, download the transcript, or e-mail me your thoughts!

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Chapters

  • 0:11 Introduction: Amin Bandali, software developer and free software activist
  • 1:06 Aspects of life: notetaking, editing, multiple
  • 3:03 Configuration: keeping things simple
  • 5:03 user-lisp-directory, site-lisp if you're using an older Emacs
  • 6:35 Organizing configuration into modules
  • 7:49 early-init
  • 9:09 ring-bell-function
  • 9:41 performance optimizations
  • 10:27 user-lisp
  • 11:16 ignoring byte compilation warnings
  • 11:58 init-file-debug = –debug-init
  • 12:56 Core
  • 13:57 no longer using bandali-configure; scoping errors, timing execution
  • 17:06 Why not use use-package
  • 18:39 Defining multiple keybindings
  • 19:48 doric-oak uses emphasis instead of colours
  • 20:52 global font scaling instead of the local ones
  • 21:39 display-fill-column-indicator
  • 22:57 emacsclient for EDITOR and VISUAL
  • 23:38 fundamental-mode-hook
  • 24:25 indicate-buffer-boundaries
  • 26:38 enabling and disabling commands
  • 27:42 package-review-policy
  • 28:58 getting the Info files from the Emacs source directory
  • 29:46 recentf, adding directories
  • 31:41 Scrolling
  • 32:36 auto revert
  • 33:16 Repeat mode
  • 34:53 EXWM
  • 38:05 Audio setup
  • 39:15 keymaps for launching different applications
  • 39:55 bandali-call-interactively-insert
  • 42:29 workspaces
  • 43:50 ZSA Voyager split keyboard, super x as a single key
  • 46:28 Keybindings
  • 48:08 Media buttons
  • 49:45 exwm-input-simulation-keys!
  • 51:43 exwm: managing floating windows
  • 53:13 exwm: application-specific local simulation keys
  • 54:09 binding C-q to exwm-input-send-next-key
  • 54:31 Renaming buffers
  • 55:38 dunst for notifications
  • 56:55 exwm xsettings and responding to screen configuration changes
  • 59:03 Slowly getting back into Org mode
  • 1:00:01 chat notes
  • 1:00:54 Mode line
  • 1:01:50 display-buffer-alist
  • 1:02:24 TRAMP slowness, maybe disabling VC detection?
  • 1:03:42 eat
  • 1:05:09 TRAMP completion
  • 1:06:55 ffs: form feed slides, ^L
  • 1:09:36 Speaker notes

Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Introduction: Amin Bandali, software developer and free software activist

Sacha: Let me do the thing. Go live. Let's check in. Alright, hello. This is Emacs Chat 21 coming back after a decade of not doing it, so... And today I've got Amin Bandali who's a... Is it seven years now that we've been doing EmacsConf together?

Amin: I think so. Since fall 2019. Yeah.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But of course you also do a whole lot of other things. I was looking through your Emacs configuration and there's like translation and other stuff in there. So would you like to start off with a brief introduction of who you are and how and why you use Emacs?

Amin: Yeah, sure. Yeah, first of all, hello, everyone. Sorry if I'm looking to the side. This is a new setup. My laptop, which has my webcam, is there, but my main display is here. So I might be looking to the side from time to time. But yeah, that aside, hello.

1:05 Aspects of life: notetaking, editing, multiple

Amin: Yeah, I'm Amin Bandali. I've been, I think, using Emacs since 2014 or 15, so I guess more than a decade now. I'm a software engineer by day, or software developer, slash programmer, slash computing scientist. I'm also a free software activist. I volunteer on a lot of free software projects as well, which Sacha mentioned. I do things around GNU. I volunteer with FSF. I'm a Debian developer, so I try to maintain some packages in Debian. I try to help run EmacsConf from time to time. Hopefully this year I will be much more present. But yeah, that's that. So I first got into using Emacs, I guess, as a programmer tool, like as a text editor. But I've since then kind of integrated it into a lot of other aspects of my life. And I do much more with it, as I'm sure a lot of us do. Yeah, so I use it for kind of note-taking, just any writing, editing purposes. in multiple natural and programming languages. Reading and sending email for chatting via IRC. All of that good stuff.

Sacha: This is the sort of thing that isn't immediately obvious from your configuration. I know you've got your Gnus setup in there and you've got your ERC setup in there, but sometimes when newcomers are trying to figure out, okay, there are all these packages, but how do I use them to get stuff done? That's one of the reasons why we want to do this Emacs chat, so that maybe you can show us some of the cool stuff. We are live, but if you accidentally show something personal, let me know and I can kill the stream within 10 seconds and I think then we can be like, okay, we'll just flush that out and then come back once we've hidden the top secret plans for taking over the world, that sort of thing. Sounds good. Where do we want to start?

3:00 Configuration: keeping things simple

Amin: I'm happy to do it however you like. I can either share my screen, pull up my configuration. Yeah, okay, so let's do that.

Sacha: Yeah. If you share your screen sometimes, I think what we did ages ago was we just started walking through the configuration and then sometimes people say, oh yeah, that's really interesting. Let's go and demonstrate that so that people can get a sense of how this actually works. And there were some things in your configuration that I had no idea, like what is FFS? There's like no package. I couldn't find any information about it. But yeah, so your config, if you want to go ahead and share your screen while I Fill the air with hand-waving. Admin's config tends to be more on the minimalist side. I think you mostly rely on built-in things with a couple of external packages. You don't even use use-package at all. It's all run-at-idle-time to delay the startup of various things, and then it's all vanilla Emacs as you can get for loading and configuring things.

Amin: Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Yeah, so before I continue, quick note, Sacha, if you can make me presenter because I don't have access to share my screen.

Sacha: Oh, that would be important, yes. Hang on a second. Let me see. Okay, here we go. Make presenter. I might as well promote you to moderator while we're at it. There you go. You should now have magic powers.

Amin: Thanks. Let's see.

Sacha: It's a good thing we're practicing this before EmacsConf so I remember how all this stuff works.

Amin: Yep, for sure. Okay, let's see. I think I got it now. Can you see my screen?

Sacha: Yes, I can see your screen.

Amin: Okay, excellent. Let's see. Okay.

4:58 user-lisp-directory, site-lisp if you're using an older Emacs

Amin: Yeah, so as Sacha mentioned at the moment, my config is kind of very minimalist and kind of conservative by design, in part because I tend to work on a lot of different machines, whether it's for work or volunteering or whatever, and I prefer to use Emacs if I can. So I want my config to be fairly self-contained so I can easily either git clone or rsync it over. Yeah. To keep it simple, I was using package.el for a while for installing and managing my packages, which I don't keep in my configs repository. But then I decided to switch over to very manual package management with the awesome new feature user-lisp-directory of the next upcoming Emacs release, which basically you can give it a subdirectory in your .emacs.d or .config/emacs. And then it'll go through all the Emacs Lisp files recursively, byte compile them, native compile them, all that good stuff, and add them to the load path. And for people who are using existing or older releases of Emacs, there's also site-lisp by Philip Kaludercic, which is kind of the... I guess first implementation of what later became user-lisp and built into Emacs. So you can make it conditional and fall back to site-lisp if you want to be able to use user-lisp on older Emacs but still have your configuration be usable. Yeah, anyway.

6:32 Organizing configuration into modules

Amin: So I've experimented with like a couple different ways of managing my configurations like single giant init file of like four or five thousand lines which I know is actually not very large by comparison to I think like someone like Sacha's configuration and also like You know, split into multiple different files, which has its own benefits. And I've kind of actually converged to the approach that Prot uses. If you actually take a look at my configuration file, you see I've drawn a lot of inspiration from Prot switches. Having a literate single file configuration, which then all of the Emacs LISPs source blocks get tangled to individual files. So I can maintain a single source of truth and edit it all in one place, but then also easily be able to share individual pieces to people if they want. So yeah, that's kind of the general approach. And I can dive right in.

Sacha: Yeah, that's definitely the structure that I've also stolen from Prot. And I like the way that you're Your heading names are all long and descriptive, and you've got everything broken down in detail. So yeah, go ahead and walk us through it, please.

Amin: Yeah, sure. Let's see.

7:45 early-init

image from video 00:08:00.067Amin: So that's a brief introduction, and then I have an early init section for doing the early init file. There's a couple of subheadings here. Actually, let me enlarge the font size a little bit to make it more legible. OK, great. I do a couple of things here like disabling package at startup because I don't use package as I mentioned. I manually install and update my packages as git submodules in my configurations repository.

image from video 00:08:15.567Amin: I set load-prefer-newer to t to make sure that I never load any stale code. For example, I might edit some Emacs Lisp file by hand and forget to byte compile or native compile it. And this tells Emacs to basically just use the version of these three variants that's the most recent. Yeah. Nothing super fancy here.

image from video 00:08:35.700Amin: I turn off a couple of things that I find a little bit distracting, like the menu bar or toolbar. Although I do say here that for people who are new to Emacs, they're actually super helpful. Sure, it's a little bit of visual clutter, but in the beginning, it's really, really helpful to help you orient yourself of what mode you're in, what tools do you have available in your disposal. And even someone who's been using Emacs for more than 10 years, I also use it sometimes when I'm like... just starting to use a new mode. So yeah, good stuff.

9:06 ring-bell-function

Sacha: I was very amused by the comment on the... "I don't like getting jumpscared out of my chair." You turned off the bell.

Amin: Yeah, because that actually used to happen when I first started using Emacs. Like when I would, I don't know, I don't even remember when it bells or rings, but Maybe if you like quit like with C-g or like try to backspace into like delete where there's no more characters to delete so it rings a bell and it's very like can be jarring so yeah I turn that off.

9:40 performance optimizations

image from video 00:09:56.367Sacha: Yeah, and then you've got a whole bunch of things where you set some variables to nil temporarily to make it faster, so that's in your startup in garbage collection.

Amin: Exactly. Empirically, there is no hard and fast science behind this. I experimented over the years. I'm pretty sure I believe the default, for example, the garbage collection con threshold is about eight megabytes. I tried increasing that a little bit to see how much If I increase it to what point will it make my startup faster? And I found this 30 megabytes or mibibytes to be kind of a sweet spot. So I bumped that up. And then after Emacs has finished initializing, in the after-init-hook, I just restored the defaults.

10:25 user-lisp

image from video 00:10:51.900Amin: And then, yeah, this is the bit with the user-lisp-directory that I was talking about. Awesome stuff. So you can basically designate a directory. For example, in my configuration, it's just a lisp directory. And then on startup, Emacs will go through and byte compile, native-compile if necessary, and then add all of that stuff to the load path automatically. So you get that. Yeah, and then this is the bit about site-lisp that I was talking about. So if you want to use user-lisp, but you're still using older Emacs versions that you maintain, you need to maintain backward compiling in your config. This is how you do it, for example. So you just yeah, add it to load-path, require it and then call prepare-user-lisp. That's about it.

11:14 ignoring byte compilation warnings

Sacha: I'm picking up that tip about using the ignore directories. I'm getting by with just ignoring all of the byte compilation output, but it would be nice to just say, you know, that stuff is test. I don't need to worry about it.

Amin: Right, right. Thanks. Yeah, I was also doing that. I actually have it as a comment to suppress warning types, like by compilation, but I was... I plan on working on some packages, whether my own or others, and it would still be helpful to get those warnings, so I keep them enabled. It's still a bit annoying. I still get some of them when I launch emacs but I don't restart or launch emacs as frequently so it's pretty bearable.

11:55 init-file-debug = --debug-init

image from video 00:12:00.400Amin: Yeah, and then I have the main init file. And there's not much in it. It's just the debug-on-error and debug-on-quit. So the debug-on-error thing, I set it to the value of init-file-debug. And if you look at that, the help for this variable, basically if you pass or launch Emacs with --debug-init, this variable will be true. So yeah.

Sacha: I did not know that. Cool.

Amin: Yeah, it's pretty helpful. I think, if I'm not mistaken, I took this from John Wiegley's .emacs, but I can't remember for sure. It's been years. Yeah, it's pretty nice. And then here, I just set my name and email address. And very early I set a custom file to keep all of that stuff separate from my .emacs. I don't want it mixing in.

12:53 Core

image from video 00:13:03.467Amin: And then pretty much the only other thing that's in my main init file is just to require and load these different modules or packages of my configuration. I have these as actual packages or as actual features. They provide themselves. And that's just something that I've found straightforward enough to do. I know, for example, Prot uses a dual approach. He has some of his configuration that's more readily usable, available as actual packages. And then the other ones, it's just Emacs Lisp code. It's not actual packages. But for me, I just keep it simple. Everything has packages and that's about that.

Sacha: Fantastic. Let's dive into some of those configuration modules.

Amin: Sure, let's see. Yeah, so this there's this like core thing which is kind of included gets included in all of my other files.

13:53 no longer using bandali-configure; scoping errors, timing execution

image from video 00:14:27.533Amin: I wrote a bandali-configure macro shamelessly based on prot-emacs-configure which is what Prot uses and it basically is a way of kind of similar to use package for like wrapping a bunch of relevant like Emacs Lisp code all together. It has the benefit, if you use it, if there is an error in that block or in the body basically, then it won't crash everything. That body will just get ignored and we display an error. And that's also the main reason that Prot uses it. The one thing that I added extra to mine, which I took with inspiration from Echelle Yaron's ESY slash init step, is to wrap it up in basically time the execution of each of these blocks, which can be pretty helpful to help you see, okay, which part of my configuration is particularly slow. Usage examples. I just have it here. You can either basically pass it like a symbol like thing or you can also pass in a string as the first argument. And this is what will be displayed when you display a list of the evaluation times for all of these blocks in your configuration.

image from video 00:15:22.133Amin: Yeah, and then I have a neat little function here like configure-report-times that will report these times, whether in the order that it's encountered them, or you can have it sort by fastest to slowest, slowest to fastest, blah blah blah.

Sacha: You mentioned you're no longer using this. Is it because you wanted it to be easier to copy and paste your code? What got you to shift back to the regular vanilla type of configuration?

Amin: Right, as neat as it is, I didn't find it super useful. For one thing, because I don't add or remove a ton of stuff to my Emacs configuration regularly, so if there is an error, it wouldn't cause an issue for the rest of my configuration. I didn't really find that very useful. And then my other potential concern is that the way I was structuring things, I would put all of the configuration, let's say for GNU, in one of these blocks. But I wanted to be able to break that down into, for example, Org Mode sections more easily. So far, I just decided to not use it. I know I could technically break those down into smaller blocks, but I haven't done that yet.

Sacha: Ihor says, this configure macro looks a lot like good old use package, which you're not even using in the rest of your config. And I hear you about wanting to be able to split things into smaller blocks with more explanations in between them. So in my config, yeah, sure, I've got the use-package there to do the ensure and all that stuff. But I also have with-eval-after-load because I still want, you know, the links and the screenshots in between.

17:02 Why not use use-package

Amin: Right. Yeah, exactly. use-package is awesome. I have used that in the past, especially when I was using the straight.el package manager. It pairs nicely with it. But yeah, since then, I found it a little bit like too magical for my tastes, kind of along the lines of declaring an init file bankruptcy at some point I really wanted to understand every single line that I have in my Emacs configuration. And at the time, I didn't know a whole lot about macros or wasn't very well-versed with them. So I just ditched it in favor of simply using, as you mentioned, with-eval-after-load. And then that causes all that code to be basically delayed, not evaluated immediately, but when that package is loaded. And then as to when to pull that package in, depending on if I want it right from the get-go of my Emacs starts, then I would require it. Otherwise, I add this, as you also mentioned earlier, this kind of timer thing where if Emacs is idle for, I don't know, 0.2 seconds or 0.4 seconds, then go ahead and require this package.

Sacha: Ihor has a tip in the chat. Of course, Ihor has an Org way to do this. He uses use-package whatever config and then he has a noweb reference to the Babel blocks. Then he just says :tangle no on the source blocks so that they don't actually get repeated. Anyway, you can look at it later when you go through. I'll send you the comments or whatever. But show us how you're actually configuring things since you're not using this.

18:37 Defining multiple keybindings

image from video 00:18:55.133Amin: Then I just have another quick macro thingy here, bandali-define-keys, which wraps around Emacs's define-key. It affords me the convenience of defining multiple key bindings, and Prot's version of this (I think it's prot-emacs-keybind, or something like that) he imposes the limitation that the keys should be valid strings that can be passed to the =kbd= function, which is very fair and valid, but I wanted to not impose that, to keep the flexibility of using define-key directly. The consequences of that, as we can see, is we can pass in the old representation of key bindings, like the vector or whatever syntax, which Prot's doesn't support by choice, whereas mine does. Let's see. For example, let's look at the Bandali theme, which is all about... The appearance, I guess, of Emacs.

19:45 doric-oak uses emphasis instead of colours

image from video 00:19:45.900Amin: Yeah, so I just have a conditional block where, you know, if you're in a graphical environment, I'll just go ahead and load Prot's Doric themes, specifically Doric Oak, which is what we're seeing right now. I'm using, it's very beautiful, it's very subtle, and it uses emphasis, bolding and stuff to draw your eye to something instead of using a million different colors, which I find pretty nice. Yeah, and then for example here I set up some fonts. I use this Sahel font for Persian and Arabic text. I set a color emoji font here and this is like we get a kind of preview of what I do. It's like with-eval-after-load faces and then blah blah blah.

Sacha: Ihor would like to point out that with-eval-after-load is also a macro that calls another macro. So I'm just going to mention it because it's there. These are your fonts. This is your theme. This is great because everyone always asks, what theme is this? What font is this? All right.

20:49 global font scaling instead of the local ones

image from video 00:20:59.967Sacha: I like your text scaling tweaks that you're just about to go into. You've changed the global mappings.

Amin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I actually took this from Prot as well. And it makes a lot more sense. So by default, this, C-x C-+, -, blah, blah, blah, it only scales the text for the current buffer only. But in newer version of Emacs, in Emacs 29, they also added commands to adjust this globally, including the mode line and all that stuff, which is usually what I want, for example, in this presentation or when I'm sharing my screen right now. It scales everything up globally. So yeah, I just swapped these to be the default, and then I add keybinds for the just local variants in case I need to use that. Yep.

21:37 display-fill-column-indicator

Amin: And then here I have display-fill-column-indicator. I don't know, maybe this is just me, but sometimes I'm kind of OCD about keeping my text lined up at exactly, for example, the 70 characters column. I care a lot about that, especially if I'm writing code or text that I want to also visually look nice. And I enable this. And let's see, I enable it for prog-mode. So yeah, I guess if I, for example, do this... This little thin line that we see here, that's the display filler column indicator. I used to have it globally enabled, but then I found that a bit too much, so I just enable it with a hook in the modes that I want.

Sacha: Yeah, and the theme makes it very subtle. It's just there as a reminder, don't go beyond this line. You can if you really want to, but just try not to.

Amin: Yeah, exactly. And then my essentials... This is where I configure a lot of key behaviors of Emacs, all built-in stuff for the most part, or things that are key to my workflows. For example, I always want to start with a scratch buffer.

22:53 emacsclient for EDITOR and VISUAL

image from video 00:22:53.767Amin: Start the Emacs server if it's not running. And this is very useful, very helpful so that then you can call into an existing Emacs process with Emacs client and have it edit a file. I don't use it for anything fancy just yet. I believe Prot also mentioned in his video with you, Sacha, that he uses it for things like org-capture to spawn a new buffer in his existing Emacs session and things like that. You can do pretty cool things with it. But yeah, I just use it for being able to easily use my Emacs as editor and visual text editors. So yeah, this sets that up.

23:37 fundamental-mode-hook

image from video 00:23:42.200Amin: Adding a fundamental mode hook. Again, I took this from Prot.

Sacha: I was surprised by that because I was like, oh, there isn't a fundamental-mode-hook? Okay, that makes sense now.

Amin: Right, right. Yeah, there isn't a fundamental-mode-hook by design. But I still, in the past, have found that I wanted that. For example, for this display-fill-column-indicator, when I had it enabled everywhere, I was like, it would be nice if I could at least disable it for fundamental mode. And at the time, I didn't have this. I added this just recently. So if I decide to go back to using something globally, but I don't want it in fundamental-mode, then I can disable it using this. Yeah, and then some standard stuff like I prefer spaces and a tab with four characters.

24:23 indicate-buffer-boundaries

image from video 00:22:02.433Amin: Visually indicate buffer boundaries. This is a little bit hard to see right now, but here at the bottom left

image from video 00:22:02.433Amin: you see a little down arrow

image from video 00:24:33.800Amin: and then the little top arrow. And... Let's see if I can.

Sacha: Oh!

image from video 00:24:43.167Amin: And also here, for example, when it all fits in the view.

Sacha: Huh, that is cool. I was looking at that. What does it do? And so that tells you, you can still scroll up or you can still scroll down, and you don't have to look at the scroll bar to see where you are. It just says there's more there.

Amin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it also helps distinguish when there's a newline character at the end of the file or not. So here in this buffer, there is.

image from video 00:25:10.533Amin: But if I delete that, you see this indicator here changed shape. But if I go back and add the new line again. So yeah, that's also been very helpful for me because I added configuration files and some of these pieces of software are sensitive to having a new line at the end of the file. So yeah, it's very helpful and useful for that.

Sacha: I would not have guessed that from the very short line in your config that turns that on. It's one line, setq-default indicate-buffer-boundaries 'left, and yet it adds this nice little nuance to the way that fringe looks.

Amin: Right. Yeah, absolutely. Perhaps I should expand more on it at some point later to explain these things. But yeah, just this one line.

Sacha: May I recommend screenshots?

Amin: Yes, you may, for sure. Yeah, I will definitely do that as well, because I'm also a bit of a visual person. I like seeing screenshots and videos, so yeah I'll take that to heart and do that for my own configuration as well.

Sacha: When I post this, I'll probably... I figured out how to have the transcripts and then screenshots embedded into my transcript. I'll generate it automatically from the subtitle file. Our EmacsConf transcripts are going to get so fancy next year. But you can pull those screenshots and drop them into your config. It'll be great.

Amin: Nice. Yeah, for sure. Sounds good.

26:36 enabling and disabling commands

image from video 00:26:36.433Amin: And then here, I just enabled some of these commands that are disabled by default. So yeah, it's useful, especially narrow-to-page, for example, or narrow-to-region. These are commands where Emacs disables them by default so that newcomers don't accidentally hit them and get very confused by what just happened. It doesn't disable them for good. It just basically prompts you for confirmation. Are you sure you want to run this command? I'm sure, at least about these commands. So I just enabled them. And then something like, for example, overwrite-mode, which I never use and I don't want to accidentally enable. I just put it disabled so that if I do accidentally hit the keys, which might be, I don't know, something insert or whatever, then it will prompt me to make sure that I meant to do that.

Sacha: That reminds me, I should probably turn that off for myself and then you get a whole new keyboard shortcut you can use too.

Amin: Right, yeah. Let's see.

27:37 package-review-policy

image from video 00:27:37.900Amin: Yeah, I have just one line setting for package.el. In Emacs 31, we will be getting a package review policy which is very helpful. So if you do use package.el for installing packages from GNU ELPA, NonGNU ELPA, MELPA or whatever else, you can enable this, and then whenever you update your packages, you'll get a diff of what changed in this new revision of the package that you're downloading and you're about to enable. And you can presumably say yes or at least see what's going on, which I find helpful.

Sacha: But you're not using packages, you mentioned, so you're just checking everything out and then you're just git pulling whenever you feel like it.

Amin: Yeah, so right now I'm using git pulls and git submodules, very manual. I put this here because I think it's generally a very welcome change and awesome new feature that I want to spread the word about. So maybe someone who's looking at my config, they use package and that's perfectly fine. So this is just here to spread the word about it mainly, I guess. And if I start using package at some point myself in the future, then I will have this enabled. Let's see.

28:52 getting the Info files from the Emacs source directory

image from video 00:28:52.800Amin: Very quickly, here I extend Info-directory-list. I like to, at least on some of my machines, use Emacs that I built from source directly in the source repository of Emacs. Just after doing make, I don't run make install, even though it's very easy to do that. You can install to a custom location by providing dash dash prefix when you're configuring Emacs. Sometimes I just find it more convenient for me to not do that and just run make and then exit and reopen Emacs. And for that kind of a setup, I just extend the info directory list to include the info subdirectory of the Emacs source repository so that the built-in Emacs info manuals will be available to me.

29:45 recentf, adding directories

image from video 00:29:46.600Amin: And then I use recentf for tracking recent revisited files. I bind it to C-c f r e for me to get a pop-up completion for visiting a recent file, it has completion. So if I hit TAB here, for example, we can see some of these files or directories that I visited recently.

Sacha: I see. And then you're adding the directory to it. So what does that let you do? Because I'm assuming you're already in there in the directory. But how does that change your recentf?

Amin: Right. So I need to think to remember this, but I think the point of this was that if I open a project in VC or in Dired, then I would like that directory to also get added to my recentf files list, because I think by default, recentf only includes files, not directories.

Sacha: You're in it, you start up Magit or whatever, and then you move on to something else, but you want to be able to easily go back to it.

Amin: Yeah, for example, I like to keep my recently visited directories in recentf as well. Because that's one of the main ways I jump between projects and stuff, even though there is literally a built-in Emacs project mode, which I still use. The only thing that I have here is... I don't want to add my home directory to the recently visited list, so the only thing that this function does is to skip that if I'm opening the home directory. That's about it.

31:38 Scrolling

image from video 00:32:10.933Amin: And then here I configure mouse and scrolling behavior. So I want Emacs to scroll very gently, one line at a time. I think the default is that when you reach the end of the page, it'll jump half a page down and then recenter. I don't remember default behavior because I don't use it very much, but yeah, this basically makes it very predictable. For example, when I reach the edge of the page here and I press C-n, it'll only scroll one line at a time, instead of jumping and then doing something like this.

Sacha: Oh yeah, mine does! Mine doesn't do that, so it does that jumping thing. I see what you mean here. Interesting.

Amin: Yeah, so you can tweak that with scroll conservatively and then scroll preserve screen position, I believe.

32:28 auto revert

image from video 00:32:37.733Amin: Yeah, and then I use autorevert, which is pretty helpful. So this will have Emacs watch, for example, files that are open in your buffers. And if they change on disk, Emacs will automatically refresh the buffer so that you get the latest version. The cool thing is you can press undo in one of these files that's been autoreverted so that you get the revision that was there right before the change. So I've used that sometimes as well.

Sacha: Yeah, and sometimes autofollow also is nice for log files and things like that. But yeah, autoreverting is great.

Amin: Yeah, for sure.

33:14 Repeat mode

image from video 00:33:14.067Amin: Repeat mode is something that I've only recently started using, especially with my Emacs EXWM setup, using Emacs as my window manager. For example, if I hit C-x o, we see here in the echo area where it says repeat with o or capital O. So I can now only press o instead of saying C-x o, C-x o to do that multiple times. Keymaps that have support for this basically indicate that they want to be repeatable can declare that. And then once you invoke one of the keys in those keymaps, then you can repeat it with just that single character. And for example, for my setup, I have that with my EXWM workspace switching keys. So I can easily go to the next and previous workspaces, many of them at a time by just pressing P and N instead of doing the shortcut multiple times.

Sacha: And actually, if you don't mind jumping ahead, the EXWM part of your config is fairly complex, and I think not a lot of people have a lot of experience seeing EXWM in action. And I don't know whether you're comfortable sharing you switching around to different workspaces, but if that is something that you can do, how are you doing all this awesomeness? I'm still too scared to use EXWM myself. Stability. But that's a me problem, not an EXWM problem.

34:51 EXWM

image from video 00:35:26.600Amin: Yeah, EXWM was pretty awesome. I used it back in 2018, '19 for a while, and then I kind of moved on to Sway and Wayland. But I don't know. It's something that I feel like once you try it, you want to keep going back to it. So recently, this past month or so, I decided to give it an earnest try and try to actually address any pain points that I've noticed. So it's much more usable for me now, and I'm sticking with it for now. I'm not a Wayland hater, but I'm just saying, at least for now, I'm using EXWM. And I'm happy to talk about it.

Sacha: OK, what do you love about your setup for that one?

Amin: EXWM?

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. Like, you're doing a lot of rename buffers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amin: Right. Yeah, let me think. There's a couple of things. So, for the longest time, my Emacs EXWM configuration used super key as a prefix, which is the Windows [key] or the one with the logo, basically, to switch workspaces, launch applications and such. And at least the way that EXWM is right now, it doesn't... Like the way you have to add those global key bindings and kind of slows down the EXWM startup. And I had many such key bindings.

image from video 00:36:16.467Amin: So one thing that I did kind of recently is to define a prefix map here, like bandali-prefix-exwm-map. So I bind all of the keys and commands that I want here, and then this helps me really minimize what I'm telling EXWM, which is here. For example, this is how you set global keys with EXWM, and I just point it to my prefix map. C-c x and then any of those letters and functions that we saw. That's kind of annoying. I still use the super key here, but I have it s-x and s-,. On the left-hand side of my keyboard, X is right next to super, so I can hit it in one go with one motion almost as a single key with these two fingers. On the right side of my keyboard, I don't have a super key, but I have a control key that I remapped to super. On the right side, I do s-, with these two fingers. It's still very convenient for me to invoke those commands. And pairing this up with repeat mode, as we can see just here, actually, then I can hit s-, and then P, N, or H, J, K, L many times to switch workspaces or shift focus to different windows and stuff without having to hit that kind of annoying s-x or s-, repeatedly. Yeah.

Sacha: That sounds really cool. I should look into that. Sorry, quick aside.

38:03 Audio setup

Sacha: @blaiseutube would like to compliment you on your awesome audio setup. It sounds like you're in the room with him. Apparently, I sound like I'm on speakerphone, but your audio setup is top-notch, apparently. But that looks like a Blue Yeti, so I have to find out what's going on. what microphone are you using?

Amin: It is indeed a Blue Yeti.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. So I just have to ask him for okay, what kind of boom mic? Anyway, we'll do that all offline because it's not Emacs related.

Amin: Yeah, it's just the Blue Yeti. Yeah, I turned down the gain. I used to have gain higher, but then it picks up more noise from around the room or around the house. So I turned down the gain a lot and then I get close to the mic so that it only captures my voice. Okay.

Sacha: I'm gonna need the boom. Otherwise, I'm squished into that corner. All right. So you were doing repeat-map before I said oh, let's talk about EXWM because you've got cool stuff there.

Amin: Yeah, and I can continue talking about the EXWM. There's a lot here.

39:10 keymaps for launching different applications

Amin: I have, let's see, s-, SPC. I bind it to async-shell-command to use as my simple, little, dmenu-thing for launching applications.

image from video 00:39:11.767Amin: Some of these things, like browsers, I still do them frequently enough, and I use different browser profiles. So I just define a new keymap so I can basically one-shot launch Chromium or Firefox in a specific browser or an incognito window and such. So yeah, I just do s-x b and then, for example, c to launch Chromium and all that stuff. So I found this pretty convenient.

39:49 bandali-call-interactively-insert

image from video 00:40:57.567Amin: Speaking of key bindings, before I get down this, let's see if I can find... C-c h. I think this is just before my EXWM setup. I'm pretty proud of this. I love this. It really goes to show how awesome Emacs is and extensible it is. Let's see. So as we know, these various help commands and describe commands are under C-h prefix. But some of them are not bound. for example, find-library or describe-face. Some of these I use pretty frequently. I was really having trouble coming up with descriptive-enough keybindings or short-enough keybindings for all of them. I put some of them here, for example, like C-c f l for find library. But I can't do that for all of them. What I did was just do C-c h a or C-c h d. What this will do is basically, if I show that, It basically opens up M-x, fills in describe-, and then I can just type, for example, face, and that's it. So it basically opens up the minibuffer for me, pre-fills it with the string that I want, and I can type what is it that I'm looking for. And I found this to be better than trying to bind a million different keyboard things for describe this and that, apropos this and that, find this and that. So yeah and the way that we do that is to just use a minibuffer-with-setup hook, and you just have a little lambda to insert the string that you give it, and then you invoke it.

Sacha: Yeah, this is pretty cool. When I saw that in your config, I was like, I'm going to steal that. Pre-filling the minibuffer but still letting you do stuff with it, it's such a powerful thing, not just for completing the command itself, but even for when you're using the command, but you want to do something with the input before. You don't want to do it all the way, send it in and submit right away. You want to actually do something with it after you insert it. So great tip.

Amin: Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, it's pretty useful. It's pretty nice. Yeah. And then back to the Emacs or EXWM stuff. So before I had, I used to yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Sacha: Sorry. I forgot whether I was muted or unmuted.

Amin: Okay, no worries.

42:26 workspaces

image from video 00:42:56.600Amin: For the longest time, I had 10 default EXWM workspaces on startup, and that can slow things down a little bit. So I found that okay, I don't really use all 10 workspaces always. So I set it to five. So I get five workspaces initially. But I still bind keys here. Like if we go down. Let's see. Here. So here, I define those keys for all the way from, let's say, from 0 to 9 for all 10. And then if I try to switch to a workspace that doesn't exist, then EXWM will just go ahead and create it for me. Yeah, so I found that pretty cool. You can create workspaces on the fly. Yeah.

Sacha: Yeah, and I saw that it moves your current window there, too. So that's just like, OK. Let's move it to workspace number two or whatever. Very cool.

Amin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have keys or convenience keys for moving some window to some workspace. Yeah, it's nice. Let's see. Let's see. Yeah. So these are just made key bindings. I use hjkl here for switching windows.

43:46 ZSA Voyager split keyboard, super x as a single key

image from video 00:45:46.167Amin: I also have a ZSA Voyager split ergonomic keyboard. I can basically customize it infinitely. For example, I don't really have a super key on the first layer. What I have is a key that will do the s-x thingy, basically my prefix. So that's the last missing piece is that if I'm at home and if I have this keyboard with me, then I just hit one key and then that's it. I'm in my prefix. But even if not, on the laptop, the s-x or the super comma are still easy enough for me to hit it with one hand.

Sacha: Now I'm jealous and I definitely want to assign my prefixes to their own keys. Very tempting. I've started using the numpad because my laptop has one. I only use the numpad rarely, but we all need more keys.

Amin: Yeah, ergonomic keyboards are pretty nice, especially these ones. For example, the ZSA ones where you can put QMK on it, the QMK firmware. You can define keys in a C file. I can actually show that. Let's see... QMK Firmware, Keyboards, ZSA, Voyager, Bandali, and then keymap.c.

Sacha: Is this in your repository somewhere?

Amin: Right. It's in a different repository, but it's still on git.kelar.org next to my configs repository. You can find this as well, but if I go smaller... Yeah, you can define keys here and have different layers, like the base layer. And then you can define a key to switch between different layers and put some of the keys there anyway. So yeah, it's a whole rabbit hole in and of itself. Prot also uses a split ergonomic keyboard. It really does help if you're typing for long periods of time. I actually had these for a while, and I wasn't using them too much, but I started slowly getting some pain in my wrists and here. So I was like, okay, I have the keyboard. Might as well put it to good use, and I've started using it.

46:26 Keybindings

image from video 00:46:53.767Sacha: Okay, so most of your keyboard shortcuts come off that kind of s-x or C-c something, and then you have a long prefix sequence, and you just remember everything or you use your... pre-fill some of it and then fill in the rest of the command.

Amin: Pretty much all my window management related keys are on this s-x prefix that I'm showing here. And then I have a few other ones which I think I showed earlier. Is it this one? Anyway, I bind a few general keys outside of the s-x thing, like C-c e i. For example, I have C-c e e for eval-last-sexp. I do that a lot, so it's easy to hit that. Making frames or deleting frames

Sacha: I love how Emacs uptime is something you use frequently enough that you have a keyboard shortcut for it.

Amin: Yeah, of course. I mean, I'm sometimes curious to see how long has my Emacs session been running. To continue with the EXWM stuff, let's see. This is just some keybindings I define here. It's all Emacs Lisp, right? It's amazing. You can mapc over whatever sequence and create keybindings like that. Only with Emacs we can do things like that. I just love it. Let's see.

48:05 Media buttons

image from video 00:48:36.200Amin: I still keep these three other keys for raising and lowering the volume and toggling mute off of that prefix and just directly on my keyboard, hitting it directly in the exwm-input-global-keys because I do that very, very frequently. But I also have scripts that I can invoke. I should do keycast. So yeah, I can invoke the prefix with semicolon. I can set my volume here, adjust it here, type in what volume I want, or with the single quote, I can enter a value for the screen brightness. I like these things to be exact depending on the lighting in the room. I have preferred brightness values of 50 or 12 or 10 that I manually adjust. I guess it's a poor man's version of having something with a light sensor that can pick up and adjust automatically. I do it manually. Yeah. Sorry, you just muted yourself again.

Sacha: You're just probably this close to writing the Emacs Lisp that takes your webcam image and then adjusts your light. But I think Prot was also saying he likes to do the lighting changes manually as well because warmer colors versus cooler colors and all of that stuff. Anyway, so you have all these buttons that EXWM listens to and it can launch various things for. That's a lot of things.

Amin: Yeah, those are pretty cool.

49:43 exwm-input-simulation-keys!

image from video 00:50:08.267Amin: EXWM has this lovely feature called input simulation keys where You can basically use it to bring Emacs key bindings to other applications like Firefox or whatever. And yeah, it's mind blowing when you try it for the first time. for example, I bind C-b to just hit the left arrow on the keyboard. And it does that. So I can define all of these commands that I'm using or used to using in Emacs. So I can get them in Firefox or other applications as well. Realistically, it's mostly Firefox. It's the only other program that I spend any reasonable amount of time outside of Emacs.

Sacha: Let me point out this very important one that you have there. Under selection, cut, copy, paste, I see a control W. Input simulation keys. So this is for all the people who have accidentally closed their browser tab while trying to copy text. This is how you solve that problem. Use EXWM and use EXWM input simulation keys and you don't have to accidentally close your browser tabs again. @blaiseutube asks, hey, what about time since last save? Or do you have some kind of autosave magic? you know, in reference to the uptime thing, right? You have this thing that shows you...

Amin: I don't think I have anything for autosave, but I have this habit of... I save everything pretty regularly. Yeah, so I've never really needed that feature, but I'm sure Emacs has something where you can, at the very least, just very dumb, simple implementation of has it been idle for one minute, then just do a save buffer. You can roll your own. But I don't have anything.

Sacha: All right. I'm getting really tempted now to try out EXWM, even if it's just for those global keyboard remapping things.

51:39 exwm: managing floating windows

image from video 00:51:43.100Sacha: How is it for windows that you've got to have floating? I feel like it's very good at handling tiling things, but how is it for sometimes the apps kind of really want the floating window?

Amin: Right, yeah, so you can toggle any window to be floating or not, and you can also — actually, we're just looking at it here. EXWM manage configurations, to match on the instance name or the class name of a window that you can get from `xprop`, to automatically make that tiling. For example, if I do my prefix and then capital T, it launches a floating terminal for me here. And if I go back to where I set it up, I just launch Xterm with the name argument. This is where it can set the instance. And I just put any string you can want, like floating, for example. And then here in my configuration, I just check that if the instance name is floating, then I'll go ahead and float the window. Simple as that.

Sacha: All right. This is starting to look exceedingly tempting. Lol, I save everything regularly, so he's one of those people who compulsively hit C-x C-s.

Amin: Yeah, I do that a lot. I don't know. It's just me. But, yeah. Yeah. And then, I don't know. EXWM is awesome.

53:11 exwm: application-specific local simulation keys

image from video 00:53:11.000Amin: You can also put local simulation keys, application-specific simulation keys, depending on, the application, terminals, for example, or, Zathura. This is a PDF viewer. To have application-specific custom key bindings, how cool is that? For example, if I'm in Xterm or something like the Mate terminal, hitting C-c C-c twice basically, it'll just send the C-c key to the terminal. Because one thing with EXWM is that you can set it to capture a couple of Emacs prefixes, like C-x or C-c. So the application by default doesn't see it because Emacs captures it. But this is one of those mechanisms by which you can send a key through. Let's see.

54:04 binding C-q to exwm-input-send-next-key

Amin: The other thing is, you can set it like EXWM inputs send next key. So the default is C-c C-q, but I just bind it to C-q, and I, for example, can do C-q C-t to send C-t to the underlying application. So that's the other thing. Yeah, and then let's see.

54:28 Renaming buffers

image from video 00:55:05.333Amin: So this thingy here, I enable EXWM and I add this rename hook and all it does is basically to add the window titles to the buffer that I can see on the mode line. But as long as it's within a certain reasonable length, like for example, I have 25 characters. If it's longer than that, it will just put dot dot dot. So yeah, that's all the purpose of that. Let's see, for example, if I launch Xterm, it appears there. The perfect example is actually here on the right-hand side. On the mode line, we see Firefox, ESR, Emacs, Comp Chat. It's a bit long, so it just puts the dot dot dot there. So that's all that does.

Sacha: Yeah, now being able to use Emacs to manage the tiling of these things instead of my having to fiddle with alt-dragging things to snap nicely into buffers. Yes, very cool stuff. EXLDM. Gotta try it.

Amin: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, let's see.

55:36 dunst for notifications

image from video 00:55:36.300Amin: Here I launch Dunst if the executable is installed for getting notifications in ESWM. I think there's at least one or two Emacs specific packages that implement a simple notification daemon or backend so that Emacs itself can handle that. But I found Dunst good enough for my use cases coming from I3, Sway, like tiling window manager background. I just reuse that. So yeah, I just start a process, keep a handle of it in this dunst process variable here. And this thing I discovered recently, it's cool. using set-process-query-on-exit-flag, you can basically have Emacs not ask you if you want to exit Emacs if that process is still running. It'll just kill it without confirming with you. So just a little convenience.

Sacha: That is also cool. Just a heads up, I have about 15 minutes before the kiddo runs out because she'll be done with school then. Even just the EXWM part and other things that you've shown us in the config have been super awesome. But are there other things in the next 15 minutes that you would love to show people so that they can see how it works in practice?

56:54 exwm xsettings and responding to screen configuration changes

image from video 00:57:13.733Amin: One thing I'll just mention, EXWM, one more thing, and then I'll go check. I think this is kind of recent: EXWM xsettings, and this allows you to dynamically at runtime change some of these things that you would normally set in an X resources file, like fonts. These kinds of settings were especially commonplace back when Wayland wasn't a thing or wasn't very popular. You would set some of these font settings there. With EXWM xsettings, you can do this dynamically, and what's awesome about that is it also lets you hook into, for example, if your screen configuration changes, if you plug in a monitor or unplug it, then you can run whatever `xrandr` command to set it up and also adjust those settings. The main thing I use it for is to change the DPI setting. The thing with X11 or Xorg is, unfortunately, there's no per-monitor DPI. There's one global DPI. But I found that on my high-DPI laptop screen, if I set the resolution to 1920x1080 instead of the full resolution, then the default DPI of 96 works just fine with my external monitor as well. All this little hook does, by calling into this function, is: if I'm plugging in my external monitor, lower the resolution and lower the DPI, and if I unplug it, go back to the high thing. I just love this.

Sacha: That's great. We're definitely not going to demonstrate that because plugging in and unplugging monitors is not a good thing for screen sharing, but that sounds really cool. When things change, you can actually get your system to adapt to the changes for you.

Amin: Yeah, it's lovely. Let's see. There's so much more to talk about.

58:59 Slowly getting back into Org mode

Amin: I'm slowly getting back into Org Mode again. For the longest time, I didn't use it and I just used Markdown for my website as well. But I found that it's kind of limited. For example, I was using a Markdown implementation that was written in C and I can't easily customize it. Whereas with Org, I can hook into or create my custom HTML back-end that's a derivative of ox-html, even if I don't necessarily like the defaults or the settings for ox-html. I just recently started writing a new back-end called bhtml for Bandali HTML. It's just a boilerplate. I don't have much there yet, but that's the idea.

Sacha: I love how you can hook into all of these different aspects of Emacs and get it to do exactly what you want.

Amin: Yeah, so that's cool. Let's see.

59:58 chat notes

image from video 01:00:16.067Amin: I have written some things about the prompt for this meeting. Yeah, so I talked about that stuff briefly. Minibuffer setup. Things that I love about my setup is that it's kind of portable, simple. People can easily copy things from it if they want. It's kind of self-contained. And that was kind of a big thing a while back when I wanted to use my configurations on a couple of work machines. And these don't have direct outbound internet access. So I couldn't do things like installing packages with Elpa because that's done over HTTP. So yeah, I use submodules now. I recently began documenting my setup, very much inspired by Prot and Sacha and others.

1:00:52 Mode line

Amin: The things that I'm looking forward to tweaking next is the mode line. This is basically the default mode line of Emacs. A couple versions ago, they added a setting for compacting the mode line, which improves a lot of the extraneous whitespace in it, which is great. It's still... There's too much information. If you use multiple windows or even especially if you use EXWM all of those things like the date or like the battery get repeated in all of the windows, so I'm looking forward to doing my mode line in such a way that for example, it shows most of those things. And Prot actually has an excellent video about that where he shows how you can create your own custom mode line.

Sacha: I've also been tempted to start using the header line too because that's another thing that you can put information in.

Amin: Right, yep, header-line is awesome.

1:01:49 display-buffer-alist

Sacha: Yeah, the display-buffer-alist is particularly powerful because you're combining it with EXWM, so it'd be interesting to see how you can manage windows and applications and stuff.

Amin: Especially, just like how we saw in today's video call and also a call that I had with Prot recently. For example, if I open a describe-variable or something, it'll by default use the right area of the screen right now where our video is. So it reuses that. So I'm also looking forward to reading more about and configuring display-buffer-alist.

1:02:23 TRAMP slowness, maybe disabling VC detection?

Amin: I'd like to figure out some TRAMP slowness. I recently tried using it again. It's awesome. You can seamlessly open files, SSH into other machines and edit files there. But I don't know. It's kind of slow. So I want to see aside from the latency, you know, the physical limit of the latency because of the distance. Is there anything slowing it down? I think I read in the Tramp FAQ that maybe trying to disable VC mode or VC detection for remote connections might help speed it up, or at least having it do only Git, for example, because by default, Emacs' VC has support for Mercurial, CVS, SVN, Git, RCS even.

Sacha: Anything anyone has ever wanted to use in the last 40 years. Here we go. I saw in your chat config actually that you were doing something with the SSH configs and I'd never come across that. So I was like, oh, that's something I should look into later.

Amin: I don't remember the specifics, but it's all out there. Feel free to look into it.

1:03:39 eat

Amin: Especially with this EXWM setup, I still use Xterm sometimes and I have the Emacs EAT terminal, which is a terminal emulator written in Emacs Lisp. If I launch it right now, it's awesome. It actually is very powerful and it's a properly capable terminal emulator. It just can be a little bit slow. It is slower than xterm, but it's still a lot faster than whatever Emacs has built in. So this is pretty cool. But yeah, I don't want to use it a lot. And I kind of started testing, delegating more things or using more async-shell-command to just basically open this prompt and then do whatever I want. anyway.

Sacha: I've also heard things about Ghost TTY. Anyway, so that's another thing to look into. Yes, so @Paniash47 says, "With Emacs 31, there's a new variable where you can hide the minor modes in the mode line." @pkal says it's mode-line-collapse-minor-modes. And @Paniash47 also says, "I personally use the Minions package by Tarsius, and it has some nice features in addition to the built-in features." So other people are tinkering around with their mode lines as well.

Amin: Yeah, it's pretty cool. And then I don't know, I think maybe you touched on something a couple of minutes ago that I was going to go back to, but I forget.

1:05:07 TRAMP completion

Sacha: Tramp SSH completion out of your configs. I was like, there's a Tramp sconfig in here that I've never used. And that sounded interesting. Yeah, tramp-parse-sconfig.

Amin: Ah, right, right, right. Yeah.

Sacha: Which, of course, we're not going to let go because it's private stuff, but yeah.

Amin: Right. Yeah, you're welcome to try this. I'm pretty sure, actually, I took this from the Tramp manual itself. And it's one of those things where it's set and forget, I don't remember. But yeah, it's here. There was something else that I also wanted to show, but I forget. Let me see if looking at the outlines will remind me or if I will see it.

Sacha: And that's one of the things I love about literate configuration is, you know, just kind of look at the structure and skim it and try to find something with keywords and ordered lists and all that stuff.

Amin: Right. Yup. Exactly.

Sacha: Oh, and you know, people will have access to your full configuration because it is in your repository and you have that lovely HTML expert for it as well. So if you, uh, if, if people want to follow up, they can go through that at length. At some point, you're going to add some more screenshots and possibly even video clips to it. so that's there you at git.kelar.org

image from video 01:06:34.567Amin: This is my configurations repository. If you go here to treeview .emacs.d, this is the org file. I also export all of those individual components into this lisp subdirectory. All that stuff is here. The QMK thingy that was mentioned.

1:06:54 ffs: form feed slides, ^L

image from video 01:08:15.933Amin: Oh, I wanted to mention FFS. Okay, I'll do that as well. Yeah, what's up with that?

Sacha: I was trying to find information. It was like, there's no package. It's not what is this thing?

Amin: It's FormFeed Slides and it's going to soon be a package. I was actually talking to Prot about it and I'm hoping to submit it for inclusion in GNU ELPA within, I don't know, the next couple of weeks. It's basically very similar to Prot's Logos package. Turns out we both had the same kind of idea at the exact same time in 2022, and we both used it for our LibrePlanet 2022 presentations. Of course, Prot being the diligent person that he is, he polished his work, documented it, put it on GNU ELPA. I still haven't gotten around to doing it yet, but better late than never. Yeah, let's see. I can maybe show a quick demonstration of that. So let's see. Let's see. Anyway, so if I go to my website sources and net-beyond-web. So I had the LibrePlanet talk a couple years ago. So what FFS is basically, it looks for a particular character in this case, or the default case, it's the page delimiter, ^L, which you can insert by hitting C-q C-l. It basically then designates each of these areas as one slide. So, very, very simple slideshow that you don't even have to use Org or outline or any other major or minor mode. If I launch ffs, by default, it's in a mode where it binds a couple of convenience keys, like p and n, to go into the next and previous slide. You can hit e to edit a slide, similar to Org source, and then make your changes and all of that. And then you can start a presentation by hitting s.

image from video 01:08:58.767Amin: It has hooks for, for example, bumping up the font size or whatever, hiding the mode line. I can toggle the mode line by hitting M here. Let's see. I can also toggle the cursor, to make the cursor visible or not. So, yeah. And then I'm just hitting P and N.

Sacha: Very simple, very minimalist. You have a file, you've got page markers, and that's all you got.

Amin: Yeah, pretty much. And then...

1:09:34 Speaker notes

Amin: The neat thing that it has that I also liked implementing at the time is it has a speaker notes feature.

image from video 01:09:47.767Amin: So you can designate a file as being the speaker notes where it has the same structure separators with ^L. But you can type your notes over here, whatever. And you can basically open these in two different windows or two different frames on separate displays. And then in whichever one of those you advance the slides, like p n n, it also does the other one.

Sacha: That's brilliant. I was looking for a way to do that so I can pretend to know what I'm talking about when I have something on screen, but I can just read my notes or even just remember what points I wanted to make. So this is great. You have speaker notes. You've got the main screen. They can be in two different frames. You can have your frame that you're sharing and your frame that you're not sharing that has all of your cheat sheets. Excellent. And on that note, in about one minute, the kid is going to come running out and want to have snack and all that stuff. Thank you so much for walking through parts of your config. There is more. And so everyone who wants to find out more can go check out your setup. I have a great many things that I want to try out, starting from EXWM to little things like figuring out a boom mic setup because apparently your audio setup is making me very jealous. Yes, thank you for doing this. I'm going to post the transcript and the chapters. I have a chapter every minute. It's going to be a long time. But it was good. Lots of cool stuff. Thank you again.

Amin: Sounds great. And yeah, you're very welcome. And thank you so much for having me as well, Sacha. I'm very delighted to be here, especially, I think, just by chance. I think I'm the first person who you're doing this with after the long hiatus. So that's an extra honor for me. But yeah, it's been fun. I could go on for hours. I'm sure we both could. This has been fun.

Sacha: If we wanted to go on for hours, Prot has more flexible scheduling, so he can chat with people for two hours and stuff, and you already have conversations going on with him. But I unfortunately have a small mammal who's 10 years old and loves me very much, and likes to not let me concentrate for very long. But thank you everyone for joining. Thank you for the chat. And thank you also, stream, for all the interesting questions. I will send you all the information and update the post. And we'll see you all on Thursday. I've got another chat. All of a sudden, all these Emacs chats are going to happen. Thanks. Oh, and you said you're happy to be on the hook for doing another EmacsConf this year, right?

Amin: Yes. You can hold me to that. There will be another EmacsConf and I will be active in it.

Sacha: Alright then, I'm going to end that broadcast. Thanks everyone, bye!

Amin: Thank you, bye bye!

Chat

  • sachactube: This is a test message
  • sachactube: Getting ready for Emacs Chat 21 with Amin Bandali, https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/
  • JacksonScholberg: Yo
  • sachactube: Yo yo yo, we are live!
  • IhorRadchenkoyantar92: … and the list can continue until the end of the stream? :)
  • IhorRadchenkoyantar92: do you compile those packages?
  • sachactube: Automatically compiled by prepare-user-lisp because of user-lisp-directory, I think
  • IhorRadchenkoyantar92: makes sense
  • IhorRadchenkoyantar92: this configure macro looks a lot like good old use-package
  • IhorRadchenkoyantar92: I just do (use-package foo :config ) and then :tangle no in actual src block
  • IhorRadchenkoyantar92: what is funny, with-eval-after-load is itself a macro
  • sachactube: hahaha, it's much smaller though
  • IhorRadchenkoyantar92: not smaller at all! Because there is recursion with-eval-after-load (macro) -> eval-after-load (also macro!)
  • IhorRadchenkoyantar92: hmm. wrong
  • IhorRadchenkoyantar92: ok. let me not do two things at the same time
  • blaiseutube: yay, I made it!
  • blaiseutube: screenshots and also asciicinema
  • blaiseutube: asciinema ?
  • blaiseutube: whatever
  • sachactube: and gif-screencast
  • blaiseutube: nice
  • blaiseutube: Sacha, your mic volume is just a bit lower than his so it's a bit harder (for me) to hear you.
  • sachactube: Hmm, let me try turning my dial, let's see if this next one is better
  • blaiseutube: better, I think
  • blaiseutube: it's also that Amin has an awesome microphone. The result sounds like Amin is in the room with me and we are both listening to you on speakerphone. it's not terrible
  • blaiseutube: we're all friends her
  • blaiseutube: here
  • sachactube: I think we have the same mic, but he has an awesome setup, so I'm going to bug him for tips =D
  • paniash47: Hello there! Nice to see this chat. :)
  • blaiseutube: yes, low gain and close mic is good. Sacha if prefer to avoid a boom, you can use a microphone with a tight pattern and increase gain. LMK if you want to unleash my inner audio engineer.
  • sachactube: oooh. my mic is right next to my laptop though, so I'm not sure I can get away from the typing noises
  • sachactube: I'll just have to get cozy with y'all
  • blaiseutube: mini buffet is an underrated superpower. I think Kakoune adopted that also
  • blaiseutube: helpful for a11y and users with sequential processing/ ADHD issues
  • blaiseutube: (I noticed that the comments are recorded so I'm trying to add value 🥴)
  • paniash47: Split keyboards make sense with vanilla keybindings. I'd like to switch but moving from evil is difficult :(
  • sachactube: much appreciated!
  • blaiseutube: what about "time since last save" or do you have some auto save magic?
  • blaiseutube: 🤯
  • blaiseutube: emacs all the things
  • blaiseutube: LOL, "I save everything regularly" …so he's one of those people.
  • paniash47: I think with emacs 31, there's a new variable where you can hide the minor modes in the modeline
  • pkal_: mode-line-collapse-minor-modes
  • paniash47: I personally use the minions package by tarsius (Magit author) and it has some nice features in addition to the built-in feature.
  • paniash47: ghostel is the package :)
  • blaiseutube: BRB

Find more Emacs Chats or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat

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From David Dimagid: What we talk about when we talk about recommending Emacs packages

| emacs

David Dimagid wrote this post for Emacs Carnival May 2026: "May I recommend…". Here it is!

Someone recently said on emacs-devel that they'd like to talk about recommending ELPA packages. Someone else said we should first ask what "recommending" actually means. RMS opened a thread asking that very question. It's still open, and you can follow it there (ELPA: to curate or not to curate).

I think we could apply Rich Hickey's technique here and start by looking up the definition of "recommend" in the dictionary. I invite everyone to do so with whatever dictionary you have at hand and to trust your definitions.

Now, we could evaluate ELPA packages for recommendation based on whether they complement or improve functionality already present in the core. For example, diff-hl by Dmitry Gutov. Its description says:

diff-hl-mode highlights uncommitted changes on the side of the window, allows you to jump between and revert them selectively. In buffers controlled by Git, you can stage and unstage the changes.

That last feature —staging partial hunks— is missing from VC, and diff-hl adds it seamlessly. We could say diff-hl complements the core.

Then there are major mode packages, like csv-mode, markdown-mode, cobol-mode, and so on. They add functionality that doesn't exist in the core. They have no direct equivalent. We could call them standalone packages.

Now consider another excellent package, like diff-hl, that depends only on the core: expreg, by Yuan Fu, the region expansion package. With a single key, it expands the region based on context. The core already offers this through sexp movement commands, but not with a single keybinding — you need several. Some will prefer the native core way; others will prefer the package. We could say expreg improves or, depending on how you look at it, duplicates the core's functionality.

So, in my opinion, package recommendations should be structured around their relationship with the Emacs core. I believe the best-regarded ELPA packages should be those that encourage users to use what the core already offers, first and foremost, and then try those packages because they extend a feature the core lacks or complement it. This would also help more people discover lesser-known core features, increase bug reports, and, over time, bring more contributors to Emacs. That way, the Emacs community could have a package repository it can trust for as long as Emacs exists. Perhaps the person who wrote Elfeed would have known about Newsticker and would have contributed to that package instead. Perhaps if we recommended what Emacs already offers, the Elisp we write would be Elisp of and for Emacs.

If you e-mail me your comments, I can forward them to David!

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Emacs Carnival May 2026: "May I recommend..."

| emacs, community

It's May and I like puns, so I'm going to suggest "May I recommend…" as our Emacs Carnival theme this month, building on lively conversations about people's favourite packages on lobste.rs, Reddit, and Hacker News. Let's go beyond packages and talk workflows, tips, practices, perspectives… whatever you'd recommend!

It was pretty nice having a wiki page that people could edit without needing to wait for me, so if you write about this topic, feel free to and add your link. If you run into problems doing that, please e-mail me and I can add the link for you.

People have already started sharing their recommendations:

I'll also do a round-up post at the end of the month so that it shows up in people's RSS feeds.

Looking forward to seeing what y'all recommend!

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2026-05-04 Emacs news

| emacs, emacs-news

Thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts on the April 2026 Emacs Carnival theme of Newbies and Starter Kits. Check out that post to see all the entries people have shared so far. I enjoyed chatting with Prot about the topic, and he shared some defaults that even experienced users have been trying out. The carnival theme for May 2026 is "May I recommend…". Looking forward to reading your posts!

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Bluesky #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

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May 14: Sacha, Prot, and Philip Kaludercic Talk Emacs: Newcomer Experience

| emacs, community, yay-emacs

Philip Kaludercic wanted to continue the conversation from YE24: Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs - Newbies/Starter Kits. He's spent a lot of time thinking about this as one of the main contributors to newcomers-presets, so there'll probably be much to cover!

(America/Toronto -0400) = Thu May 14 1030H EDT / 0930H CDT / 0830H MDT / 0730H PDT / 1430H UTC / 1630H CEST / 1730H EEST / 2000H IST / 2230H +08 / 2330H JST

We'll probably talk about:

  • Emacs 31 or Emacs 32 directions towards improving the newcomer experience
  • How the newcomers presets fits into the bigger picture
  • Documentation and guides
  • How to get more feedback from newbies (virtual focus group? mailing list? office hours?)
  • Informal community resources
  • Other things we can do to help

Related links:

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YE24: Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs - Newbies/Starter Kits

Posted: - Modified: | emacs, community, yay-emacs

: Added chapters, transcript, and Prot's defaults.

Context

The Emacs Carnival theme for April 2026 is newbies/starter kits. I chatted with Prot about helping people get into Emacs and also supporting lifelong learning.

Prot had some notes on how he started with Emacs in 2019 in All about switching to Emacs (video blog) | Protesilaos. These notes were just a few months after he started, so his experience was pretty fresh.

In Computing in freedom with GNU Emacs | Protesilaos (2026), he said:

Remember that I started using Emacs without a background in programming. … I learnt the basics within a few days. I started writing my own Emacs Lisp within weeks. And within a year I had my modus-themes moved into core Emacs.

Prot has several projects that might be of interest to many newcomers to Emacs:

  • modus-themes, which are part of Emacs core and are therefore just a M-x load-theme or M-x customize-themes away
  • Emacs Lisp Elements, a book that helps people learn Emacs Lisp
    • Where does this fit into people's learning journeys? How can they come across it and use it?
  • perhaps Denote
    • What would it take for people to learn enough to be able to use this?

I'm also curious about his thoughts on the general Emacs newcomer experience and what we can do to make it better.

He also offers Emacs coaching. I wonder if any newbies have taken advantage of that. There are a few other coaches listed on the EmacsWiki. (Ooh, Emacs buddy, that was neat.)

Other possible topics: Philip suggested the following general themes for the Emacs Carnival:

  • What are your memories of starting with Emacs?
  • What experiences do you have with teaching Emacs to new users?
  • Do you think if starter kits are more of a hindrance in the long term or necessary for many users to even try Emacs?
  • What defaults do you think should be changed for everyone (new and old users)?
  • What defaults do you think should be changed for new users (see NewcomersTheme)?
  • What is the sweet-spot between starter-kit minimalism and maximalism?

Chapters

  • 0:00 Intro
  • 0:14 Warming up
  • 2:38 C-g is supposed to get you out of everything, but it doesn't work for the minibuffer
  • 3:14 Anything related to display-buffer is hard for people to configure. Many windows do not focus by default. You have to switch to the other window to q.
  • 4:32 Good defaults
  • 4:37 How do I set my fonts? Which is the one I should be using?
  • 5:16 ediff is unusable by default for everyone, not just newcomers
  • 5:54 Packages to install
  • 6:30 People muddle through, but it's confusing
  • 8:21 The wiki might be a good approach for the community. Start here.
  • 9:35 The direction of the newcomers theme is nice
  • 10:51 Themes versus minor modes
  • 12:20 People think of themes as styles, not arbitrary customizations
  • 13:57 Listing changes for newcomers-presets
  • 16:13 Terminology is also a challenge
  • 16:54 Maybe documentation aliases?
  • 17:57 Learning Emacs as a nonprogrammer
  • 19:31 Emacs Lisp Elements
  • 20:30 Getting the hang of Emacs
  • 22:31 Getting help when you have a starter kit
  • 24:29 Customize is overwhelming for beginners
  • 27:55 debug-init
  • 29:11 Getting help: partially bridged by LLMs?
  • 31:03 Things people don't even know about
  • 32:44 Filling in the blanks
  • 33:39 .emacs
  • 37:04 Discovery and the info manual
  • 38:36 Address your immediate need; small steps
  • 41:46 :config and setq is nicer than :custom for C-x C-e purposes (eval-last-sexp)
  • 45:31 Culture of documentation and sharing
  • 47:12 Link to a search
  • 49:49 Getting through the gap between beginner tutorials and the next step
  • 51:13 Predictability
  • 51:52 Brief mention of Popper
  • 52:28 Earlier is better than later for Emacs Lisp. Take it as is.
  • 55:19 Before and after comparisons
  • 56:07 user-init-directory
  • 57:21 Emacs core
  • 59:04 Getting past the initial awkward phase
  • 59:36 Even reporting an issue is a great contribution
  • 1:00:45 Next steps: adding to the wiki
  • 1:02:39 Core longevity

Transcript

Expand this to read the transcript

0:08 Warming up

Sacha: All right. Hello, this is Yay Emacs 24, I think. And today I'm going to be talking to Prot, who is going to join eventually. In about five minutes is our scheduled time. And I want to pick his brain about newcomers, the newcomer experience for Emacs, the starter kits, what we can do to make it easier for people to get into Emacs, and how we can support lifelong learning. So let me spend a few minutes here getting all set up so that if you have any questions, you can use the YouTube chat during the live stream so that I can read your questions out loud to Prot. And also so that I can share everything. I think my audio is working. And also in the meantime, I can tell you what I've been doing lately. I have just posted a guide to newcomers presets, which is a new feature in Emacs 31. It's a theme that enables a bunch of defaults. Sorry, that changes a bunch of defaults to make it a little bit nicer for people. And let's see, what was that? I don't know what that sound just meant. Okay, Prot, it says he's in the Google Meet room. So I will now admit him. And I think we should be live. Fantastic. Hello. Hello, hello. All right.

Prot: Hello, Sacha. Good day.

Sacha: Hello, Prot. Good day. Thank you for joining early. I was just doing my pre-session panicking and warming up. But since you're here and since I have a hard stop in about one hour, a little over one hour since I have to make the kid a grilled cheese sandwich, let's dive right into it.

Prot: Yes, yes. The grilled sandwich cannot wait.

Sacha: No, no, no. She'll be hungry. So, the theme for the Emacs Carnival this month was newbies and starter kits. And it gives us a good excuse to start thinking about How do we make the Emacs experience better for new users? Now I know you probably have run into a lot of new users from the talks that you've been giving, the packages you make, everything, the coaching. So tell me about what you've been thinking about this so far.

2:36 C-g is supposed to get you out of everything, but it doesn't work for the minibuffer

Prot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So broadly speaking, there are a few pain points that I think every new user experiences. One is the behavior of C-g. The fact that you have the mini buffer open and you do C-g because C-g is supposed to get you out of where you are and the mini buffer will stay open by default. And I have seen people struggle live. It's like, oh, I am, you know, they have the mini buffer open, they click somewhere else, then they type C-g, the mini buffer stays there, and they're like, what is happening? Why is this not working? It stopped working. That's the one thing.

3:11 Anything related to display-buffer is hard for people to configure. Many windows do not focus by default. You have to switch to the other window to q.

Prot: The other big area where a lot of people, not just beginners, struggle with is anything related to display buffers, which can be configured, of course, via the display-buffer-alist. And some of the common pain points with that are the fact that many windows do not focus by default. For example, you open a helper buffer, it doesn't focus the window by default. So if you want to type q to dismiss it, you have to switch to it, then type q. You do a care, it doesn't focus a care by default. You have to go there and then interact with it. These sorts of things. And then there are a few other things. I have written some settings that I can share with you as well. Maybe I can, I don't know, email them to you and then you can... I don't hear you now. One second.

Sacha: Sorry, I turned on mute. Do you want to share your screen? Because that's another thing you can do.

Prot: Yes, of course, of course, of course. But I meant to say that, so I have this here, and I was of course about to write a blog post and all that. Let me increase the font size. Is this font size okay or is it too small?

Sacha: Oh, this is good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Prot: Okay, so I have written a few things, so I don't have to go through all of them.

4:28 Good defaults

image from videoProt: But these are basically good defaults based on what I have noticed.

4:35 How do I set my fonts? Which is the one I should be using?

image from videoProt: Another thing that is really common is how do I actually set my fonts, right? Because there are like a million ways to do this as well. And the people are like, okay, but which is the one that I should be using? And of course, when I pick one option, I don't mean to say that this is the right option, but it's just to not be technical about it. Like, okay, just use this and forget about it.

image from videoProt: A few other settings and a few common packages. And at the end of this... Oh, sorry. I have to really make this point.

5:13 ediff is unusable by default for everyone, not just newcomers

image from videoProt: Ediff by default is unusable. Out of the box, Ediff is literally unusable. I cannot excuse that. Everything else I can excuse, this is not excusable. Sorry. This is the minimum viable setup for it.

Sacha: So maybe that's something to suggest for newcomer presets or maybe even the defaults.

Prot: I would say the defaults. This is not a newcomer thing. Basically, if you want to have that default layout, you just have to opt into it. Sorry if I'm offending anyone, but I don't mean to say that. You have to consider the ergonomics of it.

5:52 Packages to install

Prot: And then towards the bottom of this list, some packages, third party packages. that I recommend for installation. This is not exhaustive. I try to be minimalist here. So, of course, there are many, many good, excellent, top-notch packages that I don't recommend here. And, for example, I don't recommend any of my packages here. But I just included some for people to get started.

Sacha: So it sounds like we should have a Prot starter kit.

Prot: No, no. I already have too many packages that I maintain.

6:28 People muddle through, but it's confusing

Sacha: It also sounds like you are talking to a lot of newbies and you are hearing about a lot of pain points and frustrations. How are people finding information in the first place? How are people finding this information? Do people tell you about their experience of getting into Emacs? Where are they finding the stuff? How do they find their way to you?

Prot: Generally they muddle through. So they will find a blog post, they will find a video, they will just do some search. Now, of course, there is also LLMs providing feedback. So it's a combination of all those and they try to piece together whatever kind of knowledge those sources provide. The thing with the newcomer experience is that there isn't a curation of content. Like of course you were doing that thing with the wiki, right? So of course you are working towards that. But what I mean is there are like options like, oh, you can do it in these 10 different ways. But for a newcomer, this is just details that don't make sense. Because the newcomer cannot weigh the pros and cons of each option, or even if they have pros and cons, or they are just different ways of expressing the same intent. Such as with the fonts, for example. You can do the frame fonts, or the faces, or whatever.

Sacha: Okay, so if there was something more curated, what would that look like? I know you spend a lot of time thinking about the, you know, the information architecture of your documentation, which is the lovely thing about your pack, one of the many lovely things about your packages. But what could that kind of newcomer experience look like for documentation?

8:20 The wiki might be a good approach for the community. Start here.

Prot: What you were doing with the wiki, I think is the right approach from a community perspective, meaning like, yeah, here is the single point of entry. Take it from there. Basically, don't look elsewhere. Start with this. No matter what you do, start with this. I think that's a good approach and basically in the community we should be agreeing on that. I didn't see all of your videos yesterday. I don't have the time to watch all of it. But basically on the Emacs subreddit, which is basically where a lot of people find information. That's the first thing that should be on the sidebar or basically it could even be pinned on the on the top of the tips and tricks section, the thread there. So that's the one thing. Yes, please.

Sacha: Yes, so the Emacs subreddit does have in its sidebar a link to the Emacs Wiki. Not calling out the Emacs Newbie page specifically, but there is a page. There's a link to the Emacs Newbie page from the Emacs Wiki homepage, I think. But yeah, as long as we can come up with a reasonably coherent starting point for people, then that will inevitably show up in people's recommendations as they respond to all these threads.

Prot: Yes, yes, very well, very well.

9:33 The direction of the newcomers theme is nice

Prot: Other than that, I really like the direction of the newcomers theme. I don't know exactly now if newcomers theme works in practice. Like, I don't know what happens if you do Emacs disable-heme, or specifically what I mean.

image from videoProt: I haven't tried this but what I mean if you do this: mapc disable-theme right, the custom enabled theme maybe you have seen this right so you want to disable all the other themes before loading your theme right I'm sure somebody has written something like this maybe I have done it and then it's like you know load your favorite theme now right and then you do your favorite theme or whatever For example, here. So in this case, I don't know what happens to the newcomers theme. I will assume that it will disable it. In which case, I think that has to be prevented.

Sacha: Oh, but then it wouldn't be treated the same as other things.

Prot: Which you can do. Which you can do, for example, if I go to Fontaine. And of course, I got this from use-package. But you can do it with a synthetic theme. So there is a little trick you can do.

10:45 Themes versus minor modes

Sacha: I was looking at newcomers presets recently, and when I was trying to make instructions for people to actually use this stuff, I ended up leaning towards just telling them to use either the splash screen, of course, or M-x customize-themes, from where they can check and uncheck things if they wanted additional themes layered on top of that. It's not like you can't uncheck it and then all of your settings go back to what they were before. Some of the things are still left over.

Prot: That's why I like the direction. I'm not sure if it should be a theme though. I think it should be a minor mode. And the minor mode should be like here is the opinionated settings and here are the default settings.

Sacha: Do we already have like a mechanism for letting minor modes override the variables in a nice way but let you go back to the previous version? Because it's not just restoring the default customized ones either.

Prot: I do something like that in Logos but I'm not sure to be honest right now how I even do it. Set arg and maybe this was a wrong time ago so I cannot even recall what exactly I was doing but actually this was contributed by Daniel Mendler so of course something like this could be added to Core Emacs as part of the newcomers theme eventually. If not, somewhere in core anyway.

12:19 People think of themes as styles, not arbitrary customizations

Prot: But I think it shouldn't be a theme. Basically, I like the idea, I don't think it's the right tool. Because themes are... It's also confusing language, you know? Because theme, when you talk to the average person, they will think of the style. And they won't think about arbitrary customizations. Whereas in Emacs we have this idiosyncratic conception of theme where it's like any kind of a user option as well as faces.

Sacha: So it sounds like if it were a package that defined a minor mode that people could turn on and off Even better, yes, exactly.

Prot: And there is this user option. I forget, do I even have it here for the built-in packages? I don't remember if I added it here. No, there is something like update the built-in packages. Yeah, so there is an option like that. So, of course, it could be like built into Emacs 31 as well as ELPA, kind of like Eglot. And then users could be like, okay, update this. So going forward, they can also benefit from whatever comes from Emacs 31. Or, you know, the development target of Emacs going forward.

13:55 Listing changes for newcomers-presets

Sacha: One of the challenges that I encountered when I was starting to play around with newcomers presets or other things like that is that it turns on all these options, but there's no easy way for people to say, okay, this is what has changed. This is how to use it. So I've started documenting that. And I think this is a challenge generally for many of the starter kits. It takes already a lot of work to make the configuration and maybe answer people's questions or It's a tricky situation how best to do it.

Prot: I guess the natural place for that is the manual. And the manual, I believe right now the manual mentions something along the lines of, well, newcomers can just toggle this on kind of thing, but it doesn't really tell them what that will entail. So I think it's worth actually keeping track of all the changes and be like, well, the newcomers theme will change this and that and the other. And it could just be a bullet point of items. Maybe it doesn't have to go into all the technicalities like, hey, we are changing, I don't know, the isearch so that it shows the counter. By default, it doesn't show the counter, right? Like, it doesn't need to be as detailed. It can just say, okay, these are the user options that are affected.

Sacha: or the minor modes that are enabled. You know, the specific commands and variable settings, whatever. It's like, how do I combine these different concepts to do something? Or taking a step back further, something we've talked about in previous conversations, how do I even begin to learn this overwhelming number of concepts? You know, how do I start to memorize all these keyboard shortcuts? And I'm not sure we have a lot of support for that yet.

16:10 Terminology is also a challenge

Prot: No, because I think part of the challenge here is the terminology. For example, if we say completion like me and you and other users, we kind of know what we are talking about, right? So minibuffer and orderless and all that, right? But if the user wants to express something along the lines, they may say the search box. Or, you know, like the interaction panel or whatever. So they don't have a language of the completion framework or the mini buffer or whatever. So even then it can be tricky for them to kind of narrow down what they are searching for.

16:52 Maybe documentation aliases?

Prot: And maybe then it makes sense to also think in terms of clusters of configuration, kind of what starter kits do with the various modules they define. And you can have aliases for them. Aliases in the manual, I mean. Like in the manual, if you type i, it goes to the index, right? And you can have a concept index. So you can have a concept index for the search panel or whatever. And that means the minibuffer and friends.

Sacha: So it's like we're doing search engine optimization so that people can find things with the words that they use. I'm not sure that will be in the Emacs manual itself, but one of the things I've appreciated about people sharing their notes through blog posts and things like that is because they're using their words to describe a concept, and they're linking it to the code that uses the words that Emacs does. So then people can then say, oh, I'm looking for this. It's actually called this in the Emacs world. But this takes time for people to kind of make those connections.

17:56 Learning Emacs as a nonprogrammer

Sacha: What was it like if you can look back to like 2019 when you were learning all of this stuff for the first time? What was it like for you as a non-programmer to come into this world where people are using all these strange terms?

Prot: Yeah, it was a challenge for sure. But I think actually the fact that I started out as a beginner, as a beginner into programming, I mean, benefited me in the sense that I was a blank slate. I don't have to unlearn terms. So I didn't have a concept of, okay, in other, I don't know, programming IDEs, for example, they call this the narrowing framework or whatever. I was like, completion. Okay, let's move on. It was the first time I was introduced to such concepts. So I think in that sense, I was lucky. That granted, there is a lot of reading involved. I was reading the manual and learning from it.

Sacha: And that's something I do too. I mean, I'll still casually flip through the Emacs manual or the Org manual because every time you read it, there's something else that catches your eye and makes you think, how do I use that? How do I do that? And I like that, you know, you and Mickey Peterson and other people have also been organizing these thoughts into like a linear arrangement of logical progression. So that's the books that There aren't a lot of books about Emacs that people can read.

19:29 Emacs Lisp Elements

Sacha: But how do people get to something like your Emacs Lisp elements? How do we support their learning journey from, I have absolutely no idea how to do anything in Emacs to, okay, I'm ready to read this book and get stuff out of it?

Prot: Yeah, yeah. When I recommend that book, I recommend it to people who have already decided that Emacs is the right tool for them. So I would basically say, look, Elisp is for you if you are already sold on Emacs, because what Elisp gives you is that extra you need to make Emacs do what you want, basically to tap into the potential programmability of Emacs. But to get to that point, you have already been convinced that you already like Emacs. If you don't vibe with it at the outset, you won't learn Elisp, not least because it's a niche language.

20:28 Getting the hang of Emacs

Sacha: Okay, so how do we get people to the point where they can vibe with Emacs? Where they can appreciate it? Because when they start off, it's this clunky text editor that has these weird keyboard shortcuts and strange terms, and all we can do is offer them videos and blog posts from people who say, this is totally awesome. I've been using it for three years or 20 years or whatever, and I love it. That's the light at the end of the tunnel, but there's a lot of tunnel to get through.

Prot: correct correct correct it's difficult and i think that's why something like the newcomers theme ultimately is the way forward where it's like yeah opt into this and that's already a good set of defaults and i think what really matters is to reach a point where you can actually open your files actually move around and that happens with the very basics like that happens with the tutorial already what the tutorial doesn't give you is the basic interface, such as the mini-buffer. The default mini-buffer, I don't think it's good for beginners. Actually, maybe it's not even good for advanced users, but that's another. You have to have a few of the basic packages enabled, and then the tutorial, I think, is enough for that initial push. Then, of course, it's also up to the user to do some reading, based on what you will provide them with.

Sacha: I know when I was trying this, I started a fresh Emacs so that I could see what it's like when people don't have their accumulated cruft of 20 years of configuration. And I was like, I need some kind of completion that I don't have to keep pressing tab for. So maybe Fido vertical mode can be part of that, you know, standard, at least in ?? or whatever, that would be nice. But yeah, there are a lot of these niceties that reduce the friction enough that people can then start enjoying things more and more.

22:28 Getting help when you have a starter kit

Sacha: Newcomers presets are some kind of starter kit. They're great at getting people over that initial hump. But the challenge with starter kits and probably things like the newcomers presets has also been that when people ask for help, it's hard because they don't know the things that have changed under the hood. So they're asking for help and the people who are helping them are like, I don't know what's going on there.

Prot: More so if the starter kit has its own macros and way of doing things, such as Doom Emacs. On the one hand, Doom Emacs does an excellent job at integrating everything, providing a polished experience, comprehensive configuration and so on. On the other hand, they have their own way of doing things like they have their own macros. You have to use Doom sync or whatever to do things from the command line. So somebody who is not using Doom basically has no means of knowing what is happening in that world. So that is definitely a challenge. So for me, a good starter kit is one that at the very least uses what a generic configuration would use, meaning no macros, no weird shell scripts and that sort of thing.

Sacha: And I did spend some time going over the starter kit list in the Emacs wiki to try to sort it by minimalist, stays close to vanilla, all the way to the changes a lot of things about Emacs and you probably should ask the community of that starter kit first if you need help. So that's kind of like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs at that end of the spectrum and things like better defaults would be like at the Like just a little bit of smoothing over of things. But then also, it was interesting to see some of the starter kits focus on saying, okay, you don't have to write any code to extend this further. A lot of the things are available through Customize.

24:25 Customize is overwhelming for beginners

Sacha: Now, Customize is pretty overwhelming also for a newcomer. So how do we get people to the point where they might feel comfortable going through this Customize interface And saying, oh, I can find what I want to change and I can change it and I'm not worried about breaking everything.

Prot: Yeah, I actually, when I was trying to use Customize with people, I gave it an honest try. Like, for example, we tried to do Emacs Customize the org capture templates. And I was seeing it live. Impossible for people to understand what is happening. Like, Customize has this concept of the insert button, right? So if you have a list of things, you can do insert to add the next element to the list. If you have an Elisp understanding of what you are actually interacting with, you kind of know what to do, right? But otherwise, I was seeing it live. It's like... I have no idea what is happening. What is this? So for me, my approach is basically skip customize altogether. For me, it's a lost cause. Unless it's completely rewritten, I mean in its current form, it's not good for beginners unless it's for toggles, like true or false kind of thing. If it's for anything more involved, it's not good. And what it is good for is for discovery, discovery of user options. But it presents the user options in a human-readable format which you cannot just copy-paste into your configuration. So, for example, it doesn't have the dashes for the names.

Sacha: Yeah, and getting it out of the customized variables if you wanted to keep a nice clean Emacs is hard. Although I would say that's more of an intermediate level concern. When they start caring about having a beautiful Emacs that other people can learn from. A couple of comments in from people who are watching the stream. Hello, folks! Hello! @hajovonta6300 says, "Hi legends." @JacksonScholberg and @petertillemans2231 say, well, @JacksonScholberg says hi. @petertillemans2231 says, "I am not worthy." @takoverflow says, "Thank you for these streams." @ShaeErisson says, "I love Emacs but haven't really learned Elisp." And I know Shae has been using Emacs for a long time. So that's interesting that you have people who enjoy using Emacs. I don't know whether something is getting in their way when it comes to learning Emacs Lisp or whether it's just totally fine already the way it is. So that's different things. @JacksonScholberg says, oh, so @hajovonta6300 says, "you are worthy if you are willing to learn." Maybe the resources are there as people start digging into EmacsLisp. Maybe the combination of looking at other people's source code and trying to ask on Reddit or whatever is enough. @JacksonScholberg says," I vibe with Emacs after using other text editors that were not minimalist enough for my preferences, plus having experience with other open source software like Linux." @petertillemans2231 says, "Well, Emacs and minimalist in the same sentence. Strange concept, but I know what you mean." There's a whole spectrum of things you can do with Emacs, right? So yeah, people can just use basic Emacs.

27:53 debug-init

Sacha: And then @petertillemans2231 says, "I guess learn starters quickly to use emacs --debug-init. Maybe not in the first hour, but close to it. Close to tweaking.

Prot: Yeah. Which of course doesn't help. It's very useful, of course, but it doesn't help beginners because they cannot read the backtrace.

Sacha: Yeah, it is hard to navigate even for people who are experienced like there's a whole bunch of things and what you need to change is like a small thing and you don't know about edebug and all that other stuff.

Prot: But of course debugging it many times of course it is a lifesaver for sure.

Sacha: Yeah, and I think a lot of these things can be stepped around if you have, you know, like you, someone more experienced with Emacs to watch over your shoulder either in person or virtually and say, you know, do it this way instead, or have you heard about this package? But this is an experience that I think not a lot of people have because many times they're isolated, right? They're the only Emacs person they know around them. And maybe they'll go to meet up, but maybe they're intimidated by the idea of asking about their beginner problem with all these other people talking about arcane Emacs list things. So how do we get people to the point where they can get help?

29:06 Getting help: partially bridged by LLMs?

Prot: Yeah, I think this is partially bridged. This gap is partially bridged by LLMs. Like a lot of people will just check with a bot and get something useful out of it and basically continue from there. And that's why I said earlier they muddle through because LLMs of course will give you what you ask. So if you kind of don't know what to ask, you will get something that may be useful, maybe needs a further tweak to it. That's why sometimes it's hit or miss.

Sacha: And I am seeing that in a lot of the discussion threads now. Of course, people are concerned about the environmental impacts and the ethical considerations around large language models, but there are also people who are saying, you know, this is what helped me write my first bit of Emacs Lisp, or this is what helped me figure out how to configure Emacs to do the thing that I wanted to do. So for that, I'm like, okay, then maybe there's something there. Challenge, of course, if it's hallucinating something, you're like, no, that function does not actually exist. You got to do it this other way. But if you can get them over some of the humps, maybe that's useful for them.

Prot: Yes, yes, yes. I think, of course, it's not 100% good, but I think it is, on the balance, I think it is good.

Sacha: So when people are too embarrassed or too intimidated to ask people in person, and when I go to these meetups, everyone's always super friendly. Sometimes we're live debugging someone's configuration or someone's function in real time. But sometimes that is a little difficult for people to get to for schedule or other reasons. There are other ways to understand something and ask questions about it and figure it out.

31:01 Things people don't even know about

Sacha: But sometimes you don't even know what to ask questions about. How do we help people in that situation where they don't even know that they're doing something inefficiently and that the solution for their problems is just one package away? How do we help?

Prot: That's difficult because it's on a case-by-case basis. I think you cannot optimize for that because each person will have different intuitions or different pain points, let's say. And maybe you can do it by having the most exhaustive kind of documentation with the equivalent of search engine optimization, as you were saying earlier. But I think eventually people will still have questions and even the formulation of the question may be idiosyncratic. So even if the concept is there, the way it is presented, you might not have a perfect match.

Sacha: And the idiosyncrasy of things is something that it's definitely a challenge for us when we're working with Emacs because everyone has their own way of doing things and everyone therefore has their own... How they set it up or the keyboard shortcuts that they use or the ways that they want the functions to work. Even trying to write documentation to say, if you're learning this, you might want to check out this stuff next, I have a hard time figuring out how to make that make sense to as many people as possible without overwhelming them with 20 different questions.

32:42 Filling in the blanks

Prot: That's the difficult part. Actually, I think that's the part where you have to assume that people will fill in the blanks. For example, I think yesterday you were doing this thing where, well, somebody needs to use Git, but what is even Git? So you have to even know about Git, right? And that's recursive because, well, how do you install Git? Well, you need a terminal. What is a terminal, right? Well, you need to have this thing called Linux. What is a Linux? So basically at some point you have to just say like I will give you as much as I can but I will limit it to the scope of this like Emacs basically. Because otherwise it has infinite scope.

Sacha: And I find that hyperlinks help a lot with that then because we can say, if you need a more detailed description, you can go over there. So now I'm trying to make it easier for myself whenever I say, oh yeah, put this in your .emacs.

33:37 .emacs

Sacha: I'm just like, oh, I'm just going to link to the Emacs wiki page on init files. Because there's this whole discussion that you have to have about what is your .emacs and sometimes it's actually your .emacs.d/init.el but sometimes it's actually your .config/emacs/init.el and, like, pass that off to a page to explain all that stuff.

Prot: Actually I want to say something about this because now it reminded me. So many people nowadays will use .emacs.d/init.el or .config/emacs/init.el But Emacs defaults to reading the .emacs file from your home directory. And I had this case where a user was writing their init file in one of those specified locations, but they did something with Emacs Customize beforehand and Emacs Customize wrote to the .emacs file. So they were loading Emacs and nothing was showing up and they were like, what is wrong? My init file is there. Why is it not working? I'm loading, you know, this dark thing. Why is it white? or whatever. And eventually it was because of the .emacs file. I'm not sure how best to resolve that given that you want to also be backward compatible.

Sacha: No, no, no. Okay. So when I tell people just, you know, here's the link to the init file page in the Emacs wiki, it also includes a describe-variable user-init-file, which will tell you which one is actually loading. And I have a to-do to suggest on emacs-devel, if they haven't already discussed it endlessly, that maybe there should be kind of like a M-x find-user-init-file that just opens that specific file. Would be nice. But yeah. Going back to the chat because people have been sharing great comments as well. Shae says, "I learned about new Emacs packages by pairing with other users and asking, how did you do that thing?" Which I think is a great thing for screencasts. People sharing videos as well because when people share a video, sometimes they see things that they wouldn't have mentioned because they totally take advantage of it. It's just something they take for granted. For example, in your live stream package maintenance sessions, I'm sure you've had this a couple of times. People are asking, what is that that you just did? Videos are great for this.

Prot: Let me open the door for my puppy. I'll be back.

Sacha: In the meantime, let's see if there's anything here I can address by myself. The puppies cannot wait.

Prot: No, the puppies cannot wait.

Sacha: Small mammals in general are like, they need us, they need us. @hajovonta6300 says, "I used Emacs since 2010 and had become a power user, but in the last year, I feel LLMs took over most of the tasks I usually solved with Emacs." I mean actually it's a bit of a tangent here but we're seeing that also with some of the long-term users of Emacs moving on to other editors because whatever they had customized on top of Emacs could be replicated by a custom application written by an LLM. The movement is going both ways. People leaving Emacs for other things, people coming into Emacs because LLMs can help them with stuff. So I just wanted to mention that because things are happening.

37:04 Discovery and the info manual

Sacha: @petertillemans2231 says, "Emacs documentation is very extensive, but I feel discovery of the docs is a problem for new users." And I want to dig into that a bit more. How do we help with this discovery thing?

Prot: In the info manuals, if you know two key bindings, it really helps a lot. One is g, the other is i. But you have to have completion already set up, like vertico-mode, for example.

Sacha: I also like using s for search.

Prot: Or s for search. Those help a lot, because then you can jump to a node or an index. Without those navigating, the manuals can feel cumbersome. That granted, we are back to the point where the user also has to do some research on their own. You cannot compensate for drive, motivation. No matter how much we write, no matter how many themes or minor modes we define, the user also has to be searching.

Sacha: Yeah. And it's going back to the challenge of being overwhelmed. You know, sometimes it's difficult for new users to say, okay, there's so much to learn. How do I scope this so that I don't go crazy? You know, what is the most important thing that I need to learn about first? And then what is the tiniest step after that that I can take? And so forth. Otherwise, it's just like, I want to learn about everything.

38:34 Address your immediate need; small steps

Prot: Based on the discussions I have had, I think the consensus is address your immediate needs. For example, you want to write a to-do list, all you need to know at this early stage is Org Mode. And not all of Org, because Org has approximately one zillion commands. Just to-do and done. And maybe schedule a date. Just learn that, and by learning that, do that for a week, do it for a month, however long it takes for you to embed it as part of your knowledge . And then once you have done that, move on to the next thing. Like, okay, now that I am solid on my to-do's, how do I do the agenda, for example, and incrementally add to that. And the idea is by piecing together your system this way, you achieve two things. First, you build on a solid foundation of knowledge where you know what you are doing. And two, you understand how your system is pieced together. So if something breaks, you already have an intuition of what it could be. Even if you don't know Emacs Lisp, you can guess like, oh, I added this thing the other day and now my Emacs is broken. So probably the breakage is there.

Sacha: And this decomposing it into those tiny steps so that you can piece them together and build slowly understanding each step along the way is something that new people struggle with because they don't have experience to know what the small step is. And I think that's where coaching and mentoring and you know sometimes If you're lucky enough to be able to sit with somebody who says, okay, your next step is just to do this. That would be super lucky. But most people will just have to content themselves with sometimes there's a playlist of videos that they can follow in sequence. Or maybe there's someone, you know, maybe they'll post on Reddit saying, okay, I know this. What should I learn next? I just wish it were easier for us to say... Let's imagine this from the helper point of view. How do we make it easier for people to say, all right, this is where you are. Here's some things that you can look into next. What do you do when you're coaching someone?

Prot: Yes, I always ask them what their needs are. There are some needs which are common. For example, completion. Vertico, for example, I think basically everybody can benefit unless you have a really special use case. But other than that, it's like, well, we don't need to fix everything. Let's understand what your needs are. Let's work towards that goal. And one way to break it down also conceptually is with use-package blocks. I think use-package is an excellent, of course, it's an excellent tool in its own right, but it's an excellent way of saying, you know what? This is one thing. This is one step. And this is the next step. And so people can start thinking in terms of each use-package is a step.

41:45 :config and setq is nicer than :custom for C-x C-e purposes (eval-last-sexp)

Sacha: I sometimes feel like I'm going back and forth. use-package is nice because it allows us to add the hooks and say this stuff happens after the package is loaded, so I don't have to keep having lots of with-eval-after-load. But on the other hand, it becomes harder for people to copy and paste things because then they have to know it needs to go inside the use-package. Do I use the custom keyword or do I just use setq because it looks more copyable?

Prot: This is why me, I don't use the custom. It's not that I have anything personal against it. It's that I found that it's unusable. If you have the equivalent of this in a custom, you cannot do C-x C-e. If you say use-package is syntactic sugar... I have read this before. To somebody who doesn't speak programming lingo, syntactic sugar doesn't mean anything. To me, it barely means anything after knowing all this stuff. So what does syntactic sugar actually mean? So what do I have to do to evaluate this, right? So I am like, okay, the more minimal you can do is just have a config and then you can do add-hook there, bind-key there or whatever. Granted, I don't do this here. I don't follow this. But I mean, if you want to have like a combination of what you were saying of the back and forth while still retaining use-package, you salvage that by doing the equivalent of this. Just this. And then everything goes under config.

Sacha: And that's what I end up doing too. Just making it easier for me to change things and re-evaluate them with C-x C-e is definitely one of the major considerations. Okay, I've temporarily misplaced my... Some people are very lucky. They actually have an Emacs channel at work that they can ask for help or they can come across recommendations for. That's nice for learning, @Rossbaker9079 says. It's not a full replacement for these other ideas, but it brings together people solving the same problems with Emacs. Some people are lucky enough to work in a large company where other people are using Emacs. You should definitely take advantage of that. I hear there's actually a Discord server as well, and of course there's IRC, where people can also hang out and hear other people talk about Emacs, ask questions, learn from other people's questions. I don't think you hang out in IRC or any of these places.

Prot: No, no. I haven't done it in a very long time. I have an account there on IRC. I think the last time I did, it was in the last EmacsConf I could attend, which is like maybe two or three years ago. I forgot already.

Sacha: It's yet another thing that kind of distracts your attention. I also find Mastodon to be very helpful for this stream of little updates from people sharing their Emacs questions or their things that they've just figured out. That's another useful resource for people. I've started trying to get people... to support them in hooking up with this community, connecting with this community. The Emacs Newbie page has a link to learning Emacs, and one of those things says links to category community. Because if you're learning these things in isolation, you will get really, really stuck. And you will not progress. I think being able to connect with the Emacs community is great for inspiration and figuring things out.

Prot: Yes, yes, I agree, I agree.

45:28 Culture of documentation and sharing

Prot: Plus, it's another reason to hang out, basically, like the social aspect of it. Like, well, of course, I use it as a tool, but there is a cultural component to it.

Sacha: So tell me, what is your impression of the Emacs culture so far?

Prot: Oh, it's, of course, we are talking about people who stick around, right? Not people who will use Emacs once and then leave. I think fundamentally it's people who care about sharing. I think the essence of it, it's really sharing. And then, of course, that is expressed sharing code, sharing ideas, and then, of course, documenting things. So the documentation culture of Emacs, I think it's really strong. Like in other free software communities, they are like, okay, we are sharing code, but then code is its own documentation kind of thing. Good code speaks for itself kind of thing. Whereas in Emacs land, we are like, okay, good code speaks for itself, but here is this wall of text just in case.

Sacha: And, you know, this is probably something only two other people in the world will ever want to do, but here it is just in case. I love those. I'm like, yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to do, actually. Thank you.

Prot: Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Sacha: It's a wonderful community, and I'm very glad that you're part of it, and I'm very glad that lots of other people have joined in as well. Okay, let me go. Once again, I have misplaced my... Okay, here we go. @ShaeErisson asked, "Is there a way to ask Emacs which file it has read below the current configuration?" That's the user init file variable, Shae, so you can just describe that.

47:11 Link to a search

Sacha: @charliemcmackin4859 says, "thinking of the terminology problem, maybe offering search terms for further exploration rather than or in addition to links." Which I guess like instead of just looking to a specific resource which may or may not still exist. I was going through my beginner resources and it's like this page no longer resolves but like saying okay this is this is what it's called and you can go search for your own resources, or this is the link, but also here's some other terms that you might find useful.

Prot: Yeah, yeah. Just to add to what this person was asking, was suggesting is like, because we had something like this in Denote and eventually I implemented it. So there are two kinds of links. One is a direct pointer where it's like, go there. The other is basically the equivalent of a button that triggers a search. For example, let's imagine in terms of files and directories, like a direct link goes to a file. A query link, you click on it, it opens a directory listing of all files that match the query. And that is basically evergreen. It will always show you whatever is matching. And maybe we could have something like that for info buffers, where instead of a link to a node, you do that and it produces a listing of all nodes that match the query.

Sacha: Hmm, that's quite interesting. Or like when we, you know, if we're writing about something, we can say, you know, here's the apropos command to go find all the commands, things that are related to this concept. Even just getting people to learn about how to use apropos, I think, would be a great step in helping them. Even before that, just getting them to a completion setup where they can ideally use something like orderless to just find things. Yeah. I think it would definitely help with the discoverability thing.

Prot: Yes. I think like Vertico and Orderless are like... if you have to install two packages, it's those two.

Sacha: Yeah. It is great. Okay. Where are we now? I keep... We've talked about the sandwich that has to be made. We've talked about getting people into it, helping them discover concepts, helping them connect with the community. And then there's a thing about how do we support people as they do their lifelong learning.

49:48 Getting through the gap between beginner tutorials and the next step

Sacha: A lot of people, maybe they'll get through the tutorial fine, but then when they start to try to do something more sophisticated, like, oh yeah, I need to do something similar to my IDE. I want to have all these different bits and bobs working the way that they do in my other editor. That's where things break down because the tutorial gets them through the, you know, here are the basics, but then there's this huge gulf before that, okay, this is how I can be more productive with it. How do we fix that?

Prot: Yes, that's very difficult because part of that requires Emacs Lisp knowledge. Like, for example, an IDE, of course, I haven't used one myself, but from what I understand, there is a sidebar with the tree view of your files. At the bottom, there is a shell. Maybe there is some debugger there, some other sidebar on the side. So to replicate that, you really need to massage the display-buffer-alist which I think requires a lot of knowledge, like you need to understand the display buffer, you need to know about window... what's it called? Even I forget. Attributes and all that.

Sacha: I don't even do it myself. If I feel like I need to do anything related to display-buffer-alist, I'm just like, okay, I'm going to look for an example and I'm going to copy it very carefully.

51:08 Predictability

image from videoProt: Okay, so this is for you. It's like too much work, but I must say. This looks like arcane knowledge but this sort of thing actually is a quality of life improvement to your Emacs because one thing that I think is bad about the default Emacs experience is uncertainty about where things will show up. Like, you never know. Like, you cannot predict it. Because Emacs tries to be sensible about it or whatever, but you cannot predict it. Whereas things that are ancillary should have kind of a more predictable behavior.

51:51 Brief mention of Popper

Prot: And by the way, there is a package by Karthik Chikmagalur called Popper. I didn't mention it, but yeah, it's basically another way to do the display-buffer-alist.

Sacha: Mm-hmm. So there's an interesting thing here where you have the beginners. Okay, they're just getting through the tutorial. If they can get to the point where they can edit the file, click on, even just use the menu bar to say file save, file open and all that stuff, that's great. Then the step beyond that is, okay, how do they start to use packages? And quite...

52:25 Earlier is better than later for Emacs Lisp. Take it as is.

Sacha: It feels like in order for them to be able to use packages like Popper or all these, they gotta be unafraid to use Emacs Lisp. Because all the packages, you know, tell them, okay, just put this use package in your config, but you gotta be comfortable.

Prot: And that's why I think you have to basically circumvent Customize. Like the earlier you are exposed to Emacs Lisp, I think the better it is for you long term. Because there is no way around it. You will have to deal with it. and even if you don't quite know how things work, like even, for example, this thing here, where it's like, there is a line between them, even if you don't understand code, you can start to think in terms of blocks even if you don't understand this code... Maybe with a few comments here and there, that can become a bit more obvious as well. But of course, like you go to a package and the first thing it will tell you is, okay, add this to your config and it's a use-package declaration, for example. And you will be like, what is a config? The better solution is for you to know that quickly, learn it quickly.

Sacha: There's this whole intimidation factor, especially for people who are coming from non-programming backgrounds, and suddenly they're like, there are a lot of parentheses in this. Do I have to be a programmer in order to use this? You just go right into it, but I'm sure you've talked to people who maybe weren't sure about it. How do you get them over that hump?

Prot: Basically the idea is treat it as something that is inscrutable right now. Just take it as is. Take it at face value basically. You don't need to understand it. You don't need to be able to debug it. Take it as is and just make sure moving your cursor that this kind of balance is preserved by checking that there is a parenthesis at the beginning and there is a parenthesis at the end. So, show parent mode helps in that regard, which is enabled by default. Of course, you cannot really get around it. Like, you cannot have a training wheels mode for Elisp, unfortunately. You can do something like rainbow-delimiters, you know, the package. You can help, but I'm not sure that helps by a lot.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. And it's like, OK, so you just got to do it. Don't be too scared. But it's OK to just copy and paste and trust that as you do this, you will learn enough that when you go back, you'll be able to understand more and more of it.

55:17 Before and after comparisons

Prot: Yes. What helps, for example, in this block here, of course, I don't have to describe the code. But if you do this iterative approach that we mentioned earlier of step by step, like you can try your Emacs before this and after this. And based of course on some comment or whatever, you can see what the difference is. So even if you don't understand the code, you understand the effects of the code.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. Before and after comparisons. I'm guilty of not taking advantage of this enough myself. I'm just like, oh yeah, I'm just going to evaluate it in my current Emacs and sometimes the results are obvious and sometimes the results kind of break my Emacs and I'm like, okay, I got to restart Emacs instead. I should have just started a new Emacs and tried it there.

56:04 user-init-directory

Sacha: But with the new user... Well, I say new, but actually --user-init-directory has been around since Emacs 29. So it's pretty much widely available now. People can actually try, for example, a starter kit without committing to it. Do you see newbies actually use this? Because I tell people, okay, you can do this, but it requires using the command line and using command line arguments. Is that a thing they can do?

Prot: I have introduced it to some people and they have used it, yes. But I don't know if people use it as part of their workflow or maybe they have just a cheat sheet specifically for this where it's like, oh, I want to try this and I want to try that. But eventually they don't use it day by day, I think. They just settle.

Sacha: if you want to try something big, then you know you can say, try that starter kit, but don't necessarily go to the work of making it my .emacs.d and so forth. Yes, that's a good one. They just say put this in your init file so it's a lot easier to back it out and change your mind. I had a thought, but it has disappeared, so I will just read something else from the chat.

Prot: That's fine.

57:20 Emacs core

Sacha: @romsno says, "Do you fear that Emacs C core will go unmaintained? Deep knowledge is rare, held by few, like Eli. While finding Elisp maintainers is easier, like with elfeed, the core is hard to replace." So I guess if you're thinking about the long-term: newbie, to package user, to package developer, to who knows, Emacs core contributor, And then off to the C, like somebody who knows the C core, that's a very long and somewhat leaky pathway.

Prot: It is for sure, for sure. But of course, here we are talking about people who have expertise in those specific domains. And yeah, that's something that it's an experienced Emacs user already. Like we are talking about somebody who not only is actually an experienced Emacs user, but also knows the relevant technical knowledge. Right. I am an experienced user, for example, but I don't know C, so I'm useless in this regard.

Sacha: I guess if we zoom out a little bit, we can think about how do we help people connect with the long-term motivation that drives, that you mentioned earlier, to keep using Emacs, to learn more about it, to enjoy using it and fiddling with it and get deeper into it. For some people, Emacs clicks right away because they already tinker with other things and it becomes another thing to tinker with. For some people, it's like, I don't know, I've heard I should use this or I've heard people say good things about Org Mode or about Magit. I just want to see what it's like.

59:02 Getting past the initial awkward phase

Sacha: So going back to that, how do we get people hooked?

Prot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's that initial awkward phase. Like if they can get past that, and by awkward phase, here I mean to actually understand Emacs and the key bindings and how to move between windows and there is a mini buffer, that sort of thing. Once they get past that, I think that people stick around. Like if they have, for example, a use for it such as, okay, I use it for org, they do stick around.

59:34 Even reporting an issue is a great contribution

Prot: There are a lot of people who contribute, like even non-programmers. And this is something I encourage in my packages, for example, where it's like, write me an issue. You don't need to know any code. You don't have to tell me about how to do it. Just tell me what your idea is. And in all my manuals that I write, I have an acknowledgement section where I have, you know, ideas or suggestions or whatever. And I write the name of everybody who has ever created an issue because it's like you help even by telling me what your use case is. And that already helps. And it gets the people involved as well.

Sacha: They spend time trying it out and describing what the difference was between what happened and what they wanted to happen. And sometimes even just identifying the issue is a big part of it already because you can't test everything. So we can definitely help people feel more included in the community because they don't have to be core developers or package authors to be part of the community. Even using it and writing about it is a big help.

1:00:44 Next steps: adding to the wiki

Sacha: In the four minutes before I have to make a grilled cheese sandwich, shall we wrap up with some concrete things that you or me or somebody listening can do to help improve the newcomer experience for Emacs?

Prot: You were doing it already. You were doing the wiki. I think that's good. A link, a direct link to the newbie section I think is great. Maybe you can even have a permanent link in your Emacs News, like the topmost line. It would be like, well, new...

Sacha: Don't get overwhelmed by all these people talking about SDL graphics loops and Emacs and whatever. Very far down the path of the learning journey. So making one of these starting points where people can then kind of find the trail that then leads them to different places. I'm looking forward to reviewing the Emacs news things for beginner resources that I've already previously identified and then fitting them into the Emacs Wiki in various places where people might come across them. And then of course, it would be nice if we could test these with actual people. So in your coaching sessions, we can find out where the other gaps are. There's a lovely conversation in the chat about other things that I don't have the fast speaking rate to cram into the next three minutes. Thank you so much for this conversation. It was great. I always like picking your brain about things. It's a big project but Emacs is fun to play with and I hope lots of other people come to have fun with it too.

1:02:37 Core longevity

Prot: Yes, and maybe I can make a final comment about the C core and the fact that there are a few people such as Eli Zaretskii who have expertise in that. I am an optimist. I think things will be ironed out. I think they will work out on their own. There are people who have the expertise. Maybe it's a cultural issue or We could say like a bureaucracy issue, like they don't want to deal with mailing lists or whatever. Maybe they don't like the current style. I don't know. But I'm sure that when push comes to shove, somebody will step up.

Sacha: I think it's actually very encouraging that because Emacs has such a long history, we've actually seen this kind of generational transfer of knowledge already in the sense that the people who are maintaining Emacs now, aside of course from Dr. Stallman himself, they're not the originals who started this project. They came into it afterwards, decided they liked it, dug deep enough into it to learn all these different things and have continued from there. And we've also seen lots of, you know, lots of trends come and go. People leave Emacs for Atom. People come back when Atom gets discontinued. People leave Emacs for VS Code. Who knows what will happen then? But when they come back, they come back bringing even more ideas. Thank you for watching! Okay, so in about one minute, the kid is going to start barreling down the hallway and asking for a grilled cheese sandwich. I'm going to wrap it up nicely here so I can remember to copy the chat this time.

Prot: Very well, very well.

Sacha: Yeah, yeah. The notes are going to be in, like, you know, if you go to yayemacs.com, they're probably going to be in, like, yayemacs24. And you're going to send me this markdown file or whatever that you showed me, so I can post that as well. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Prot, and thank you to the people who joined in the chat. We'll see where it goes. Okay, bye.

Prot: Take care. Take care. Bye, Sacha. Bye, folks. Take care.

Chat

  • protesilaos: ​​I am in the Google Meet room
  • protesilaos: ​​And hello, by the way!
  • hajovonta6300: ​​Hi legends!
  • JacksonScholberg: ​Hi
  • petertillemans2231: ​I am not worthy!
  • takoverflow: ​​Hello Sacha and Prot, thanks for these streams!
  • ShaeErisson: ​I love emacs, but haven't really learned elisp.
  • hajovonta6300: ​​@petertillemans2231 you are worthy if you are willing to learn!
  • JacksonScholberg: ​I vibe with Emacs after using other text editors that were not minimalist enough for my preferences, plus having experience with other open source software like Linux.
  • petertillemans2231: ​Well, Emacs and Minimalist in the same sentence… strange concept, but I know what you mean
  • petertillemans2231: ​I guess learn starters quickly to use emacs –debug-init. Maybe not in the first hour but close to tweaking.
  • JacksonScholberg: ​ChatGPT reminding me keyboard shortcuts helps a lot
  • ShaeErisson: ​I learn about new emacs packages by pairing with other users and asking "How did you do that thing?"
  • hajovonta6300: ​​I use Emacs since 2010 and had become a power user; but in the last year I feel LLMs took over most of the tasks I usually solved with Emacs.
  • petertillemans2231: ​Emacs documentation is very extensive but I feel discoverability of the docs is a problem for newer users.
  • 10cadr: ​​wow! ill watch the vod later,, nice buzzcut prot. i am between sessions rn also ill leave a comment on prot latest video later cheers
  • rossbaker9079: ​​We have an Emacs channel at work that's nice for learning. It's not a full replacement for these other ideas, but brings together people solving the same problems with Emacs.
  • ShaeErisson: ​Is there a way to ask emacs which file(s) it has read to load the current configuration?
  • charliemcmackin4859: ​​thinking of the terminology problem: maybe offering search terms for further exploration, rather than (or in addition to) links
  • JacksonScholberg: ​An Emacs channel at work sounds like a nice way to learn from others.
  • siredwardthehalf: ​​whats emacs
  • hajovonta6300: ​​it is an application platform with a great editor app
  • romsno: ​​hello guys do you fear the Emacs C core will go unmaintained? Deep knowledge is rare, held by few like Eli. While finding Elisp maintainers is easier (like with elfeed), the core is harder to replace
  • hajovonta6300: ​​@romsno true that
  • petertillemans2231: ​orderless is awesome
  • takoverflow: ​​Vertico can be replaced by icomplete-vertical-mode but there's no built-in corfu replacement
  • petertillemans2231: ​In the beginning, especially with use-package it is much more like yaml than a real programming language. That can ease people in.
  • satrac75: ​​i'm curious if other users split their init file into seperate files. my init file over the years continuea to grow and grow.
  • hajovonta6300: ​​@satrac75 I sometimes delete obsolete code I don't use anymore. I found my config became relatively stable after 2-3 years of initial trial-and-error. I heard other people experienced the same
  • petertillemans2231: ​I do … I go back and forth… single file … modularize … refactor/simplify in single file again… Like a dynamic tension field.
  • hajovonta6300: ​​My current config is 3099 lines long (org-babel format)
  • hajovonta6300: ​​the tangled output is 2345 lines.
  • charliemcmackin4859: ​​@satrac75 I did, yes. But this is mainly because I cherry-picked the configs from purcell's emacs config as I found I needed it. Then I converted it (mine) to use-package later
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What's in the Emacs newcomers-presets theme?

| emacs

The development version of Emacs as of Feb 2026 includes a newcomers-presets theme that can be enabled from the splash screen or by using M-x load-theme RET newcomers-presets RET. (Not sure how to run that command? Start with the guided tour/tutorial or choose "Help - Tutorial" from the Emacs menu.)

2026-04-29_14-19-11.png
Figure 1: Newcomer presets are on the splash screen

If you like it and want to make it automatically enabled in future Emacs sessions:

  1. Use M-x customize-themes
  2. Select the checkbox next to newcomer-presets by either clicking on it or using TAB to navigate to it and then pressing RET.
  3. Click on or use RET to select Save Theme Settings.
2026-04-30_09-47-33.png
Figure 2: Saving the theme setting

I'm not sure if someone else has made notes on what it does yet, so I thought I'd put this together.

Most Emacs newbies aren't running the development version of Emacs at the moment, but it will eventually make its way into Emacs 31. I wonder if it might be a good idea to extract the theme as a package that people can use use-package on if they want. I am not entirely sure about using themes for this, but it's worth an experiment.

Here's a list of what newcomers-presets includes. I'll also include the corresponding Emacs Lisp in case you want to copy just that part, or you can also get it as copy-of-newcomers-presets.el. If you want to load it in your existing Emacs, you can add (load-file "path/to/copy-of-newcomers-presets.el") to your InitFile. You can use C-h f (describe-function) or C-h v (describe-variable) to learn more about the functions or variables it changes. I'm manually making this page, so there might have been some changes to etc/themes/newcomers-presets-theme.el since .

;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-
;; Based on https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/tree/master/etc/themes/newcomers-presets-theme.el

Editing and navigation

When you select text by pressing C-SPC (set-mark-command) and then moving to the end of the text you want to select, and then you type, the new text replaces the selection.

(setopt delete-selection-mode t)

New text replaces the selection

Copying works better when copying between Emacs and other applications Equivalent:

(setopt save-interprogram-paste-before-kill t)

If you have a compatible spellchecker installed (Hunspell, Aspell, Ispell, or Enchant), Emacs will check your spelling and underline errors using flyspell-mode. You can use M-x ispell-change-dictionary to change the language if you have the appropriate dictionary installed. In code buffers, the spelling is checked in comments and strings. You can also use flyspell-goto-next-error (C-,) to go to the next misspelled word and flyspell-auto-correct-word (C-M-i) to fix it. More info: Spelling (info "(emacs) Spelling").

2026-04-30_09-36-20.png
Figure 3: A wavy red underline shows potentially misspelled words; right-click on them to correct them or add them to the dictionary
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'flyspell-mode)
(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook 'flyspell-prog-mode)

Imenu entries are automatically updated based on the structure of the current buffer or file (ex: outline headings, function names). You can list them with M-x imenu or add them to the menu bar with M-x imenu-add-to-menubar.

(setopt imenu-auto-rescan t)

When you visit a read-only file, it will be in view mode, so you can use SPC to scroll. This affects buffers for files that you don't have permission to change as well as buffers that you make read-only using C-x C-q (read-only-mode).

(setopt view-read-only t)

Keyboard shortcuts

Some commands allow you to use just the last part of the keyboard shortcut in order to repeat them. Related: Repeat Mode: Stop Repeating Yourself | Emacs Redux

(setopt repeat-mode t)

Appearance

Scrolling happens more smoothly instead of jumping by character.

(setq pixel-scroll-mode t)

Line numbers are shown in both text and code buffers.

(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook 'display-line-numbers-mode)
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'display-line-numbers-mode)

Column numbers are shown in the mode line.

(setopt column-number-mode t)

If you change your system-wide fixed-width font, Emacs will also update. the system-defined font dynamically.

(setopt font-use-system-font t)

You can resize your frames or windows to any size instead of being limited to whole-character steps.

(setopt frame-resize-pixelwise t)
(setopt window-resize-pixelwise t)

The frame size will stay the same even if you change the font, menu bar, tool bar, tab bar, internal borders, fringes, or scroll bars.

(setopt frame-inhibit-implied-resize t)

If a mode line is wider than the currently selected window, it is compressed by replacing repeating spaces with a single space.

(setopt mode-line-compact 'long)

Saving data between sessions

Minibuffer history is saved between Emacs sessions so you can use M-x and then use M-p and M-n to navigate your history.

(setopt savehist-mode t)

Your place in a file is saved between Emacs sessions.

(setopt save-place-mode t)

Your recently-opened files are saved between Emacs sessions, so you can use M-x find-file and other commands and then use M-p and M-n to navigate your history.

Completion

This set of options affects the completion candidates (the suggestions that appear when you press M-x and then TAB, or when you use TAB at other prompts).

You can use the arrow keys to select completion candidates in the minibuffer, and you can use RET to select the highlighted one.

(setopt minibuffer-visible-completions t)

Additional details for completion suggestions are shown before or after the suggestions. For example, M-x describe-symbol (C-h o) shows additional information.

(setopt completions-detailed t)

Completion candidates can be grouped together if the function that sets up the completion specifies it.

(setopt completions-group t)

When you press TAB to see the completion candidates for a prompt (for example, M-x and then TAB), the first TAB will display the completion list, and the second TAB will select the buffer.

(setopt completion-auto-select 'second-tab)

This Completions buffer will update as you type so that you can narrow down the candidates.

(setopt completion-eager-update t)

The following completion styles are set up:

  • basic: You can type the start of a candidate. (ex: abc will list abcde and abcxyz)
  • partial-completion: You can specify multiple words and each word will be considered as the prefix for matching candidates. For example, if you type a-b, that will match apple-banana if it is one of the options.
  • emacs22: When you move your point to the middle of some text and then complete, the text before your point is used to filter the completion and the text after your point is added to the end of the result.

More info: Completion styles

(setopt completion-styles '(basic emacs22 flex))

Automatically show the completion preview based on the text at point. TAB accepts the completion suggestion and M-i completes the longest common prefix.

(setopt global-completion-preview-mode t)

TAB first tries to indent the current line. If the line was already indented, then Emacs tries to complete the thing at point. Some programming language modes have their own variable to control this, e.g., c-tab-always-indent, so it might need additional customization.

(setopt tab-always-indent 'complete)

Help

If you pause after typing the first part of a keyboard shortcut (ex: C-c), Emacs will display the keyboard shortcuts that you can continue with.

(setopt which-key-mode t)

Tab bar

The tab bar is always shown. Tabs let you save the way you have one or more windows arranged, and which buffers are displayed in those windows. You can click on a tab or use M-x tab-switch to switch to that configuration, or click on the + sign or use M-x tab-new to add another tab. More info: Tab Bars (info "(emacs) Tab Bars")"

(setopt tab-bar-show 0)
2026-04-30_09-15-18.png
Figure 4: The tab bar is displayed at the top of a buffer.

The tabs are saved between Emacs sessions.

(setopt tab-bar-history-mode t)

The Dired file manager

Dired buffers are refreshed whenever you revisit a directory.

(setopt dired-auto-revert-buffer t)

You can use the mouse to drag files in Dired. Ctrl+leftdrag copies the file, Shift+leftdrag moves it, Meta+leftdrag links it. You can also drag the to other applications on X11, Haiku, Mac OS, and GNUstep.

(setopt dired-mouse-drag-files t)

Show the current directory when prompting for a shell command. This affects shell-command and async-shell-command.

(setopt shell-command-prompt-show-cwd t)

Package management

If you open a file for which Emacs has optional packages that provide extra support in GNU ELPA or NonGNU ELPA, Emacs will add [Upgrade?] to the mode line to make it easier to install the appropriate package.

2026-04-30_09-06-18.png
Figure 6: Package autosuggest adds an Upgrade? to the modeline when you open a file for which Emacs has an optional package available
(setopt package-autosuggest-mode t)

When you're working with M-x list-packages, x (M-x package-menu-execute) now requires you to select something instead of acting the current package by default. Press i (package-menu-mark-install) to mark a package for installation, press d (package-menu-mark-delete) to mark a package for deletion, press u (package-menu-mark-unmark) to unmark a package, and press x (package-menu-execute) to execute the operations.

(setopt package-menu-use-current-if-no-marks nil)

Code

In code buffers, Emacs will display errors and warnings by using flymake-mode.

(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook 'flyspell-mode)

If you use M-x compile, the *compilation* window will scroll as new output appears, but it will stop at the first error so that you can investigate more easily.

(setopt compilation-scroll-output 'first-error)

You can Ctrl+leftclick on a function name to jump to its definition using xref-find-definitions-at-mouse.

(setopt global-xref-mouse-mode t)

Emacs will automatically insert matching parentheses, brackets, and braces.

(setopt electric-pair-mode t)

Emacs will generally use spaces instead of tabs when indenting code.

(setopt indent-tabs-mode nil)

If there is a project-specific .editorconfig file, Emacs will follow those settings. (More about EditorConfig)

(setopt editorconfig-mode t)

Tags tables are automatically regenerated whenever you save files. This uses Etags to make it easier to jump to the definitions of functions or variables.

Version control

(setopt etags-regen-mode t)

Files are reloaded from disk if they have been updated by your version control system.

(setopt vc-auto-revert-mode t)

If a directory has changed in version control but you have some modified files, Emacs will ask if you want to save those changed files.

(setopt vc-dir-save-some-buffers-on-revert t)

If you use vc-find-revision to go to a specific version of the file, it is displayed in a temporary buffer and does not replace the copy that you currently have.

(setopt vc-find-revision-no-save t)

If you open a symbolic link to a file under version control, Emacs will open the real file and display a message. That way, it will still be version-controlled.

(setopt vc-follow-symlinks t)

C-x v I and C-x v O now have additional keyboard shortcuts. For example, C-x v I L is vc-root-log-incoming and C-x v O L is vc-root-log-outgoing. Use C-x v I C-h and C-x v O C-h to see other commands.

(setopt vc-use-incoming-outgoing-prefixes t)

The version control system is automatically determined for all buffers. (Standard Emacs just checks it in dired, shell, eshell, or compilation-mode buffers.)

(setopt vc-deduce-backend-nonvc-modes t)

Things I haven't been able to figure out yet

On Linux with X11, Haiku, or macOS / GNUstep: When a buffer has an associated filename, you can drag the filename from the modeline and drop it into other programs. (Haven't been able to get this working.)

(setopt mouse-drag-mode-line-buffer t)
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