I have not put much time on the write-up for the 2024-02 EmacsATX meeting, and I think this month I am just going to bail and put out a short one. I have a lot of other things going on.
The meeting was pretty unfocused. There are a lot of single lines about plugins and packages.
We did talk about how Emacs is even more extensible and awesome thanks to LSP, eglot and tree-sitter. Now you don’t need all the garbage alternatives members of the group have used, like Visual Studio, IntelliJ, or Visual Age. Emacs is more extensible, allows you to advise functions, and does not push you to a proprietary version.
And it works better. One member has 300 packages, and everything works seemlessly. And few other tools can handle Org. Take that, BS Code. Where is your god now?
One member came up with the npm drinking game: pick a random word, see if there is an npm package with that word.
There was a lot of talk about packages to facilitate writing, like so-long mode and pandoc mode. There are packages that can function as a thesaurus (mw-thesaurus), an interface into Google translate called google-translate, an interface into many translation engines (go-translate), dictionaries (define-it which has definitions and translations, sdcv which hooks into StarDict, and Wictionary-bro), as well as spellchecking (like Flyspell or Jinx).
Emacs enables making awesome computer stuff. If you use these packages, then Emacs will elicit massive analytical cognitive success, and you can then engineer magical and critical software.
In case you are wondering, other words for thesaurus include lexicon and onomasticon.
This post was created in Emacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome. And stop looking at your stupid phone all the time.
Image from MS M.651, a manuscript made in Cologne in the 11th century housed at the Morgan Library; image assumed allowed under public domain.