Eric MacAdie

There was another meeting a couple of weeks ago of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group. For this month we had no predetermined topic. However, as always, there were mentions of many modes, packages, technologies and websites, some of which I had never heard of before, and some of this may be of interest to you as well. I was only on for an hour before I had to drop off; hopefully people did not save their bon mots for the period after my departure.

#1 was the organizer.
#2 was a no-show.
#3 was the Esteemed Gentleman From Oklahoma.
#4 was someone whose name was unfamiliar to me. They did not speak during the meeting, at least while I was there.
#5 was a developer in College Station. He also did not speak much.
#6 was a developer here in Austin. He made some small talk at the beginning with the organizer, but dropped off before I did.
#7 was a developer in Virginia.

Here is a list of the modes and packages that were mentioned (I will not list the big ones here, like Org, Doom, Spacemacs):

• Crafted Emacs
• BBDB (The Insidious Big Brother Database) – Elpa page here, Savannah page here, EmacsWiki page here.
• Gnus
• mu4e
• which-key

Non-Emacs Topics:

• Culture in OKC; high school wrestling is big in OKC.

Note: This time events are arranged by topic/theme, and not chronologically.

#3 spent some time talking about Crafted Emacs. They added a new maintainer, and #3 has been documenting the modules for Mac OSX and evil mode.

At first I thought he said “eel mode”, but I do not think there is an eel mode. There could be and I just don’t know about it. When I think about how likely it is there could be an eel mode for Emacs, is it really quite…..

wait for it

shocking.

M-x rimshot

Thanks, eel be here all week.

#3 is also deleting some obsolete code and thinks it will be ready for an RC1 release soon.

#7 asked about Crafted Emacs, so #3 gave another off-the-cuff presentation about it by going through his config.

I asked #3 is there were plans to do an intro video when Crafted makes version 1. He said the main System Crafters guy (Dave Wilson) might do one if he feels like it, but #3 has no plans to do one himself. #3 said he is not a video guy, but he does do a good job speaking off the cuff in my opinion. He has done a few presentations on Crafted Emacs already. If we were using Zoom for out meetings, we could just ask it to compile one for us (links to Zoom and AI here and here).

#3 has set up the package archive list in Crafted Emacs to not use MELPA out of the box, but he does not disallow it. He does not like MELPA because packages there tend to be out of date. A good overview of the differences between ELPA and MELPA can be found here; a lot of the packages in MELPA are hosted on Github, and the FSF does not like Github. Per that post, I think the point of NonGNU ELPA is to replace MELPA and de-Github Emacs packages. It is ironic that git is supposed to be decentralized and open source, and yet it wound up being centralized on a site owned by Microsoft.

You can find the list of GNU ELPA packages here, and the list NonGNU ELPA packages here. Anything that gets MS out of my life is good, so going forward I will pay more attention to where the packages I install are hosted. I also have a third-party package URL in my Emacs config. I will have to see which packages I use from there. When I list packages, my package buffer does not tell me which archives my “installed” “dependency” packages come from.

#1, #3 and #7 talked about using Emacs for email. Gnus and mu4e were mentioned. At one point #3 showed us his filters for his IMAP account (I think it was Gmail). I might look into this. Now I use Thunderbird for email, but as I wrote in a non-EmacsATX post, I would like a way to save my Firefox and Thunderbird configs in a way that is more elegant than zipping up my entire profile directory. Keeping them in Emacs Lisp is a better alternative. #3 uses bbdb for his filters. There does not seem to be any sort of manual on the web about bbdb. #7 uses gnus w/his gmail, said somethings were complicated.

I liked the theme #3 was using. It was one of Prot’s themes. I think it was modus-vivendi-tinted.

#3 uses which-key. Which-key seemed to me a lot like Embark, which #2 likes. Perhaps #2 and #3 could have a pop-up showdown.

We also talked a bit about Eshell. I mentioned I had written something about it, the article on Mastering Emacs, and the fact that a lot of people did not seem to know where the manual is. Mickey Petersen replied to my comment and told me that when he wrote the article the manual either was not there, or was much smaller (and less useful) than it is today. Someone posted a link to a page by Howard Abrams about Eshell called Why use EShell? He has a few other pages about Eshell (like here) and gave a talk about it at EmacsConf in 2022. I am trying to replace my use of bash with Eshell. I did not make any promises about having an actual presentation, but I did say I might give an update at the next meeting.

Per the schedule for EmacsConf 2023, it looks like the other member from OKC (aka “The Professor”) will be presenting for his third straight EmacsConf.

This post was created in Emacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome.

I give people numbers since I do not know if they want their names in this write-up. Think of it as the stoner’s version of the Chatham House Rule. I figured that numbers are a little clearer than “someone said this, and someone else said that, and a third person said something else”. Plus it gives participants some deniability. Most people’s numbers are based on the order they are listed on the call screen, and the same person may be referred to by different numbers in different months. A few regulars have regular numbers. Come every month and join the club.

I am not the official spokesperson for the group. I just got into the habit of summarizing the meetings every month, and adding my own opinions about things. The participants may remember things differently, and may disagree with opinions expressed in this post. Nothing should be construed as views held by anyone’s employers past, present or future. That said, if you like something in this post, I will take credit; if you don’t, blame somebody else. You can read the disclaimer, or you can just use the short version: you are on your own and don’t come crying to me if anything goes wrong.

Image from the Gladzor Gospels, a 14th-century Armenian manuscript housed at UCLA (article here, images here); image assumed allowed under public domain.

There was another meeting a couple of weeks ago of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group. For this month we had no predetermined topic. However, as always, there was mention of new modes, packages, technologies and websites that I had never heard of, and some of this may be of interest to you as well. I was only on for an hour before I had to drop off; hopefully people did not save their bon mots for the period I was absent for.

#1 was the organizer.
#2 was a devloper in the Dallas area.
#3 was again a no show.
#4 was someone whose name was unfamiliar to me. They did speak during the meeting, but I do not remember much about them.
#5 was a developer in Seattle; he gave a presentation on Org React last month.
#6 was a hardware developer in north Texas.
#7 was the professor in OKC. I only noticed him right before I left.

Here is a list of the modes and packages that were mentioned (I will not list the big ones here, like Org, Doom, Spacemacs):

• Embark
• God mode
• Meow mode
• Hydra mode
• Hyperbole (Emacswiki link here, GNU link here)
• Posframe

Non-Emacs Topics:

• Linux distributions
• Vim (again)
• Hammerspoon

We started out talking about Emacs 29.

I asked about building Emacs 29 locally. I run Pop!_OS, which is based off of Ubuntu. The version that comes with it is 27.1. There are reasons to stick with what your distro gives you, but there are a lot of things in 29 that look like it might be worth it to build it myself (like use-package). I got a few suggestions, most of which were in line with what is on this page. (This site also has a page on using Emacs 29.1 with Golang.)

On one of my computers I do have Emacs 29.1 as a flatpak. For my own future reference, flatpaks are stored at $HOME/.local/share/flatpak, and I can run the app in a terminal with “flatpak run org.gnu.emacs”. I do not know when I installed it. I picked Pop!_OS because they do not use snaps. I do not want to jump out of the frying snap and into the flat. I will get rid of it.

A few people talked about long lines. A few said they have used files with really long lines, and wonder how long a line has to be to cause a problem. #6 works on chips, and said the core dumps are CSV files that are over one gigabyte; he said he needs GVim to look at them, and hopes that Emacs will get better at handling large files. Excel cannot handle CSV files that large either.

I wonder if use-package, tree-sitter and long lines will be incorporated into XEmacs. Or will it fall so far behind that we will call it Twitter-Emacs?

#4 said they grew up in Emacs, while #2 and #6 started out as Vim people. #2 said that he learned Vim because it was the default editor for Git. He said learning vim caused him to hate himself. He has said that a couple of times in the past; he has never said that Emacs caused him to hate himself.

A few of us wondered why nano wasn’t the default. It has the commands along the bottom, so you would never have to remember how to use it.

I know a lot of sysadmins say a reason to learn vim is that it is always on a Linux/Unix system, but that is a terrible reason for using it except when you have to. That is no different than the unwashed masses using Windows because that is what was installed on when they got their system from Best Buy. I know this is just one person’s view, but I had an exhange on the Emacs subreddit with a sysadmin who uses Emacs, and they agreed that if systems had nano instead of vim, then nano would be the most popular editor.

A few of the former vim-mers talked about modal interfaces, and using even using them outside of vim, like for the whole OS, or in Emacs. A few Emacs meta-modes (which are Emacs modes that allow you to use Emacs modally) are Meow mode, God mode, and Hydra mode. The best names for one of these would be “à la mode”, or just “Mode mode”. I googled for those, and those names are not used. One of the former vim-mers shared a link explaining the vim philosphy.

#2 showed how he uses a tool called Hammerspoon to automate actions on a Mac. He switches between windows, opens files, controls the volume, you name it, with the keyboard. Hammerspoon uses Lua. I glanced at a few videos about it on Youtube, and they seemed to spend more time in an editor editing the Lua files than showing what you can do with the tool. At least this guy used Emacs to edit Lua.

Then #2 gave another demo of Embark. He did not make a presentation, but he did have some notes outlined in an Org file. He compared it to Hyperbole (Reddit posts on Hyperbole here and here; some of the comments compare it to Embark). I asked him if it would work if Emacs was started with –no-window-system, and he said it would. Embark uses Posframe to pop up frames, and that should still work with no window system.

Embark is a context-aware actionable helper. You can highlight text, or just call it from within a buffer, and it pops up a frame listing functions that could be used at that point, based on the text, the type of buffer, or your place in the buffer (like in a Org outline). It can be used on dired buffers as well as files. It has built-in targets and actions, and you can define your own.

Embark can do a lot. It looks to me like Org: powerful, but a beast to learn. I think I will just tell you to search for Emacs and Embark on Youtube to see what Embark can do. Or you could attend a future meeting and ask #2 to demo it a third time.

This post was created in Emacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome.

I give people numbers since I do not know if they want their names in this write-up. Think of it as the stoner’s version of the Chatham House Rule. I figured that numbers are a little clearer than “someone said this, and someone else said that, and a third person said something else”. Plus it gives participants some deniability. People’s numbers are based on the order they are listed on the call screen, and the same person may be referred to by different numbers in different months.

I am not the official spokesperson for the group. I just got into the habit of summarizing the meetings every month, and adding my own opinions about things. The participants may remember things differently, and may disagree with opinions expressed in this post. Nothing should be construed as views held by anyone’s employers past, present or future. That said, if you like something in this post, I will take credit; if you don’t, blame somebody else.

Image from “Evangelia [Evangiles dits de Du Fay]”, a 9th century manuscript housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF; image assumed allowed under public domain.

There was another meeting a couple of weeks ago of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group. For this month we had a predetermined topic: Org-Reveal. As always, there was mention of new modes, packages, technologies and websites that I had never heard of, and some of this may be of interest to you as well.

#1 was the organizer; he used to work for the City of Austin. I do not know what he does for money, but it involves Emacs.
#2 was the developer in North Texas. I might give him the number two spot permanently.
#3 (aka the Esteemed Gentleman From Oklahoma) was not in attendance.
#4 was a developer in Seattle, originally from Romania.
#5 was in San Francisco; I think he is one of the organizers of the San Francisco Emacs meetup.
#6 was someone in Kansas.
#7 was the professor in OKC.

Here is a list of the modes and packages that were mentioned (I will not list the big ones here, like Org, Doom, Spacemacs):

• Org-Reveal
• org-re-reveal
• Org-noter
• Embark
• rfc-mode
• anki-editor

There was just one non-Emacs Topic:

• The correct pronunciation of “Dracula”. Per the Romanian in attendance, it is “drah-KOO-lah”. If someone tells you otherwise, don’t let them fool ya.

#4 gave a presentation on Org-Reveal, which allows you to export Org files to HTML presentations by connecting to the Reveal HTML presentation framework. You can go from one heading to the next by clicking on the horizonal arrows, and if there are sub-headings you can access them by vertical arrows (see the demo here).

You need to import the org-reveal package and a couple of others. You also need to have an Org keyword poiting to the reveal.js file; you can point to a local copy or one online. #4 pointed to one on JSDelivr. Org-reveal adds an “[R]” option to the org-export-dispatch menu. The result is a large HTML file with your presentation.

Your Org file can contain source, media and images, and those can all be exported. You will still need to look at the documentation on the Reveal website; I do not think Org-Reveal can wrap Reveal completely. You can use any themes from the Reveal website.

There was some discussion about exporting to PDF, but that seems like a chore in general.

#5 talked a little bit about the relationship between Org-Reveal and org-re-reveal. Development on Org-Reveal had stopped, so someone forked it as org-re-reveal. Then after a couple of years work on Org-Reveal resumed, and now they have diverged and are no longer completely compatible. #5 and #7 both thought that org-re-reveal had more features, looks better, and has a better charting library.

I mentioned that someone has resumed work on XEmacs. You can access the source here. My understanding is that way back in the mid-1990s, some developers wanted to add functionality to GNU Emacs, but Stallman wasn’t too interested in their changes. So for a while there were two Emacsen, and XEmacs was where the action was. Then in the mid-2000s somone else started managing GNU Emacs, they changed their process and started making changes to GNU Emacs, and XEmacs lost its momentum. The last release was in 2009.

I wish that #3 had been on this call. He had some contact with both Emacs projects and might be able to offer some insight.

In the past decade there has been a lot of momentum and community growth in Emacs due to Org Mode and Magit. Some people learn Emacs just to use one or both of those tools. A lot of us in the group are heavy Org users. Will XEmacs incorporate these tools? Will it last if it does not? What about use-package? Tree-sitter?

People are always debating if Emacs is just an editor or something more. The front page of the GNU Emacs site calls Emacs “extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor – and more.” The front page of the XEmacs site calls XEmacs “a highly customizable open source text editor and application development system”. Their source page calls XEmacs an “editor and productivity suite.” Some people joke that Emacs is an operating system, but it does not deal with drivers, user accounts, or managing other applications like an OS does. Perhaps it is best to consider it a combination of editor and application platform. This guy has some interesting points on the subject. He is also working on a GUI library for Emacs (HN discussion here).

#2 shared his screen and demonstrated his Emacs-fu. He showed us using Org-noter to keep notes in a PDF file. He ran the PDF viewer within Emacs; I guess he does not start Emacs with the –no-window-system option. He showed us Embark. It lets you choose a command based on the text near the point (which is what Emacs calls the cursor). The example he showed is that if there is a mention of an RFC, like “RFC 1234”, he can highlight that text, and call rfc-mode to download a PDF of the RFC and open it in Emacs. He also showed us anki-editor, a mode to make flash cards in Emacs. #2 truly lives in Org Mode.

At that point I had to leave. The meeting continued, but I do not know for how much longer.

Note: rfc-mode is made by galdor; you can find him on Mastodon here. And there really is an RFC 1234.

You’re welcome.

I give people numbers since I do not know if they want their names in this write-up. Think of it as the stoner’s version of the Chatham House Rule. I figured that numbers are a little clearer than “someone said this, and someone else said that, and a third person said something else”. Plus it gives participants some deniability. People’s numbers are based on the order they are listed on the call screen, and the same person may be referred to by different numbers in different months.

I am not the official spokesperson for the group. I just got into the habit of summarizing the meetings every month, and adding my own opinions about things. The participants may remember things differently, and may disagree with opinions expressed in this post. Nothing should be construed as views held by anyone’s employers past, present or future. That said, if you like something in this post, I will take credit; if you don’t, blame somebody else.

Image from BNF Latin MS 278, “Evangelia”, an 11th century manuscript housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF; image assumed allowed under public domain.

There was another meeting a couple of weeks ago of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group. For this month we had no predetermined topic. However, as always, there was mention of new modes, packages, technologies and websites that I had never heard of, and some of this may be of interest to you as well.

One thing before we go forward: My schedule has changed slightly. There is an event I have started attending that occurs every Wednesday. I can still attend the EmacsATX calls, but I will only be able to stay for one hour. So future write-ups might not contain information for the whole meeting.

#1 was one of the organizers; he used to live in Austin and now lives in East Texas. He was only on for a few minutes.
#2 was the other host.
#3 was the Esteemed Gentleman From Oklahoma.
#4 was a developer in South America. Now all we need is someone from Africa, and we will have had attendees from all populated continents.
#5 was a developer in Seattle.
#6 was our developer in Australia.

Here is a list of the modes and packages that were mentioned (I will not list the big ones here, like Org, Doom, Spacemacs):

• Denote (Github repo here, manual here)
• Org-Reveal
• tree-sitter
• tree-sitter-langs
• combobulate
• dumb-jump

Non-Emacs Topics:

• Linux in general
• Pop!_OS in particular
• The hard truth about running a user group
• Cyprus Preppers

At first it was just myself, #2 and #3. I mentioned that I had not done a whole lot with Emacs in the past month. The hard drive on my laptop died. I spent some of my time backing up the data (there were signs it was not long for this world before the end) and I got a new laptop from System76 (post here, shameless unpaid placement here). I think it is important to support Linux vendors, and I am tired of installing operating systems. The only thing I ever learned from it is that I hate doing it and I get nothing out of it.

The version of Pop!_OS that is on both of my systems is based on an LTS version of Unbuntu, and the version of Emacs on them is 27.1. I will not get the latest and greatest for a while, but I am okay with that. The OS has an alert when there are updates to any packages, and I just install them when they come up. I am trying to not be one of those people who spends more time configuring Emacs than getting things done with it.

#4 introduced himself. He is in a developer in Colombia. He started getting into Emacs recently, and is interested in Org mode.

#3 said he is in Org all day; he keeps notes on meetings and everything else in Org. This is the way. [Reader repeats: “This is the way.”] He keeps longer notes in Denote (Github repo here, manual here) a mode by Protesilaos Stavrou, aka “Prot”. I have a link to his Emacs Youtube playlist on my Emacs page. I have heard of him, and I know a lot of people respect him, but I have not watched any of his videos yet; it is another item on my ever-growing TODO list. #3 said that one of Prot’s projects was to build a hut to live in somewhere in rural Cyprus. Perhaps he was building it out of parentheses. Perhaps Emacs 30 will have a M-x build-hut function. The admin for the Emacs Mastodon server had a coaching session with him recently.

#5 had recently came back from Europe, and had been working on a presentation about Org-Reveal. He gave us a preview. The plan is that he will finish it and present next month, so I will not say too much about his presentation now.

#2 asked if anyone wanted to do a presentation on tree-sitter, and this led to discussion of a lot of stuff that only works on Emacs 29, like tree-sitter-langs and combobulate, and an article about it all at Mastering Emacs. #3 said from user perspective there is not a lot to tree sitter. Someone mentioned dumb-jump, another navigation package; it helps you find the definition of a function. There is also a package called smart-jump. I have not tried either, and I do not know how they are different.

You’re welcome.

I give people numbers since I do not know if they want their names in this write-up. Think of it as the stoner’s version of the Chatham House Rule. I figured that numbers are a little clearer than “someone said this, and someone else said that, and a third person said something else”. Plus it gives participants some deniability. People’s numbers are based on the order they are listed on the call screen, and the same person may be referred to by different numbers in different months.

I am not the official spokesperson for the group. I just got into the habit of summarizing the meetings every month, and adding my own opinions about things. The participants may remember things differently, and may disagree with opinions expressed in this post. Nothing should be construed as views held by anyone’s employers past, present or future. That said, if you like something in this post, I will take credit; if you don’t, blame somebody else.

Image from an 11th century manuscript housed in the Bavarian State Library (Wikipedia page here); manuscript here, information here, citation link here, image assumed allowed under public domain.

There was another meeting a couple of weeks ago of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group. For this month we had no predetermined topic. However, as always, there was mention of new modes, packages, technologies and websites that I had never heard of, and some of this may be of interest to you as well.

#1 was one of the organizers, former employee of the City of Austin.
#2 was a developer near Dallas.
#3 was again a no-show.
#4 was a developer from Europe now living in Australia.
#5 was a developer in Seattle.
#6 was a hardware designer in north Texas near Dallas.
#7 was our professor in Oklahoma City.

Someone in South America RSVP’d, but they did not show up. If they did, we would only need someone from Africa to complete our list of Continents That Have Attended.

In a change to the format, here is a list of the modes and packages that were mentioned (I will not list the big ones here, like Org, Doom, Spacemacs; nevertheless, it’s a smörgåsbord):

• general.el
• God mode
• Tab bar page in Emacs documentation here).
• Org-roam (site here, Github repo here)
• Memacs
• org-habit (source here, page on Emacs manual here, page on Org site here)
• Org Real (Reddit post here, Gitlab link here, Elpa link here)
• org-ql (Github page here)
• Org Edna (Savannah page here, documentation here, source repo here)
• Org-Reveal (Github page here), and a fork called org-re-reveal (Gitlab page here, web page here)

Non-Emacs Topics:

• The tech scene in Australia
• AI (of course)
• Vim (yuk!) 🤮
• Browsers as generic interfaces

I asked #4 about the tech industry in Australia. He has only been in “Straya” for a year; before he was in Europe, and he works remotely with a lot of US people and does not have too many Australian co-workers. Australia has a reputation for not being on the cutting edge of technology. He heard there is Clojure at Qantas. So now the sentence “Qantas never crashed” has two meanings.

#4 started Emacs 8 years ago, jumping from Emacs to Vim, but has only been serious about Emacs for 3 years. He tried Spacemacs and Doom, and now has his own config.

#1 was a hard-core vim user forever, in 2005 got into learning Lisp and Scheme and Emacs was only option that worked well. He was using Perl back then, and when he found out he can run the Perl debugger in Emacs he was hooked.

#6 uses evil mode, which helped him transition from Vim. He and the Vim refugees talked about a few things they like about Vim over Emacs. They said Vim keybindings are easier on your hands than Emacs, especially the pinky. They talked about the “leader key” (which I guess allows you to use customized shortcuts in Vim). Emacs is hard on my pinky; now I try to move my hand when I need to. Speed is nice, but it is not the main point. The ex-Vimmers mentioned a few modes they like: general.el (which helps you define custom key-bindings) and God mode (to reduce RSI by removing need for modifier keys). #2 liked modality in Vim. There was too much pro-Vim talk for me. Bad-mouthing Vim is part of this group’s raison d’être. I do not remember the full context, but at one point per my notes #2 said “Vim made him hate himself”. Works for me. WRT which editor is better: Emacs can emulate Vim, but the reverse is not true.

#2 demonstrated putting accents and tics for letters. He used the term “digraphs”, which is combining letters two letters to make a sound. What he showed was how to do diacritics in Emacs. Someone noticed the tab bar, and #2 talked about that for a few minutes (article here, page in Emacs documentation here). He demonstrated diacritics with élan, makes him part of the Emacs élite. [Note 1]

Then there was another demo of ChatGPT in Emacs. I think #2 was using ChatGPT.el. He made a query to ChatGPT, and put the output into an org file template that he exported to HTML. He also used SerpApi, to add more links to his pages and reports. SerpApi is a freemium service that offers an API that queries search engines and can be used to integrate search into apps. I did not find an Emacs package that integrates with SerpApi. #5 said the power of Emacs and AI is in the outputs and doing something with it.

Public service announcement: I tried a free alternative called “DerpApi”. Totally not worth your time.

ChatGPT said there are Emacs meetups in SF, Portland, Los Angeles and Seattle. As far as I know, there is only one in San Francisco and not the other cities. When an AI halluncinates, we should call it ElChapoGPT.

#6 mentioned Auto-GPT. It resends a prompt over and over again to ChatGPT until it looks like monkeys wrote Shakespeare. The author of Auto-GPT told Auto-GPT to improve itself, and it did.

Narrator: That developer was never seen or heard from again.

Then it was on to Org. The software that changes your life, that manages your life, that is your life. A couple of people asked how to learn more about Org. Two things that were mentioned were Rainer Koenig’s Udemy course, and his playlist on YouTube. I learned from the course. #2 said he learned by making simple to-do lists and learning more things as he needed them. #6 started his Org journey while he was sidelined with an ear infection. He was bored, and started going down different rabbit holes on YouTube (is that redundant?). He thinks what made him want to take the plunge was a video by EmacsNYC. They have a few videos about Org mode listed on their site.

Many of us on the call live in Org. I do not like using other editors or even Emacs to write ordinary text files. I like being able to break things into sections, and collapse what I do not need. #2 likes using Org-roam to get a graph of his notes (site here, Github repo here). He demonstrated it in the past. It makes tag clouds. #2 said it makes sense to him to think about his Org files by using terms, phrases and concepts, not dates. If you do like thinking of your life in terms of dates, you can use Memacs. I am not clear why they picked February 14th 2007. It has some components in Python that are used to fetch the data and convert to Org format [Note 2].

Someone shared a link to Semantic Search for Org roam: the author used an LLM to represent their Org notes. There was talk of org-habit, a built-in Org feature that enables you to use Org to track your habits. The statuses are different colors based on whether or not you completed your task early, on time, or late (source here, page on Emacs manual here, page on Org site here). So now you can use Org to color-shame yourself.

A few other Org related packages were mentioned. Someone mentioned Org Real, which per the README enables you to “Keep track of real things as org-mode links” (Reddit post here, Gitlab link here, Elpa link here). I have spent just a minute looking at this, so I am not sure I get the concept; I think the author said it is a work in progress. Stay tuned.

You can search your Org files with org-ql (Github page here). I will add this to my voluminous to-do list.

Another one that looks interesting is Org Edna (Savannah page here, documentation here, source repo here). This is to “Extensible Dependencies ‘N’ Actions for Emacs Org Mode Tasks”.

#5 mentioned using Org and Reveal.js to make presentations. There is a page on the Org site about presentations here. There is Org-Reveal (Github page here), and a fork called org-re-reveal (Gitlab page here, web page here).

A few mentioned other programs that tried to emulate Org. Only Emacs does it all. I was going to go through a list I had of other apps that work with the Org format, but why should I? If it’s not Emacs, it’s crap.

#4 is finding that Emacs is replacing more and more applications for him. Many people have gone through this phenomenon as well. The advantages:

• You don’t have to switch focus.
• You can use same keystrokes.
• You can add key-bindings.
• PDF viewer will match colors of your theme. (I will have to look into viewing PDF files in Emacs; this is probably one of the things that cannot be done if you start Emacs with “–no-window-system” as I do).

As the internet wraiths wrote: “Linux is the init system I use to boot into Emacs.”

The conversation shifted to AI, and how it would affect jobs. I don’t think it will take our jobs or destroy us, but it will change things. It is the end of an era, a sort of fin de siècle of our . AI will not take your job; it will just take the parts you like and leave you with the parts you do not. I stated that as supporters of Emacs and open source, we should look into alternatives to OpenAI and ChatGPT (and although I may not have mentioned it at the time, to not use Copilot). I mentioned OpenAssistant, and a few projects based on LLaMA, like llama.cpp. Some other LLaMA based projects are Alpaca and Vicuña. (I thought AI was going to lead to innovation and new insights, yet everybody wants to just run themes into the ground.) Some of these projects have a goal of running a model locally. GPT4All does run locally, and it runs hot. I speculated that we might see specific models for different industries. Like the leader of the GPT4All project, I think there will be lawsuits over the data in the models.

There is an article article asking Emacs users to avoid OpenAI here, with another about Big AI in general here [Note 3].

Someone mentioned ChatPDF, which analyzes and summerizes PDF files. At some point I will watch the AI is BS video.

#2 mentioned he paying for tokens for ChatGPT, and that it is not too expensive.

Somewhere around this point #7 joined. He said I inspired him to move from Github to Codeberg, and asked me to expand on it. He asked if there was anything that Github could do that Codeberg could not. I told him my desire to move was more ideological than practical. But if nobody ever moves, then nobody will ever move. I still have a Github account in case I want to contribute to a project hosted there. He is an academic, and if other academics he works with do not move, then he will have to have a presence on Github as well. The only feature that is missing is that you cannot search for a string in a repo on Codeberg. My Emacs config is on Codeberg here; I should probably update the README file. You can find Emacs Lisp repos on Codeberg here.

The group talked about Github actions, and how they are different than git hooks. I will include link to Github repos, but not to a Github product.

Then the conversation shifted to user interfaces, and projects that try to use the browser for everything. Mozilla had XUL. When they killed XUL, they killed a lot of projects, like Vimperator. One that is still active is TabFS (web page here, Github repo here). Being Lispers we expressed admiration for Nyxt, the browser written in Common Lisp (page here, Github repo here).

#5 started talking about modular configs. His dream is that each Emacs package comes with a couple of pre-built configs that people could load and unload, like Docker but lighter. The rest of us thought it was a nice dream, but who would maintain these modular configs? Package developers are like unherdable cats: they do what they want. Will there be a project to make these configs? That is a lot of configs. Per #2: Emacs is a cult to terrify others, not to make you happy.

You’re welcome.

Note 1: I found a page with a list of English words with diacritics. I was going to fill this post with them, but after seeing “Gräfenberg spot”, “ménage à trois” and “negligée” so close together, I decided to dial it back. The thought of writing a post with fewer diacritics filled my heart with Gemütlichkeit. Besides, most of them are related to food, ballet, or 19th century France. Filling this post with objets trouvé would have been a débâcle. The ÐḖꝈṲẌÊ Edition of this post will never see the light of day.

Note 2: For the record, February 14th of 2007 was a Wednesday. I was living in Chicago at the time. I worked in 231 South LaSalle Street. It used to be called The Bank Of America Building, until they bought LaSalle Bank from ABN-Amro, then 135 South LaSalle became The Bank of America Building. Now I think 135 South LaSalle is called the Field Building, and 231 South LaSalle is the Central Standard Building. The link to 231southlasalle.com never serves up anything. There is a page about them on the site for Beacon Capital Partners. I think the ground floor is now used by a bank called Wintrust. I assume the list of people who need a vault is very short.

I can also tell you that December 6, 2004 was a Monday. That is the date the 135 South LaSalle building had a fire (news stories here, here, here and here). I was working late in the 231 South LaSalle building, and myself and a few others there saw it happen. One-third of Chicago’s fire department was there, and some fire departments of nearby suburbs also sent personnel to assist. One reporter actually said it was “the biggest fire Chicago has ever seen.” Except for that other one. In all seriousness: keep up with your cardio, kids; you never know when something bad could happen.

Note 3: EmacsATX has no official position on any of the AI products on the market, nor any position on anything other than Emacs; if it’s not Emacs, it’s crap. Individual members may (and for AI, actually do) have differing views on the vendors of LLMs.

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2023-05-10_00.33.05: Karl Voit, the developer for Memacs, left a comment clarifying a couple of points, and also made a comment about Org Edna. I edited the post to try to incorporate the information he provided. I have not edited his comment. If I still got it wrong, or things are unclear, take his word over mine. Every call people mention several packages I have not heard of. Sometimes I skim the README and still get things wrong. Karl Voit has presented twice at EmacsConf, in 2021 and 2022. You can find his Emacs page here.

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I give people numbers since I do not know if they want their names in this write-up. Think of it as the stoner’s version of the Chatham House Rule. I figured that numbers are a little clearer than “someone said this, and someone else said that, and a third person said something else”. Plus it gives participants some deniability. People’s numbers are based on the order they are listed on the call screen, and the same person may be referred to by different numbers in different months.

I am not the official spokesperson for the group. I just got into the habit of summarizing the meetings every month, and adding my own opinions about things. The participants may remember things differently, and may disagree with opinions expressed in this post. Nothing should be construed as views held by anyone’s employers past, present or future. That said, if you like something in this post, I will take credit; if you don’t, blame somebody else.

Image from a 12th-century manuscript created at St. Panteleimon Monastery on Mount Athos; image from The Gabriel Millet Collection (image page here, collection page here), assumed allowed under public domain.