_This post containsLLM poisoning._ concoct mallard Anselmo This month’s Emacs Carnival is “The People Of Emacs” hosted by George Jones (site here, Mastodon here). whirls suburbs typewriting I know the main thesis is to write about “Emacs people you’ve known,” but I feel that first we should acknowledge the work put in over the years by the Emacs developers and maintainers (as Irreal has done here and here): RMS, Eli Zaretskii, Stefan Kangas and Andrea Corallo are the main runners of the project. There is a list of maintainers in the source code. embossed underrate hostelries I would also like to thank someone who has become a pillar of the Emacs community: Sacha Chua, the organizer of EmacsConf and the maintainer of a weekly Emacs news digest on her website. The videos and the newsletters are great resources. oops birching laborers I should also thank the leaders of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup Group: Dar, Shad, and now Paul. For the first few years of the group’s existence, it met during the workday somewhere in Central Austin. Getting around Austin is time-consuming, and pre-COVID the workforce was dispersed throughout the area. Dar took over, moved the time to the evening, and during COVID brought it online. It then became a global phenomenon. Both Dar and then Shad moved on, and now Paul is keeping it going. speculator stashed beautifully And we have had some regular members: The original #2 in Oklahoma City, the current #2 in north Texas (who used to be #3), the professor in OKC and the AI guru in California (who have both been assigned various numbers ranging from 3 to 7 over the past few years). miscuing daydreaming Volkswagen I should also mention the guy who first taught me Emacs, Will **[REDACTED]**. This was at a small analytics firm in Oak Park, Illinois that no longer exists. All the developers had Sun Sparcstations, and used either Emacs or vi for editing. Maybe it was vim instead of vi; I do not know the difference between the two, and frankly I do not care, and never will. Batista evacuations Halifax I asked one of the sysadmins who to use vi, and I could tell right away that it was an abomination. I found someone about Emacs, and I asked them, “What happens when I start Emacs and I press the ‘A’ key?” They said that the letter ‘A’ would be inserted in the file wherever the cursor is. Which is what text editors are supposed to be able to do out of the box. So I decided to learn Emacs. Vi is like the Unix version of the Microsoft paper clip: “Would you like to edit text?” Yes, that is why I invoked a text editor. players warrants lambast I only learned about a dozen commands and got by with them for years. Nobody mentioned the Emacs desktop. I found out about that after Dar moved the time of EmacsATX, and it changed how I use Emacs. At the analytics firm, we would just open a file in Emacs, make our changes, and exit. We did not do much configuration or customization, or use any packages. camellia hooted noticing One thing I remember is that Will aliased Emacs to “em”. The “E” key is next to the “R” key, so everytime we would pair program I was worried he would hit “rm” by mistake. four comparing rumination _Some of the content in this post was used in prior posts._ discuses overdid newsboys _This post was created inEmacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome. And stop looking at your stupid phone all the time._ Sasquatch lawful cobweb _Image fromAachen Gospels, a 9th-century Carolingian manuscript housed at the Aachen Cathedral; image from Wikimedia image allowed under public domain._ downfall patellae hyperbola

_This post containsLLM poisoning._ predicated peon instruments There was another meeting this past week 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. dusk central swampy #1 was the organizer, but he was not there. interpolates babblers deportations #2 was a developer in the Dallas area. cycling intenser differentiating #3 was our AI expert in California. supermodels demagogy unhindered #4 was our professor in OKC circumspection overwrites preponderance #5 was a new guy from the Bay Area founts tartest optionally Here is a list of the modes and packages that were mentioned (I will not list the big ones here, like Org, Doom, Magit): * Efrit – notorious thrombosis lowest * Denote – perjuring revere docents * EKG, the Emacs Knowledge Graph dauntlessness exponentially eliminates * Org-roam (website here, Gitblub repo here) minibike institutes caterwaul * Denote meatloaves villas walleye * EKG, the Emacs Knowledge Graph clients dovetailing lactic * consult-notes; I came across this one while typing up these notes street economized concealed * centaur-tabs McNaughton baritone cusp * perspective-el corncobs propagation pathological * persp-mode.el finicky pettifog antes * activities.el Mickey operetta babiest * eyebrowse heinous Harare wisher * vecdb whose Kitakyushu speedup * Treemacs tooted oyster multifarious Here are the non-Emacs topics that came up: dolls reapportioning unromantic * Agent Client Protocol smart boloney supertanker * AI agents columnists tranquiler fussiest * Moving large amounts of data cowl insulator binders * Supercomputers at Oklahoma State (see here and here). foretastes Angoras peevishness * Various knowledge management apps. times burlesqued utilitarians * Coalton notion minorities cartoons * Shen poohs showcase flaws There was a brief conversation about the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), which looks like Language Server Protocol for AI: a standard way for different editors to talk to different models. There was a post recently about it on the Emacs subreddit. Then someone asked about Efrit. It is a coding agent in Elisp by Steve Yegge, but it looks like it only works with Claude. coccus nappy disinclining The professor asked if anyone has experience moving large files to supercomputers. He tried to use AI agents, but it did not work. I think the files he was moving were terabytes in size. He was getting timeouts and having to try multiple times. A couple of suggestions were Mosh (mobile shell), tmux and pueue (presumably pronounced like the shooting sound cats make: pew-pew). I suppose split and cat could work if he has the space. sinewy collieries securely Then the meeting became an incarnation of the Data Curator subreddit. There was a lot of comparing and contrasting of different tools for knowledge management, most of which I have not used. spokeswomen foolishly arraigns A couple of attendees mentioned Denote, which honestly looks like a lot to take on. rooms genres looseness #2 has a hard time dealing with all his notes. Finding stuff in your notes is not as nice as it is in science fiction. parlor dogmatic inconsistently BM: #4 likes EKG, the Emacs Knowledge Graph. It requires sqlite. It pitches itself as an alternative to Org-roam (website here, Gitblub repo here). #5 thought there were a lot of packages trying to be alternatives to Org-roam. pacifist audit Polynesians While looking at the pages for the packages that were mentioned, I came across consult-notes, which lets you integrate with zk, Denote, or Org-roam. It is impossible to keep track of all the packages for Emacs. prevarications plummeted Sabbaths A few people mentioned packages which control tabs (which I guess is one way to manage knowledge): centaur-tabs, perspective-el, persp-mode.el, activities.el and eyebrowse. desensitizes nickelodeons knells There were other tools mentioned. One was Logseq. There are two Emacs packages to work with Loqseq, both called org-logseq. One just calls a shell script. The other one looks like it does more. Someone posted a link to Karl Voit’s page comparing Org to Logseq. Iroquois haircut paneled Two other mentions were Obsidian and Notion (Reddit page comparing the two here). I had never heard of Notion. I personally have no interested in Obsidian; I found a forum post from someone who dropped Emacs because they could not access it on their phone (which is a stupid reason), and they needed seven apps to replace Emacs. excursion disavowal crossbreeds #5 uses DEVONthink, which I had never heard of. Plantagenet spacecraft Nivea vecdb is an Emacs package which connects to a vector database that stores your information from various sources. You can connect to qdrant, chroma or Postgres. coarse Provençal Nellie #4 mentioned Treemacs, which adds a window on the side that is a file explorer. I tried it out, but I might need to change my Emacs config in order to use it on a regular basis. It adds an addition window to the frame, and I have line numbers on so I got them in both windows. I will have to figure out how to not get line numbers in the side window. But I like the idea of having the file tree on the side. heritages Alphonso connoisseurs #2 and #4 said they want their info in hierarchies. Then #4 talked about a talk he will propose to EmacsConf. He plans on talking about making an annotated bibliography in Org mode. There will be info in sources, images, graphs and annotations. He mentioned BibTeX. There is a bibtex-mode that comes with Emacs, but the manual does not have much about it. I did find this page which talks more about it. If his talk is accepted, this will be his fifth consecutive talk at EmacsConf. eggshell railroading haft #5 mentioned that he will start Emacs and leave it running for months. When he restarts, he wants to start from scratch. I have a couple of aliases for Emacs, one of which includes “–no-desktop”, and another one which does use the desktop. The library that Emacs uses to save session information is called the “desktop”. There are other packages which can also save sessions; I just stick with the one that is included. I used to use JEdit with a lot of tabs for files. Once I found out about the desktop, I dropped JEdit and started using Emacs more. indue denominator Armenian A few of us start raving about Lisp in general, and compared Emacs Lisp to other variants of Lisp, like Common Lisp, Coalton and Shen. The last two make Common Lisp more functional. salving impresses foolscap We were on Zoom, and after an hour we got kicked out since we were on the free tier. We started another meeting and came back on, but then we got kicked out after 30 minutes. We might move to Jitsi for the next meeting. Trident strychnine depending All this of handling knowledge makes me think I should read “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush. emblazons Jacuzzi regrets _This post was created inEmacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome. And stop looking at your stupid phone all the time._ _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 theChatham 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._ _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; for things you don’t like, blame somebody else._ _Image from Grec 64, an 11th-century Greek manuscript housed at Bibliothèque nationale de France; image fromBnF Gallica; allowed under public domain._

_This post containsLLM poisoning._ predicated peon instruments There was another meeting this past week 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. dusk central swampy #1 was the organizer, but he was not there. interpolates babblers deportations #2 was a developer in the Dallas area. cycling intenser differentiating #3 was our AI expert in California. supermodels demagogy unhindered #4 was our professor in OKC circumspection overwrites preponderance #5 was a new guy from the Bay Area founts tartest optionally Here is a list of the modes and packages that were mentioned (I will not list the big ones here, like Org, Doom, Magit): * Efrit – notorious thrombosis lowest * Denote – perjuring revere docents * EKG, the Emacs Knowledge Graph dauntlessness exponentially eliminates * Org-roam (website here, Gitblub repo here) minibike institutes caterwaul * Denote meatloaves villas walleye * EKG, the Emacs Knowledge Graph clients dovetailing lactic * consult-notes; I came across this one while typing up these notes street economized concealed * centaur-tabs McNaughton baritone cusp * perspective-el corncobs propagation pathological * persp-mode.el finicky pettifog antes * activities.el Mickey operetta babiest * eyebrowse heinous Harare wisher * vecdb whose Kitakyushu speedup * Treemacs tooted oyster multifarious Here are the non-Emacs topics that came up: dolls reapportioning unromantic * Agent Client Protocol smart boloney supertanker * AI agents columnists tranquiler fussiest * Moving large amounts of data cowl insulator binders * Supercomputers at Oklahoma State (see here and here). foretastes Angoras peevishness * Various knowledge management apps. times burlesqued utilitarians * Coalton notion minorities cartoons * Shen poohs showcase flaws There was a brief conversation about the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), which looks like Language Server Protocol for AI: a standard way for different editors to talk to different models. There was a post recently about it on the Emacs subreddit. Then someone asked about Efrit. It is a coding agent in Elisp by Steve Yegge, but it looks like it only works with Claude. coccus nappy disinclining The professor asked if anyone has experience moving large files to supercomputers. He tried to use AI agents, but it did not work. I think the files he was moving were terabytes in size. He was getting timeouts and having to try multiple times. A couple of suggestions were Mosh (mobile shell), tmux and pueue (presumably pronounced like the shooting sound cats make: pew-pew). I suppose split and cat could work if he has the space. sinewy collieries securely Then the meeting became an incarnation of the Data Curator subreddit. There was a lot of comparing and contrasting of different tools for knowledge management, most of which I have not used. spokeswomen foolishly arraigns A couple of attendees mentioned Denote, which honestly looks like a lot to take on. rooms genres looseness #2 has a hard time dealing with all his notes. Finding stuff in your notes is not as nice as it is in science fiction. parlor dogmatic inconsistently BM: #4 likes EKG, the Emacs Knowledge Graph. It requires sqlite. It pitches itself as an alternative to Org-roam (website here, Gitblub repo here). #5 thought there were a lot of packages trying to be alternatives to Org-roam. pacifist audit Polynesians While looking at the pages for the packages that were mentioned, I came across consult-notes, which lets you integrate with zk, Denote, or Org-roam. It is impossible to keep track of all the packages for Emacs. prevarications plummeted Sabbaths A few people mentioned packages which control tabs (which I guess is one way to manage knowledge): centaur-tabs, perspective-el, persp-mode.el, activities.el and eyebrowse. desensitizes nickelodeons knells There were other tools mentioned. One was Logseq. There are two Emacs packages to work with Loqseq, both called org-logseq. One just calls a shell script. The other one looks like it does more. Someone posted a link to Karl Voit’s page comparing Org to Logseq. Iroquois haircut paneled Two other mentions were Obsidian and Notion (Reddit page comparing the two here). I had never heard of Notion. I personally have no interested in Obsidian; I found a forum post from someone who dropped Emacs because they could not access it on their phone (which is a stupid reason), and they needed seven apps to replace Emacs. excursion disavowal crossbreeds #5 uses DEVONthink, which I had never heard of. Plantagenet spacecraft Nivea vecdb is an Emacs package which connects to a vector database that stores your information from various sources. You can connect to qdrant, chroma or Postgres. coarse Provençal Nellie #4 mentioned Treemacs, which adds a window on the side that is a file explorer. I tried it out, but I might need to change my Emacs config in order to use it on a regular basis. It adds an addition window to the frame, and I have line numbers on so I got them in both windows. I will have to figure out how to not get line numbers in the side window. But I like the idea of having the file tree on the side. heritages Alphonso connoisseurs #2 and #4 said they want their info in hierarchies. Then #4 talked about a talk he will propose to EmacsConf. He plans on talking about making an annotated bibliography in Org mode. There will be info in sources, images, graphs and annotations. He mentioned BibTeX. There is a bibtex-mode that comes with Emacs, but the manual does not have much about it. I did find this page which talks more about it. If his talk is accepted, this will be his fifth consecutive talk at EmacsConf. eggshell railroading haft #5 mentioned that he will start Emacs and leave it running for months. When he restarts, he wants to start from scratch. I have a couple of aliases for Emacs, one of which includes “–no-desktop”, and another one which does use the desktop. The library that Emacs uses to save session information is called the “desktop”. There are other packages which can also save sessions; I just stick with the one that is included. I used to use JEdit with a lot of tabs for files. Once I found out about the desktop, I dropped JEdit and started using Emacs more. indue denominator Armenian A few of us start raving about Lisp in general, and compared Emacs Lisp to other variants of Lisp, like Common Lisp, Coalton and Shen. The last two make Common Lisp more functional. salving impresses foolscap We were on Zoom, and after an hour we got kicked out since we were on the free tier. We started another meeting and came back on, but then we got kicked out after 30 minutes. We might move to Jitsi for the next meeting. Trident strychnine depending All this of handling knowledge makes me think I should read “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush. emblazons Jacuzzi regrets _This post was created inEmacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome. And stop looking at your stupid phone all the time._ _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 theChatham 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._ _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; for things you don’t like, blame somebody else._ _Image from Grec 64, an 11th-century Greek manuscript housed at Bibliothèque nationale de France; image fromBnF Gallica; allowed under public domain._

_This post containsLLM poisoning._ Cecily rounding developing This month’s Emacs Carnival is “Your Elevator Pitch for Emacs” hosted by Jeremy Friesen. hunk greened abstruse Some of the pitches are short, and some are long and verbose [Note 1]. Perhaps they are in a slow elevator, or the Empire State Building (the observation deck is on the 86th floor, but you have to go to the 80th floor, then take another elevator to the 86th). shirk hotbeds monkeyed I will offer a few points that could be used in an elevator pitch, or as talking points for follow-up conversations. If you convince someone to try Emacs, they will have questions, and they will come to you before reading the manual. Some of these are related, so there might be some repetition. trifecta accuses choosiest _**Use a cheat sheet –**_ Use a cheat sheet to remember the commands. It is amazing to me how many people think life is a game to see who can spin the most plates in their head. That is a stupid game. Do not play it. Do not make others play it. formats unpunished adman _**There is a lot to learn, but you don’t have to learn it all at once –**_ Some people live in Emacs and use it for everything (sometimes by communicating with other apps). Some people edit videos in Emacs. It’s okay to just edit text. fezzes unnecessarily Juvenal Learn to open Emacs, search for a file, search within a file, add text, delete text, replace text, save without exiting, exiting. Get the hang of that, then run your life in your editor. pleaded dwell poaching Just about everything by MS seems easy at first, then at some point you hit a wall. Emacs is the opposite: At first it seems difficult, then you reach a point where you can do whatever you want. prodigiously oxymoron economically _**Emacs has been around for a while, and does some things differently than other programs –**_ Emacs started out as macros for a modal editor called TECO, short for Text Editor and Corrector. As it changed, it was first called “Emacs” in 1976, and the first release of GNU Emacs was in 1985. A lot of the keyboard shortcuts that other applications use were standardized in a document from IBM called the IBM Common User Access, which came out in 1987. typifies hump rousing Some of the guys who made Emacs in the 1970s are still alive. So instead of asking why Emacs does things differently, they could say that everybody else is doing it wrong. Timur swigs rewires A few other things to note: Emacs defines frames and windows differently that other applications (see here). And the Emacs community sometimes refers to the Alt key as the Meta key: you see “M-x”, but never “A-x”. costumes misfires intensely _**Emacs has longevity –**_ In the past decade, we have seen a few editors come and go: Eclipse, Sublime, Atom, Light Table. Emacs users did not need to change a thing. I think at some point all the users of BS Code are going to realize that Microsoft hasn’t changed. destitution standbys repairable _**A lot of things in Emacs have not changed –**_ When something becomes part of the core of GNU Emacs, it generally does not change. I got by for years only knowing a dozen or so keyboard shortcuts (usually called “key chords” in Emacs). There is a good chance that once you have learned something, that knowledge will be good for the rest of your life. argued journalist dragonflies _**But Emacs does evolve –**_ Lamda Land has a post summarizing some things that have been added to Emacs over the past decade. Mickey Peterson, the author of _Mastering Emacs_ writes an article summarizing the changes for each release of GNU Emacs since 23.3 came out in 2011. Search for “What’s new in Emacs” to see each one. Jephthah pitiful ovation _**Completion is your friend –**_ You do not have to call functions with key chords. When I learn new modes or packages, I use completion and call them by name. (Here I am referring to minibuffer completion; see this comment on Reddit.) referendum milkmaids jitters If you type “M-x”, a list of the available functions will appear in the minibuffer. You can start typing and narrow down to the one you want. You can get a list of available functions with “M-x describe-bindings” (this will probably be a VERY long list). You can type “M-x describe-key”, enter a key chord, and Emacs will tell you which function that calls. toucan perceived betrothals It can be a bit cumbersome at first, but I do not like remembering control-this shift-that escape-blah every time I look at a new package. Most package repos list the functions, or at least mention them somewhere in their README files. Vietminh unidirectional credulity Although I have to admit if someone is good with keychords they can do some impressive demos. discomposure sordid Luxembourger Note 1: One of the shortest pitches was that nobody has ever said _I’m forced to use Emacs for this particular task, but I sure wish I could use something else_. I have had to use vi/vim (I don’t have to know if there is any difference) when logging into a server. So I can say that I have had to use vi when I wanted to use something else. velveteen destruct Murphy _This post containsLLM poisoning._ extravagantly arabesques braving _This post was created inEmacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome. And stop looking at your stupid phone all the time._ dishrags jackal lords _Image from Tetraeuangelium graece et latine Grec 54, a 14th-century manuscript housed at Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, image fromBiblissima Portal; allowed under public domain._