Sacha Chua - category - emacs-chat-podcast

Sacha Chua

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Episodes: 3
Ratings: Monthly
Cadence: 2026
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About Sacha Chua - category - emacs-chat-podcast

Emacs, sketches, and life

Publisher: Sacha Chua
Category: technology
Language: en
Explicit: No
First episode: 4 May 2026
Latest episode: 1 Sept 2026

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1 Sept 2026
Emacs Chat 30: Fabrice Niessen (en français, partie 2)
Nous avons parlé en direct avec Fabrice Niessen (https://github.com/fniessen) d'Emacs pour la deuxième fois. Voici ses notes (https://github.com/fniessen/emacs-chat-sacha-chua). Watch on YouTube (https://youtube.com/live/4m0G_ASLUXY) Correction : J'ai voulu dire Speaches (https://speaches.ai/) (un serveur de reconnaissance vocale) au lieu de speechd (un serveur de synthèse vocale) Voici notre conversation précédente : Emacs Chat 28: Fabrice Niessen (en français) (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/08/13-aout-emacs-chat-fabrice-niessen/) Chapitres (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chat-30-fabrice-niessen-en-fran-ais-partie-2-chapitres) 0:00 Introduction 3:00 gptel 13:42 diff 17:52 gptel-commit-message 23:30 docstrings 24:03 hs-minor-mode - hideshow 31:03 Super-whisper 41:21 Dotfiler 59:12 Enseignement d'Emacs La transcription légèrement corrigée (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chat-30-fabrice-niessen-en-fran-ais-partie-2-la-transcription-l-g-rement-corrig-e) Details 0:00 Introduction Prot: Tu peux prendre le lien correct cette fois. Fabrice: Ah, voilà, je suis prêt avec. Sacha: Ah, ok. Ok. Nous sommes en direct. Prot: Ah, nous sommes en direct. Très bien. Sacha: Donc, je vais passer à vos notes. Bonjour à toutes et à tous et bienvenue au 30e épisode d'Emacs Chat. C'est la suite de notre conversation avec Fabrice Nissen. Merci de nouveau Fabrice d'être là et merci également à Prot de nous rejoindre. Donc, on continue. Lors de la conversation précédente, nous avons parlé de ton expérience sur Windows et sur WSL, des thèmes de publication vers HTML ou vers PDF, de ton kit de configuration Leuven, des petites améliorations et des automatisations et des formations et des cours particuliers en français, en anglais, en néerlandais et en espagnol. C'est incroyable, ça! Du coup, si ça ne te dérange pas, j'essaie d'en savoir plus sur ton flux de travail, puis repasser à une discussion sur l'enseignement d'Emacs, de nombreux changements et de grandes incertitudes à l'époque de l'IA. Qu'en penses-tu? Depuis notre conversation, tu as ajouté beaucoup de fonctions, d'outils, de préréglages (presets) de gptel à ta configuration. C'est un sujet très tendance YouTube a évidemment beaucoup de video de ce genre en anglais, mais pas encore en français, je pense. Peux-tu nous montrer ton flux de travail avec l'IA sur Emacs? Fabrice: Volontiers. Merci pour l'invitation et l'image bouge. Merci pour l'invitation pour cette trentième fois. Donc, je vais partager mon écran. Prot: Merci. Fabrice: Alors, je tape share, voilà. Et donc, ce sera celui-ci. Est-ce que vous voyez mon écran ? Prot: Oui, je peux voir ton écran. Fabrice: Ok, très bien. Très bien. 3:00 gptel Fabrice: Donc en fait, sur gptel, j'utilise pas encore beaucoup, beaucoup, beaucoup, mais de plus en plus. Je suis aussi un peu novice, un peu, mais j'ai effectivement, et récemment d'ailleurs, fait quelques petites améliorations de layout au standard. Donc j'ai, par exemple, utilisé le raccourci C-<F1> pour lancer… Je n'ai pas lancé le chat. Je vois que je n'ai pas ma dernière configuration. C'est peut-être l'occasion aussi de parler, juste un petit break. Vous voyez que j'utilise Helm. Je ne sais pas ce que vous utilisez vous. Je suis extrêmement content de Helm, ce qui me permet de taper. Je ne dois plus savoir où se trouve un fichier, dans quel répertoire. Il suffit que je connaisse quelques morceaux de son nom. Et je vais retrouver directement le fichier ou le buffer actif. Donc ici c'est gptel et ce sera le point el. Il est là. Donc ici, je vais lancer et je vais faire vb rapidement pour le keychord eval-buffer. Voilà, donc il est évalué. Donc je vais avoir un look un peu différent maintenant si je recommence. Voilà, C-<F1>. Donc on peut lui dire bonjour. C-c C-c pour envoyer. Voilà. Et donc ici il répond. Donc une petite utilisation que j'ai faite, c'est gptel-highlight-mode qui permet de mettre la réponse avec un certain fond et une petite barre ici dans la frange pour bien identifier la différence entre les questions et les réponses. Je peux lui demander d'écrire Un exemple de code Python. S'il fait comme d'habitude, il va faire la suite de Fibonacci. Voilà. Et donc, qu'est-ce qu'il a fait ? Ah non, les nombres premiers. Ici, c'est quelque chose que je commence à utiliser de plus en plus, le buffer de conversation gptel. Une petite customisation que j'ai faite. D'ailleurs, j'ai envoyé un issue à l'auteur de gptel pour éventuellement qu'il l'introduise directement dans... Dans gptel, c'est le fait de recoloriser les codes blocs dans les réponses en utilisant la couleur que j'ai dans mon thème pour Org Mode. Donc ici, c'est exactement comme dans un fichier Org Mode. J'ai le fond jaune pour le code et les délimiteurs ici, de début et de fin, en gris. Et ça, c'est très important, je trouve, pour mettre en évidence comme il faut le code bloc. Et le fait, bon ici ce n'est pas de l'Emacs Lisp, mais si j'avais demandé, si je pouvais demander de faire la version, donnez-moi la version de l'Emacs Lisp. C-c C-c. Et l'avantage évidemment de faire ici, donc à la fin de la réponse, il y a un scroll automatique vers le bas. Ah d'accord. Et ce qu'il fait aussi, c'est qu'il fait un formatting pour que ça reste moins de 80 caractères. Et donc ici, l'avantage, c'est que c'est dans Emacs et que c'est l'Emacs Lisp. Je peux directement faire C-x C-e. Et je pourrais tester les fonctions. Je pourrais faire ici. Ça me permet d'éviter de faire des copier-coller entre ChatGPT ou Copilot ou n'importe lequel. Ici j'ai tout directement là dedans. C'est extrêmement pratique. Sacha: Tu as aussi des fonctions pour ajouter des contextes, des fonctions, d'autres choses dans ta configuration. Au lieu d'utilisation de conversation buffer, tu as aussi utilisé les fonctionnalités gptel dans ton code. Fabrice: Il y a le rewrite que j'utilise parfois, ou alors pour répondre avec le contexte, il y a notamment le add context ou add context file. Je n'ai pas encore beaucoup joué avec, donc je sais qu'on peut aller dans Dired et puis faire gptel-add-file, add context file, je crois. Et je l’ai déjà bindé sur C-c g, donc tout ce qui est C-c g et c’est gptel. J’ai déjà utilisé le raccourci avec un petit a, donc C-c g a pour ajouter du contexte. Mais je ne l'ai pas encore vraiment utilisé, donc je n'ai pas encore beaucoup d'expérience avec. Par contre, je fais parfois dans des fichiers, je peux faire, si je prends un fichier Org, on peut aller dans le fichier ici avec mes petites notes d'aujourd'hui. Ça pourrait m'arriver ici de dire je veux traduire ces deux paragraphes en anglais par exemple. Je vais les sélectionner. Je vais faire C-u C-c RET pour avoir le menu de gptel. Là, je vais changer la directive puisque la directive ici c'est tu es un assistant, etc. Je vais changer la directive. Je vais en fait utiliser le S, Set System Message. Là, j'ai une série de prompt, en fait, de system prompt, de directives, ça s'appelle, sous gptel. Donc, une série de directives, de prompt qui sont prêts. Mais ici, je vais faire un spécifique. Donc, je vais encore faire une fois s. Et là, je vais taper, par exemple, traduit. Là, quand on a fini, on peut faire C-c C-c. Ici, on voit la directive qui est là. Pour l'instant, si je ne change rien, il va envoyer ma sélection et il va insérer la réponse. Là, je ne vois pas très bien. Il faut que je déplace un truc. Il va insérer la réponse à la fin. Je pourrais faire ça, par exemple, pour voir comment il a traduit. Comme ça, je garde au-dessus l'input. Je vais faire effectivement RET ici. Parfois, c'est un peu compliqué à lire. Prot: Qu'est-ce qu'il m'a fait ? Fabrice: On dirait qu'il a pris plus de lignes. Sacha: Il y a un problème des démos en direct. Fabrice: Je vais bien le refaire. C-u C-c RET. Je vais bien sectionner ma région. La directive est là. Donc, je vais faire ici Enter. Voilà. Donc j'ai vu que l'input était, la section était toujours sélectionnée, donc j’ai fait C-w pour l'entrée, et puis j'ai gardé ce qu'il y a. Donc ici, voilà, typiquement, il a fait le job facilement, donc je suis nouveau restant dans Directement dans Emacs, on fait des copies-coller avec d'autres interfaces externes. Sacha: Je vois que tu peux aussi remplacer la sélection avec les résultats ou peut-être rediriger l'output à un autre tampon pour comparaison. Fabrice: Exact. Donc, je n'ai pas encore tout utilisé, mais je pourrais ici essayer. On va essayer. On va traduire en français, par exemple. Donc, j'ai bien sélectionné. Je vais faire C-u C-c RET pour avoir de nouveau le menu. Ou alors, M-x, j'ai fait tel menu. Donc là, je vais changer et je vais mettre la directive 2 fois S. Et cette fois-ci, je vais traduire en français. C-c C-c, voilà. Et donc, je vais mettre ici le respond in place. Et donc, en théorie, il va écraser ma sélection par sa réponse. Donc, je vais faire le i ici. Et donc, en fait, il faut toujours lire la dernière ligne ici. On voit ce qu'il va faire. C'est un résumé de ce qu'il va faire en fonction des options qu'on a choisi. Donc ici, quand je vais faire ret, quand je vais faire return, il va remplacer la sélection avec la réponse. Donc je fais RET. Ah, et là j'ai peur. The conversation must end with a user message. Qu'est-ce qu'on va faire ? On va rester, on ne sait jamais. C-x C-x C-u RET… Non, ce n'était pas ça. C-x u. C-x u. Voilà. C-x C-x C-u RET Ben si, c'est ça. Non, C-u C-c RET. Il y a trop de raccourcis. Je fais la sélection, voilà. C-u C-c RET. J'ai mon menu, j'ai ma directive en haut qui est bonne. Je vais faire le i, Replace, la sélection du response, RET. Bon, j'ai l'erreur. Donc là, il faudrait que je regarde un peu plus. Je n'ai pas beaucoup utilisé ça. Et en fait, justement, sur le rewrite, il faut que j'utilise aussi un peu plus pour du texte et pour du code. Et je sais qu'il y a plusieurs possibilités après. 13:42 diff Fabrice: Il y a aussi moyen de dire, il va remplacer en théorie par le nouveau texte, mais il y a moyen de montrer aussi son changement sous forme de diff ou de ediff. Donc il y a moyen de dire accepte. J’ai vu qu’après on peut faire C-c C-a pour accepte, C-c C-e pour ediff, C-c C-d pour diff. Et donc il peut rouvrir différents buffers pour bien visualiser la différence. Si c'est une traduction, tout serait changé. Et si on modifie du code, par exemple, en disant rajoute-moi un paramètre, on a envie de voir vraiment la différence et de sûr qu'il n'a pas fait plus de choses que ce qu'on a demandé. Donc il y a moyen de faire un diff ou un ediff après. Prot: C'est peut-être mieux comme ça avec Ediff. Fabrice: Oui, moi j'aime beaucoup Ediff. D'ailleurs, c'est quelque chose, je ne crois pas que je l'ai montré l'autre fois. Donc ici, moi j’ai C-<f9> chez moi, c’est privé, pour lancer vc-dir sans me poser de questions sur quel est le répertoire qu'on veut analyser. Donc ici, je vais faire C-<f9>. Donc il me lance vc-dir sur le répertoire dans lequel je me trouvais. On voit que j'ai fait une modification dans le fichier readme. Si je fais égal, on voit un diff unifié avec les plus et les moins en dessous. Il faut toujours relire avant de committer les diffs parce que là il y a une ligne qui n'était pas prévue d'être committée en imaginant que je devais faire le commit. Je vais d'ailleurs effacer cette ligne. Ce qui est pratique ici dans tout ça, c'est que j'ai fait une modification, j'ai sauvé. Ce buffer-ci est le diff. Je n'ai pas besoin de retourner dans le vc-dir et de refaire un égal. Je peux faire g, faire refresh, il recalcule le contenu. Donc ici, j’ai fait g et simplement, il a recalculé le diff. Et je ne vois plus que le paragraphe qu'on devait traduire, qui a été effacé. Pour l'instant, c'est une possibilité. Et l'autre possibilité à partir de vc-dir. Pour l'instant, je n'utilise pas encore Magit parce que j'ai eu pendant des années des répertoires, des repos qui étaient sous SVN, subversion. Certains étaient déjà sous Git. Je voulais une seule interface pour gérer tous mes repositories. Et donc, j'ai tout construit sur vc-dir qui marche très bien. Voilà, je suis sûr que Magit, pour Git, est plus sophistiquée, plus jolie à regarder, sans doute. Mais en fait, je fais tout mon boulot ici avec vc-dir. Donc, si j'avais égal, j'ai un diff unifié. Ça, c'est standard, je crois. Si je fais grand E, ça, c’est pas standard. Ça m'appelle ediff. Donc là, directement, j'ai ediff, puis j'ai plus qu'à faire next. Voilà, next. Bon, j'ai qu'un changement ici. Ce paragraphe là qui a disparu. Donc ça c'est très pratique, directement pouvoir lancer Ediff à partir d'un fichier modifié. Et alors une petite chose que j'ai récemment rajoutée dans Git, c'est donc ici je viens de refaire un égal pour avoir un Ediff unifié. Donc ici j'ai le Le diff unifié où j'ai ce paragraphe-là qui est apparu. En fait, depuis n'importe quel diff, donc output qui est sous forme de diff avec des plus et des moins, Ici, c'est à partir de vc-diff. Ça pourrait être le résultat d'un Git diff dans un buffer. Ça pourrait être dans Magit. Je peux lancer la touche avec w, ça marche. Ça m'a lancé la génération d'un message de commit via gptel. J'ai écrit une petite fonction qui va envoyer tout ce buffer-là. 17:52 gptel-commit-message Fabrice: Ça envoie le buffer en entier à gptel. En lui demandant de m'écrire un message de commit. C'est gptel-commit-message. Je l'ai mis sous GitHub. Il génère un message de commit à partir d'un fichier, d'un buffer diff. Il envoie tout ça et donc il a été généré n'importe comment, donc ce n'est pas lié à Magit. Parce qu'il y a beaucoup, il y a plusieurs solutions qui existent déjà dans MELPA et c'est lié souvent à Magit. Ou à Git, en fait, il faut avoir stagé les fichiers. Moi, je n'ai pas spécialement envie de mettre des fichiers, de les stager dans Git. J'ai envie de pouvoir simplement sélectionner moi-même ici dans l'interface un, deux, trois fichiers et regarder la différence pour ces fichiers-là. Génère-moi un message pour ces fichiers. Ici, dans le package, qui est tout petit, il fait une fonction. Il y a juste une fonction. Il y a le nom du buffer et la fonction. Derrière, je l’ai mappé sur w. Quand je suis dans le diff-mode-map, dans vc-dir, Je tape w pour write. Ça me gênait le fichier de ce message. Donc, si je reviens sur ton changement, voilà. Donc, j'avais ici, j'avais fait W à partir d'un buffer diff. Ça a envoyé via gptel, ça a envoyé le diff, ça a récupéré un message de commit, ça l'a mis dans le presse-papier et ça m'a ouvert un buffer, donc ça a rajouté un buffer à côté où je pouvais le voir. Je vais le refaire ici. Donc ça envoie, voilà. Et donc on voit, ça ouvre un buffer avec le message en bas. Et en fait, je peux très bien me dire, tiens, en fait, ce message-là, il ne me plaît pas trop. Puisqu'en fait, on a chaque fois des réponses différentes. Donc je peux très bien refaire W en haut. Il va réenvoyer le truc. Cette fois-ci, ça ressemble assez fort. Je vais le refaire. Il change un petit peu, il n'y a pas beaucoup de changement ici parce que ce n'est pas le même texte. Donc, remove personal introduction from readme. Prot: Et il a copié aussi sur le kill ring. Fabrice: Oui, exactement. Donc, maintenant, en fait, je n'ai plus qu'à refaire ctrl . Je suis déjà là-dessus. Je n'ai plus qu'à faire dans V, c'est dire, next action, c'est V. Pour dire, fais l'action suivante qui a du sens. Ici, puisque j'ai un fichier modifié, l'action suivante qui a du sens, c'est de committer. Donc, il m'ouvre un buffer pour pouvoir mettre mon message de commit. Donc, je fais simplement C-y. Et éventuellement, je vais un peu le modifier. C-c C-c, c’est envoyé. Et donc, c'est committé. Ça, j'utilise depuis quelques mois quand même, je dirais depuis 4, 5, 6 mois. Depuis cette période-là, je fais tous mes messages de commit avec gptel, l'intelligence artificielle. Et c'est merveilleux parce que ça a augmenté la qualité de mes messages de commit. C'est indéniable. Avant, je mettais souvent dans mes fichiers à moi « update ». Sacha: Moi aussi. Fabrice: Et en plus, non seulement j'ai un beau message qui dit vraiment ce qu'il y a, et je relis encore, non seulement avant de committer, je relis toujours. Au minimum, je fais égal pour voir la différence. Ou s'il y a beaucoup de différences, je vais faire un grand E pour pouvoir en Ediff comparer les versions avant et les versions après, systématiquement. Mais en plus, je fais générer mon message de commit et je lis aussi le message de commit. Voilà, pour voir qu'il a bien compris et qu'effectivement aussi, le résumé est correct par rapport à ce que j'ai fait. Parce que parfois, s'il y a eu des centaines de changements, je pourrais voir aussi quelque chose qui me tient. Il me parle de ça, c'est bizarre qu'il me dise que... Je ne sais pas, que j'ai enlevé un paragraphe, ce n'est pas normal. Voilà, ça pourrait aussi m'attirer l'attention sur, tiens, est-ce que je n'ai quand même pas trop vite lu le diff et donc d'aller voir des trucs. Donc, c'est vraiment... Ça change la qualité du commit sous Git. C'est vraiment quelque chose que je conseille à tout le monde. Et donc ici, pour vc-dir, il a fallu que j'écrive ma fonction moi-même, parce que les autres Git gptel commits, il faut avoir stagé les fichiers, donc ça regarde ce qu'on a stagé, et ça fait un message de commit par rapport à ce qu'on a stagé. Maintenant, on essaie de dire, on ne stage pas. On ne voit pas cette opération-là, ça se fait tout seul. Donc on a les fichiers modifiés et puis on fait le commit directement. Donc ça fait le git commit -a, git commit add… On ne passe pas par cette étape de staging. Et puis voilà, je trouve que c'est plus simple, simplement de sélectionner les fichiers, ceux que je veux, et puis de voir la différence, et puis de committer. Prot: Oui, c'est mieux comme ça. 23:30 docstrings Sacha: Tu utilises également gptel pour générer des docstrings. Peux-tu montrer ? Fabrice: Alors, on pourrait aller dans un fichier. Par exemple, ce fichier de gptel-commit-message. Donc voilà. Donc, j'ai une seule fonction. 24:03 hs-minor-mode - hideshow Fabrice: Et donc, chez moi, quand je rouvre par défaut, j'utilise aussi H.S. hs-minor-mode, hideshow. Donc, tous les corps des fonctions, etc., il les réduit. J'ai rajouté qui m'indique le nombre de lignes pour avoir quand même une petite idée, pas juste trois petits points, mais avoir une petite idée de ce qui se cache en dessous. Et donc après je fais metashifta chez moi, ce qui est visible mode. Donc ça m'ouvre. Il y a visible mode pour les fichiers Org avec les drawers et puis ça fait plusieurs choses visible mode et aussi HS show all. Donc ici, voilà, j'ai un message, j'ai une fonction, j'ai un message, un docstring et on va dire que j'ai écrit moi-même un docstring un peu plus bête. Je mets xxx à la place. Et donc, ce que je peux faire, c'est sélectionner toute la fonction. Oui, les métas, parenthèses, accolades, fréquentes. Ils ne sont pas toujours faciles sur un clavier français, d'ailleurs. Il faut faire le AltGr, tu vois. Le QWERTY est plus facile pour certains trucs. Donc ici, j'ai sélectionné, donc je vais faire C-u C-c RET. Donc je retombe sur le gptel menu. J'ai une directive traduite en français, donc ça, c'est pas très bon. Donc je vais changer la directive, donc je vais faire ici le s pour Set System Message. Encore une fois, le s, puisque on pourrait imaginer, si j'avais ça tout le temps, que j'ai write the string. Je n'ai pas de preset, de prompt avec ça, donc je vais essayer de le faire à la main. Je vais refaire S pour pouvoir moi-même éditer le message. Et donc ici, je vais taper à la place écrit un docstring correct montrant ce que la fonction fait. exactement. directive est correcte. Alors, je n’ai pas ?? le b, là, other buffer, ou je pourrais le mettre dans le kill ring aussi. On va le mettre dans le kill ring, par exemple, donc je vais faire k. Donc j’envoie la réponse dans le kill ring, k. Donc on lit bien, toujours en bas, ce qu'il va faire. Donc ici, quand je vais faire RET, il va envoyer les lignes sélectionnées avec la réponse dans le kill ring. Parfois, ce qui est dommage, c'est qu'on n'a pas un sablier comme des applications Windows. Voilà, ici, j'ai la réponse. C'est dommage qu'il n'y ait pas de sablier. Il y a tellement de choses qui passent sur l'echo area qu'on ne voit pas nécessairement ce qui se passe. Je vais remonter ici et on va imaginer, je vais directement effacer ça, faire C-y. Il a fait un peu trop. Alors, ben, voilà, ici en fait, c'est voilà, il faudrait je juste que j'édite un petit peu, voici un docstring correct. Il marque copié. Il faudrait voilà, il faudrait justement faire un prom pour lui dire ne me donne que le docstring sans répéter le nom de la fonction et cetera et cetera. Mais en gros, ouais, bah tout ça a l'air bon en fait hein. Ici, il m'avait rajouté du texte et des infos. Après, il explique ce qu'il a fait. Voilà. En gros, ça c'est bon. C'est juste que je ne sais pas pourquoi il a mal lié ceci. Sacha: [Je me suis] trompée, peut-être. Tu as une fonction boost-gptel-generate-docstring dans ta configuration. Fabrice: Ah ! Je ne l'ai pas encore testé, celle-là. Justement, avec la section de la fonction, je pense que ça ne marche pas toujours très bien. Il y a des choses qui ne marchent pas encore très bien. Il y a des choses qui sont en test un peu. Ça fait partie des tests. On peut réessayer. Je vais essayer de voir si elle marche. On voit ici qu'il a fait un docstring assez long, d'ailleurs. Un peu trop, à mon goût. En théorie, il doit détecter les bounds de la fonction et envoyer toute la fonction à gptel et avec un prompt. Ça a l'air de marcher assez bien. Sauf que de nouveau, il me fait plus, il me répète toute la fonction. Non, voilà, c'est ça, il me répète toute la fonction. Oui, jusque... Jusque l'interactif. Jusque là, oui, jusque l'interactif. Donc, c'est pas mal. Donc, oui, voilà, ça... Prot: Oui, pas mal. Fabrice: Voilà, hop. On peut voir, effectivement... Donc, ça, c'est nouveau, c'est... Enfin, c'est... Changez, changez, oui. Et donc l'interactive, je n'avais pas d'interactive apparemment. Si je devais l'avoir. Je ne sais pas si j'ai un interactive ou pas, donc je fais C-<f9>. Et on peut voir ce qu'il a modifié. On va le faire en vertical. Hop. Oui, si j'avais un interactif avant. Il considère, il n'est pas aligné au niveau du truc. Forcément, je devais avoir un interactif. Pour terminer ou pas avec tout ce qui est intelligence artificielle, j'ai un petit truc ici qui traîne sur l'écran. Ça fait une semaine que je l'essaye. J'ai déjà payé pour la version si il y avait trois jours d'essai et ça me paraît très bien. 31:03 Super-whisper Fabrice: Donc c'est Super Whisper. Je vais le faire d'abord dans un Notepad par exemple pour vous montrer. Je l'ai mappé sur la touche Escape, ce qui n'est pas encore la meilleure touche. Je vais expliquer. Je voulais aussi pouvoir l'appeler à partir d'Emacs. J'aimerais bien que ce soit une touche assez facile, donc un peu une extrémité du clavier. La touche Escape, c'est une extrémité du clavier. Voilà, il n'y en a pas beaucoup, et puis il faut qu'elle ne soit pas utilisée dans Emacs, parce qu'il faut que je la fasse arriver dans Emacs. Et donc ici, quand je suis dans un endroit où on peut insérer du texte, donc ça pourrait être aussi en formulaire sur une page web, ici je suis dans Notepad, ça peut être dans Word, ça peut être n'importe où, je vais faire escape, et on voit à ce moment-là qu'il écoute. Prot: On voit des ondulations là. Sacha: Je ne le vois pas. Prot: Je ne peux pas voir l'indication. Sacha: Parce que tu vas partager seulement le fenêtre Emacs. Fabrice: Je vais stopper la présentation et je vais faire un share. Sacha: Je suis très curieuse à la reconnaissance vocale. Fabrice: Voilà, screen 1. Voilà, ok. Prot: Est-ce que vous le voyez ? Maintenant, oui. Oui, oui. Ok. On va bien danser dans le pad, ici. Fabrice: Il y a une minute, j'ai fait Escape. Qui a lancé, donc, le Super Whisper. Et donc, on voit ici qu'il écoute, on voit des petites ondulations. Il y a une integration dans Notepad, aussi. Je le vois assez discret, d'ailleurs. Sacha: Je pense que parce que tu as aussi, dans ton séance de réunion virtuelle, la reconnaissance vocale a du mal avec l'audio. Fabrice: Je pense que ça va aller, mais en fait, c'est ça qui est bien. donc W-I-S-P-R. En fait, ça marchait bien, sauf qu'il y avait des conflits avec Emacs. Et que dans Emacs, de temps en temps, j'avais des caractères qui étaient générés de manière aléatoire donc j'ai compris que c'était Wispr parce qu'en j'étais désactivée, quand j'aie désinstallé Wispr, je n'avais plus de problème avec Emacs de config. Et Wispr, lui, il écoutait ce que tu disais et tu voyais afficher au fur et à mesure les mots. Prot: Peut-être tu peux désactiver Whisper, parce que on ne peut pas écouter bien ce que tu dit. Peut-être maintenant... Fabrice: Ok, excusez-moi, je n'avais pas compris, vous n'entendiez pas. Je n'avais pas compris, donc je vais réexpliquer. En fait, j'avais utilisé il y a quelques mois Wispr, W-I-S-P-R, et cette application-là, elle avait des conflits avec Emacs, donc j'avais des caractères qui généraient dans Emacs aléatoirement à un certain moment. Et quand je l'ai désinstallé, je n'ai plus eu ça, donc je ne sais pas pourquoi, mais il y avait des problèmes avec Emacs. Et l'application Wispr, elle écrivait les mots au fur et à mesure. SuperWhisper.com, je pense. Elle, elle écoute tout ce qu'on dit, donc je fais Escape pour l'activer, elle écoute tout ce que je dis, et puis quand je refais Escape, donc c'est un toggle, elle écrit tout d'un coup. Mais l'avantage, c'est qu'elle a du contexte. Et donc si je dis par exemple, je lui ai demandé comment ça va, en fait il va recopier, je lui ai demandé deux points, ouvrez les guillemets, comment ça va, point d'interrogation, fermez les guillemets. Parce qu'il interprète en fait, il reconstitue le paragraphe, le texte à la fin. Parfois, si je fais une faute et qu'il y a un autre orthographe, et puis je répète orthographe, il va comprendre que c'est le même mot. Il est assez malin, il remet le texte. de manière plus synthétique. Il met tous les mots, mais à la fin, au niveau typographie, etc., il met deux, trois petits points. Il met parfois des guillemets. Il comprend bien les questions. Je ne sais pas pourquoi ici, j'ai un caractère un peu spécial. Il y a quand même de temps en temps des fautes aussi. Tout à l'heure, je parlais de aléatoire. Il a marqué aléatoire. Oui, j'espère que j'ai cité tout à l'heure Donc voilà, il fallait marquer W, I, S, P, R. Et puis une fois, il a marqué c'est A, I, R. Bon, c'est pas parfait, mais en fait, ça marche et c'est beaucoup plus rapide quand même. Et j'écris une petite fonction qui marche dans WSL, en tout cas pour ma config, de telle façon que dans... Donc si je vais dans un buffer scratch, par exemple. Que dans Emacs, ça fait la même chose aussi quand je fais escape. Parfois, j'ai des problèmes de clipboard, donc le kill ring. Quand je fais le deuxième escape, parfois il me remet un vieux truc qui n'est pas ce que je viens de dire, donc il y a encore des choses à comprendre. Je vais essayer quand même juste une phrase, je fais ESC… Je sais pas... Ah, voilà. Il se lance. Mais... Il se lance. Est-ce que cela marche ? Ah, tu vois, j'ai un problème. J'ai dit est-ce que cela marche ? Il vient de remettre système, il faut que je comprenne. Il y a des petites configurations dans Super Whisper à faire pour le presse-papier. C'est un peu plus compliqué avec le presse-papier Windows et le presse-papier Emacs. J'ai encore des petits réglages à faire, mais quand ça marchera bien, ce sera fantastique de pouvoir directement aussi dans Emacs utiliser ça. Il y a peut-être d'autres solutions d'ailleurs. Ici, il marche assez bien et le fait qu'il insère le truc une fois qu'on a fini de parler, ça fait quand même des phrases qui sont plus correctes. On hésite parfois, donc ça reconstitue un truc de meilleure qualité. Sacha: En fait, j'utilise aussi la reconnaissance vocale sur Emacs et j'utilise le substitute de Prot pour corriger facilement les erreurs et sauver les remplaçantes. Fabrice: Et ça marche bien, donc ? Sacha: Oui, oui, oui, ça marche. Fabrice: Tu es contente ? Sacha: Oui, je suis très contente. Je l'utilise pour les sous-titres, dicter mon texte. Ça marche bien. Fabrice: Mais il faudrait que je regarde ta configuration, alors. Pour m'en inspirer, pour faire des tests aussi. Sacha: Si tu rediriges l'output de la reconnaissance vocale à Emacs, tu pourrais traiter avec Emacs Lisp pour faire des remplaçants. Prot: process sentinel, il y a les processus qui... Sacha: Oui, j'ai lancé un serveur de [Speaches] pour offrir un service de la reconnaissance vocale qui utilise aussi Whisper, le mode Whisper. Fabrice: Oui, il y a beaucoup de belles choses qui vont arriver, c'est sûr. En fait, le problème maintenant, c'est que je n'aime plus quand je suis ici au bureau parce que j'ai des collègues, on est en open space, donc je ne peux pas utiliser ça. C'est ça le problème. Quand je suis à la maison, je peux parler, mais quand on est au bureau, on ne peut pas. Sacha: Et dans ce temps, j'utilise avec les enregistrements que j'ai fait en marche, à pied, et d'autres environnements qui sont Prot: Et quand il y a les autres gens, il peut comprendre seulement toi ou il écrit toutes les phrases de les autres gens aussi? Fabrice: Je ne sais pas, en fait. Je ne l'utilise pas avec d'autres personnes. Et si je l'utilise, je vais utiliser le casque. Et je pense que le casque est assez... Le micro est assez directif. En gros, il n'y a quand même que moi qu'on entend, je pense. Il faudrait vraiment qu'il y ait des bruits assez forts pour que ça puisse passer aussi. 41:21 Dotfiler Sacha: Je veux aussi consacrer du temps pour ton outil dotfiler pour gérer les fichiers professionnels et les fichiers personnels. Comment tu l'utilises-tu? Fabrice: Oui, alors ça, ce n'est pas de l'Emacs. Par contre, c'est très utile, y compris pour Emacs. Et donc, j'ai écrit ici une petite note là-dessus. Je vais ouvrir l'HTML, par exemple. Donc, là, ici, vous voyez bien l'HTML, oui, OK. Donc, en fait, j'utilise le programme dotfiler, donc c'est son nom, c'est le nom du programme. Il y a un outil qui s'appelait Stow dans le temps qui fait, je pense, à peu près la même chose. Je ne sais pas très bien les différences entre les deux, d'ailleurs. Mais donc l'idée en fait c'est, j'ai des repositories, donc j'ai par exemple, et ça me sert notamment pour Org, donc justement j'ai un repository avec des fichiers Org personnels, j'ai un repository avec des fichiers Org professionnels, et en fait, dotfiler, en fait c'est plus clair ici dans mon explication, donc j'ai un repo A, Et sous le repo A, j'ai un répertoire Org, j'ai un répertoire bin, j'ai un répertoire Lisp. Repo B, je ne suis pas obligé d'avoir les trois. Donc, j'ai une autre structure, mais j'ai par exemple Org, bin, Lisp aussi, examples, peu importe. Et donc, quand on utilise dotfiler, Il va créer, donc tout ça est mis par défaut dans .dotfiles sous le home directory. C'est là que tous les repos se trouvent, ceux qui sont gérés par dotfiler. Et donc j'ai fait des clones, donc au début je vais faire, donc ici si je vais dans mes .dotfiles, c'est tous les repos que j'ai. Il y a des repos privés et des repos publics. Et je vais faire un dot add d'une URL Git. Par exemple, si je veux cloner un nouveau repository. Et donc, il va mettre sous .dotfiles, il va mettre repo c, par exemple. Donc, si j'ai fait un dot add. Donc, la commande, c'est dot update, dot add. Donc je vais faire un add d'un repo C. Donc le repo va être cloné localement sous dot files, un repo C. Et puis je vais faire un dot update. Donc quand l'update, imaginons au départ que j'avais que le repo A, et puis je fais ça, donc j'ajoute un repo B. Comment on va faire ? Donc au départ, quand je n'ai que le repo A, ce qu'il fait, c'est que tout ce qu'il trouve en dessous de chaque repo, Il les met directement via des symlinks sous le home directory. Donc le répertoire Org va se retrouver via un symlink sous le home directory. Le répertoire bin va se retrouver sous le home directory. Et pareil pour l'isp. Donc si je n'ai qu'un repo au début d'ailleurs et que je fais un update, dot update, donc il va créer des symlinks. Un dot update crée ou détruit des symlinks. Ça fait juste ça, en fonction de ce qui a évolué. Et donc la première fois, il va juste faire un symlink du répertoire tilde slash Org vers tilde.dotfiles repo a Org. Et il va faire la même chose avec bin, la même chose avec Lisp. Quand j'ai le deuxième repo, le repo b, que j'ai colonné, j'ai fait... dot add de ce repo-là. Puis je fais un update. À ce moment-là, évidemment, il y a deux répertoires Org qui doivent être symlinkés. Ils doivent avoir des liens symboliques dans le tilde. Donc, il ne peut plus faire ça au niveau du répertoire. Et donc, ce qu'il fait, c'est qu'il supprime le symlink qu'il avait sur le répertoire Org et il scanne tous les fichiers qui sont là-dedans et il va faire un symlink individuel, fichier par fichier. Donc si j'ai 10 fichiers ici, donc fichier 1, fichier 2, fichier 3, il va me faire des symlinks dans tilde Org fichier 1 vers le fichier 1 qui se trouve physiquement là. Et ainsi de suite pour tous les fichiers. Il va faire la même chose avec tous les fichiers qu'il va trouver ici. Et donc tous les fichiers qui se trouvaient dans repo A Org et dans repo B Org, via des symlinks, se retrouvent en fait dans tilde Org. Et pareil ici dans mon exemple avec bin et avec Lisp. Donc si je vais voir ici, si je vais dans mon répertoire bin, vous voyez, donc j'ai, je vais faire un peu plus petit, j'en ai des, enfin on ne va pas, ici, voilà, celui-ci, il vient de Archibus Reports, de ce repo-là. Celui-ci, il vient de Archibus, OIL, MCD, Datamodel, Diagram. Donc de ce repo-là. Ici, il vient de gitboost. Donc j'avais dans ces différents répertoires, j'avais un sous-répertoire bin. Donc dans ces différents repos, j'avais un sous-répertoire bin. Et tous ces fichiers qui se trouvent directement dans bin, sous les repos, se retrouvent in fine via des symlinks dans mon bin à moi, dans mon directory. Ce qui veut dire que dans ma configuration de mon shell, j'ai juste à dire path égale tilde slash bin de point $path. Et donc il va connaître tous mes petits scripts qui sont dans les bins d'un coup. Pour Org, Ça veut dire que, org-agenda-files, je fais pointer simplement vers tout ce qui se trouve dans ~/org. Et vu que dans ~/org, je retrouve tous les fichiers Org du repo A, du repo B, et ainsi de suite, j’ai une seule variable, un seul setq, et j'ai tous mes fichiers qui se retrouvent directement dedans. Et donc, quelle que soit la machine, si j'ai différentes machines, une machine pro, une machine perso. Sur ma machine perso, j'aurai mon repo privé et mon repo pro. Sur la machine professionnelle, j'aurai que le repo professionnel. En fait, mon fichier Emacs ne change pas. C'est le même fichier. Je dis juste scan tous les fichiers. Mon Emacs, en se lançant, il fait toujours un scan de tout ce qu'il y a. Donc, il va, org-agenda-files va regarder tout ce qu’il y a dans ~/org et tout ça est rajouté à mon org-agenda-files. Et donc, il va, à chaque lancement d'Emacs, il va voir tous les fichiers qui sont dans la configuration. Mais c'est le même fichier Emacs. Pour ça, il ne change pas. C'est le même fichier Emacs d'un côté ou de l'autre. Simplement d'aller voir tous les fichiers qui sont en ~/org. Et en fait, c'est des symlinks vers les fichiers qui sont dans un repo privé, un repo public, etc. Pareil avec le bin. Donc ça vient de 36 repositories. Pareil avec le Lisp. Justement, et ça me force un peu aussi à faire une structure un peu plus standard. Donc ici, si je vais dans… dans ~/.dotfiles… gptel-commit-message. J'ai un répertoire. J'ai un répertoire Lisp. Et c'est dedans, donc c'est des lisps. J'ai ici le petit package, le petit fichier avec la fonction pour écrire le message de commit. Si je vais dans... Si je remonte... Je vais dans Emacs Leuven Lisp. Là, j'ai tous mes fichiers de configuration. Et tout ça se retrouve en fait dans ~/lisp. Grâce à symlink. Donc si je vais ici dans ~/lisp. Lisp. Voilà. Dotfiler, Emacs gptel, mon fichier de configuration, le nouveau avec gptel. Qu’il voit dans ~/lisp, en fait, physiquement, il est dans /home/fni/.dotfiles/emacs-leuven/lisp, il est physiquement là. Celui avec le gptel-commit-message, Physiquement, il est dans un autre repo, il est dans le repo gptel-commit-message, sous le répertoire Lisp. Donc en fait, en dessous de chaque repository, tous les fichiers qui sont là vont directement tel quel dans le home et tous les répertoires qui sont là vont directement tel quel dans le home. Donc en fait, il faut que je vois vraiment tous mes repos comme des puzzles, pièces de puzzle. Et tous les fichiers ou tous les répertoires à la racine de chaque repo vont se retrouver via des symlinks dans mon ~ Directement en tant que fichier. Par exemple, j’ai toujours un README.org dans chacun de mes repos. Là, c'est une exception parce que on peut dire celui-là n’essaie pas parce que j’ai README.org dans chacun de mes repos. Donc, il ne saurait pas créer des symlinks d'un README.org dans ~ vers tous les repositories. Celui-là, c'est une exception. On me dit de ne pas le symlinker. Et tous les autres fichiers se retrouvent directement dans mon ~ avec des symlinks. Et tous les répertoires, pareil. S'il y a des répertoires qui sont communs, donc j'ai chaque fois plusieurs fois des répertoires bin dans les repositories, donc à ce moment-là, il fait des symlinks sur les fichiers qui sont dans les répertoires bin. Et donc pour le Lisp, pareil, dans Emacs, j'ai juste dit de scanner tous les fichiers que j'ai dans ~ Lisp et de faire un load library. Donc je fais un dolist avec un find, etc., Et donc en une seule commande, qui reste la même sur la machine professionnelle et la machine privée, j'ai la même commande qui fait scanner tout contenu mon ~/lisp et donc dynamiquement, sur une machine, j'aurai potentiellement plus de fichiers Lisp ou pas, mais c'est la même commande et je n'ai pas de config particulier à faire. C'est juste en fonction des repositories que je vais cloner sur telle ou telle machine que j'aurai plus ou moins de fichiers disponibles et tout ça est caché. Sacha: Il y a une question dans le chat. Ces liens sont gérés dans Git ? Fabrice: Non, non. Imaginons... Je peux le montrer en live si tu veux. Je vais aller dans Emacs... Donc, cd. Donc dans .dotfiles, dans emacs-chat-sacha-chua. Donc dans ce répertoire-là, j'ai une image, j'ai quelques fichiers, d'accord ? Et je vais rajouter un fichier. Fichier des mots, .Org. Voilà, donc ici, maintenant, j'ai un fichier de plus dans ce repository. Je pourrais l'ajouter dans Git, etc. Mais je n'ai même pas besoin de faire ça, en fait. Pour les symlinks, je peux... Donc, pour l'instant, ce fichier Org, imaginons que j'ai des tâches dedans. Pour l'instant, il sera... Dans ce cas-là, d'ailleurs, je devrais... Enfin, je vais... Je vais créer un répertoire Org et je vais le déplacer, fichier des mots, temps Org. Prot: Voilà. Fabrice: Donc, ici, dans... Dans ce répertoire-là, j'ai ce fichier de démo et on peut imaginer que j'ai des tâches. J'aimerais bien voir ce fichier-là dans mon Org agenda files. Et pour l'instant, il n'est pas visible à partir de mon tilde. Il est physiquement là, mais il n'y a pas de symlink dessus. Pour que le symlink soit créé, je vais juste faire .dot files bin. Dans bin, il y a la commande dot. On peut voir son aide. Il y a dot update, dot status, dot add. Add, c'est pour ajouter un nouveau repository. Et update, c'est pour scanner le contenu des repositories et mettre à jour les liens. Ici, je vais faire dot update. Et alors, je vais faire moins skip pool parce que sinon, si on ne fait pas moins skip pool, il va en même temps pooler les repos. Donc, on va essayer que tout soit à jour. Donc ici, je vais faire le --skip-pull. Et on va voir qu'il va créer un lien, en fait, Vers ce fichier-là, voilà. Donc ici, il a créé, donc dans mon Org, donc dans mon tilde en fait, ça c'est mon tilde, donc dans ~/org, fichier-demo.Org, il l’a lié vers la position physique du chemin. Donc ça veut dire que maintenant, je peux dans Emacs, ici, donc si je fais C-x C-f, dans Org, donc c'est des fichiers, voilà. Il est directement là. Donc il est vide. Voilà, et donc ici, fichiers des mots, ça pointe dans mon type d'org, il pointe vers sa position physique. Donc les symlinks, c'est lui qui gère ça, c'est lui qui met à jour en fonction des fichiers ajoutés ou des fichiers supprimés. Il garde, il compare, voilà. Il y a tout ça dans les repos. Il y a tous ces symlinks qui existent à partir de ~ et il met à jour. Il rajoute ou il retire en fonction. Prot: C'est Git qui garde toujours le fichier original. Fabrice: Et donc dans Git, tu as les fichiers physiques. Git ne voit pas de symlinks, etc. Dans Git, tu as les fichiers physiques. Ici, si je vais... Imaginons que je mette Hello. Dans Git, je vais faire vc-dir, C-<f9>. C-<f9>. Qu'est-ce qui se passe ? Peut-être parce qu'il n'est pas... Ah oui, c'est parce que justement, je suis sur le Simlink, là, il faut que j'aille dans dotfiles. Donc c'était Emacs, chat, Sacha, voilà. Donc là, je fais C-<f9>. Et donc je vois que j'ai un nouveau fichier à ajouter. Et là, ce n'est pas un Simlink, ce sera le fichier physique. Donc au niveau Git, c'est les fichiers physiques dans des repos. Simplement, conventionnellement, tous mes repos vont se retrouver en dessous de ~/.dotfiles. C'est là qu'ils scannent tout ce qu'il y a en dessous de ~/.dotfiles. C'est là qu'ils scannent tous les repositories et qu'ils regardent le contenu de chaque repository. Si j'avais ton site web ou ta configuration, tu rajoutes un fichier, je vais faire dot update. Il va les puller Et puis, si tu as rajouté des fichiers, si tu as fait des modifications, il ne se passe rien. Au niveau des symlinks, il ne se passe rien. Puisque simplement, j'aurai la nouvelle version à jour dans mon clone, dans le sandbox. Mais s'il y a des nouveaux fichiers ou des fichiers qui ont été enlevés, il va rajouter ou effacer des symlinks. Maintenant, si j'efface ce fichier-là, donc un delete, je vais l’effacer de .dotfiles. Emacs. Sacha Chua, le chat. Donc je vais effacer le répertoire ou le fichier ici. Donc hash, yes. Voilà, le fichier n'existe plus dans mon repository. Donc je vais relancer dot update avec le --skip-pull. Il va montrer rm, voilà. Donc il vient d'effacer le symlink vers tilt Org. C'est génial parce qu'en fait, dans le temps, chaque fois que j'ai rajouté un repository, il fallait voir où se trouvent les bins, puis faire add dans le path de tous les bins. Ici, non, tout se retrouve, pour autant que ce soit directement dans le repository sous ./bin, ça va se retrouver après le symlink dans ~/bin. Et donc j'ai qu'à rajouter une fois le fait que Tiltbin est dans mon path. Donc ça pourrait marcher pour les manpaths, pour les fichiers d'info, enfin pour les lists, pour l'org, donc c'est extrêmement pratique pour ça. 59:12 Enseignement d'Emacs Sacha: Pendant les dernières minutes, j'aimerais connaître ta point de vue sur l'enseignement d'Emacs. Comment tu structures ton cours pour ne pas noyer les gens sur les fonctionnalités? Fabrice: Mon cours, je le vois plus comme étant un cours pour des gens qui connaissent déjà Emacs, donc c'est plutôt pour leur montrer des choses qu'ils ne connaissent peut-être pas parce qu'ils n'ont pas lu des dizaines ou des centaines ou des milliers de fichiers de configuration comme moi. Donc voilà, c'est des gens qui a priori connaissent déjà Emacs, donc ils savent faire enregistrer, ouvrir un fichier, Et simplement, je vais leur montrer des choses en plus, comme Helm. Moi, j'utilise Helm pour tout ce qui est la gestion des fichiers et des buffers. Je vais leur montrer aussi des fonctionnalités parfois qui sont peu utilisées ou parfois un peu cachées, donc peu utilisées comme les macros ou le multiple curseur qu'on ne connaît pas nécessairement et qui n'est pas standard, mais qui est facile à installer. ou l'édition rectangle, qui est standard, mais que pendant longtemps, je n'avais pas connu. Et donc voilà, je vais leur montrer des choses comme ça. A priori, c'est des gens qui connaissent déjà, donc ça va un peu plus vite. Maintenant, j'avais quand même une fois dans un de mes cours, Martin, qui ne me connaissait pas du tout Emacs. Son père connaissait Emacs, il l'avait amené de force presque. Si on écoute et qu'on suit, je repassais aussi. En fait, je réexpliquais tout depuis le début. J’avais des slides sur C-a, C-e, M-n, M-p, C-s, C-r. Je réexpliquais tout plus ou moins rapidement en fonction du niveau des gens, s'ils connaissent déjà. Je vais aller assez vite. En fait, c'est plus facile si les gens connaissent déjà pour aller plus vite. Sinon, il faudrait plus que deux jours de formation. En fait, j'ai quand même fait quatre jours de formation Emacs. Donc, c'est deux jours sur ce que j'appelle les fondamentaux. Tout ce qui est édition rectangle, macro, multiple curseur, donc avec des choses en plus. Et puis, deux jours plus orientés sur Org. Il y a tellement de choses dans Org. Il y a les Org agendas, le time blocking que j'utilise pour tout, pour mon temps, pour faire des factures derrière. Et puis il y a évidemment Babel, Tangling. Donc tout mon fichier de configuration Emacs, il est dans un fichier qui est tanglé. Un fichier de doc, la code littérée de programming de Knuth, où je décris pour un humain. Et puis j'ai des petits bouts de code qui vont se retrouver. dans des fichiers de code où il faut pour être exécuté. Mais l'objectif, c'est de faire un document qui soit lisible par un humain d'abord. Et donc, même en quatre jours, ça passe vite. Il y a trop à montrer. Sacha: C'est aussi le point lié à des incertitudes économiques. Quels sont les avantages du coaching ou de l'enseignement humain par rapport à l'IA? Fabrice: Donc, répète les avantages du coaching par rapport à l'IA. Sacha: Parce qu'il est facile de poser des questions à l'IA gratuitement, mais je pense que tes formations, ton cours ont des avantages. Fabrice: Absolument. En fait, dans tous les domaines, c'est comme ça. C'est que l'IA, si j'ai une question précise ou une question claire, il va pouvoir me répondre très facilement et de manière avec plein de détails, donc extrêmement fantastique. Mais l'IA, le problème, c'est qu'on ne sait pas ce qu'on ne sait pas. Et donc, dans la formation, je me doute que plein de gens, même qui sont des utilisateurs d'Emacs depuis 20 ans, Plein de gens ne connaissent pas l'édition rectangle, utilisent peu ou pas les macros, ne connaissent pas Wdired, le Dired mode éditable, par exemple. Si je mets des photos sur mon disque, je veux mettre la date de la photo dans le nom du fichier, je vais passer en mode direct éditable et je vais faire une petite macro qui va me copier la date. Et donc voilà, en fait, ChatGPT, si je dis, ChatGPT, explique-moi comment marche l'édition rectangle, il va l'expliquer. En fait, il ne va jamais répondre à dire, tiens, il y a l'édition rectangle que tu ne connais pas. C'est ça le problème. C'est justement de pouvoir juger ce que les gens savent et de ce qu'on pourrait leur apporter en plus. Et là, l'IA va être moins bonne parce qu'elle n'a pas des propositions comme ça de choses que tu ne connais pas. C'est de ce point de vue-là que c'est beaucoup plus pratique en encadrement personnel ou par groupe où on peut expliquer des choses qu'on pense que les gens ne savent pas et donc ils ne vont jamais poser la question à l'IA là-dessus, par définition. Sacha: Merci beaucoup à vous deux, à tout le monde. Fabrice: Merci beaucoup pour cette organisation, cette deuxième séance. Peut-être à une prochaine fois. Merci beaucoup en tout cas pour l'organisation, Sacha. Au revoir. Prot: À la prochaine, au revoir. Fabrice: Salut, je vais vite dans l'autre. Chat (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chat-30-fabrice-niessen-en-fran-ais-partie-2-chat) protesilaos: à bientôt! julienlambe78: Bonjour de Belgique 🙂 Sacha, le volume de votre micro est un peu bas. Nous n'entendons pas bien vos questions. Pensez-vous pouvoir augmenter le volume un petit peu? SaMusz73: synlinks `ln -s` et hardlinks `ln ` vers des fichiers sont gérés dans git ? J'ai cru comprendre que git gére assez mal ces symlinks SaMusz73: Merci :) JeromeVanLunter: MERCI SaMusz73: Merci à vous tous ! View Org source for this post (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/08/27-aout-emacs-chat-fabrice-niessen-en-francais-partie-2/index.org) You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com (mailto:sacha@sachachua.com?subject=Comment%20on%20https%3A%2F%2Fsachachua.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F08%2F27-aout-emacs-chat-fabrice-niessen-en-francais-partie-2%2F&body=Name%20you%20want%20to%20be%20credited%20by%20(if%20any)%3A%20%0AMessage%3A%20%0ACan%20I%20share%20your%20comment%20so%20other%20people%20can%20learn%20from%20it%3F%20Yes%2FNo%0A).
23 Aug 2026
Emacs Chat 29: Abdallah Maouche (en français)
Nous allons parler en direct avec Abdallah Maouche (heiwiper) (https://heiwiper.com/) (heiwiper/emacs.d (https://github.com/heiwiper/emacs.d), Gitlab (https://gitlab.com/heiwiper), Github (https://github.com/heiwiper)) d'Emacs, de ses flux de travail, de sa configuration, et d'autres sujets en français. Je suis un peu intimidée, mais si vous posez vos questions dans le chat, je pense que nous pouvons survivre à mon faible niveau de français. =) Watch on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qkvvVP8ZMQ) J'ai essayé de corriger la transcription (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#ID-emacs-chat-29-transcript), mais je crois qu'il y a encore beaucoup d'erreurs, donc n'hésitez pas à m'envoyer un message. La transcription un peu corrigée (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#orgf74eb75) Details 0:01 Introduction Sacha: Ok, vous êtes en direct. Prot: On a le nouveau lien ou c'est le même ? Sacha: C'est le même lien que Google Meet mais je vais copier le nouveau lien. C'est YouTube.com, sachactube... C'est difficile. Oui. Prot: Oui. Sacha: Je ne peux pas poster le chat. Donc, je vais poster sur les conférences. Comment dire? Ah! Ajoutez un commentaire. Et je vais aussi ouvrir. Oui. Donc, le chat est ici. Je pense. Prot: Ah, take two. J'ai trouvé. Oui, oui. Abdallah: Oui, j'ai trouvé moi aussi. Sacha: Ça marche? Merci beaucoup pour votre patience. L'introduction ! Bonjour à toutes et à tous et bienvenue dans le troisième épisode d'Emacs Chat en français et le vingt-neuvième épisode de la série. Notre invité aujourd'hui est Abdallah Maouche, qui s'est fait aussi appeler par son pseudo heiwiper. Il vit en Algérie et le français n'est pas sa langue maternelle, mais il s'y est assez courageusement avec nous. Si on se retrouve totalement bloqué, comme moi, justement, pas de souci, nous pouvons passer au franglais ou à l'anglais. Ce n'est pas grave. Bonjour Abdallah et encore merci d'être là. Abdallah: Merci, merci beaucoup. Merci pour l'invitation. Ça me fait un grand plaisir de parler à vous deux, car je vous suis sur votre blog et sur la chaîne YouTube. Donc, j'ai très hâte de converser avec vous. Sacha: Et merci aussi à Prot de se rejoindre à nous pour cette expérience. Nous faisons de notre mieux ensemble. Merci beaucoup. Prot: Je t'en prie, je t'en prie. C'est parti. Oui, c'est magnifique, c'est magnifique. 3:13 Apprentissage Sacha: Abdallah, contrairement aux invités précédents, tu utilises Emacs depuis seulement sept ans. Je plaisante. C'est déjà pas mal, c'est génial. Peux-tu me raconter ton parcours d'apprentissage d'Emacs moderne? Comment est-ce que tu l'as découvert? Abdallah: Donc, ça a commencé environ 2019-2020. À ce moment, j'ai découvert Linux pour la première fois et j'ai commencé à explorer les applications open source. C'était quelque chose de nouveau pour moi. Donc, à un certain niveau, j'avais besoin d'un texte éditeur parce qu'en université, on avait utilisé des environnements de développement spécialisés pour des langages spécifiques. Par exemple, il y avait Eclipse pour Java et je pense CodeBlock, c'était pour C, C++. Et puis au master, il y avait tellement de langage que c'était difficile de garder le même flux de travail. Donc, je me suis rendu au répertoire des applications de distribution Linux que j'utilisais à l'époque. Et j'ai parcouru la liste et j'ai trouvé plusieurs éditeurs et parmi ces éditeurs, bien sûr Emacs. Je l'avais installé, j'ai installé tous les éditeurs en fait. Mais le problème c'est quand je l'ai testé, ça n'a pas vraiment, ça m'a pas plu. C'était un peu, l'interface graphique était un peu, je ne sais pas comment dire, un peu moche. Oui donc, et aussi il y avait le logo Emacs avec le GNU et le E ça ressemblait à le symbole Epsilon. Donc ça me rappelait un peu des maths et je voyais les keybindings avec les moins et tout. Je me suis dit c'est un éditeur pour les mathématiciens. Donc j'ai installé Atom et j'ai utilisé Atom. Après quelques mois, je pense, j'ai vu une vidéo à propos de Spacemacs. Parce que j'apprenais Game Engine Godot. Donc j'ai vu dans une chaîne Spacemacs et c'était très intéressant. Donc j'ai installé et j'ai appris les keybindings de Vim parce que c'est plus recommandé dans Spacemacs. Et je l'ai utilisé pour une période et puis je pense que j'ai J'ai changé la configuration pour utiliser les keybindings Emacs après parce que l'intégration de Evil, l'intégration des Vim keybindings n'était pas parfaite. Il y avait des trucs qui manquent et c'était un peu frustrant. Donc, j'ai dû switcher à Emacs Keybindings. Et je pense, après un certain temps, j'ai eu mal à configurer Spacemacs. La communauté était un peu trop petite. Oui, quand je rencontre des problèmes et je vais dans le Reddit d'Emacs, je ne sais pas comment appliquer les solutions à Spacemacs. Donc, je me suis dit, je vais devoir changer et utiliser Emacs, ce qu'on appelle Vanilla Emacs. Je pense que j'ai vu les vidéos de David Wilson. Est-ce que vous le connaissez? Sacha: Oui, bien sûr. Abdallah: Oui, System Crafters. C'est sa chaîne YouTube. Et j'ai suivi son tutoriel et depuis ce moment, je configure mon Emacs from scratch depuis le début. Et maintenant, j'ai une configuration, celle que je vous ai envoyée. Je l'ai publiée sur mon GitHub. Et je l'utilise quotidiennement pour les trucs personnels et au travail aussi. Sacha: Les kits de débutants Spacemacs réduisent les peurs pour toi. Et après que tu [t'es] habitué à Emacs, tu repasses vers Emacs. Abdallah: Oui, exactement. Je pense que le point important à l'époque, c'était l'interface graphique. Spacemacs avait une interface déjà configurée et c'était un peu attractif quand on voit la config Spacemacs. C'est pour ça que j'ai utilisé Atom, parce que c'était un peu aussi... Il avait une interface qui m'a plu. Prot: Je crois que c'est aussi plus facile de découvrir les fonctionnalités avec quelque chose comme Spacemacs. Oui, je pense... Oui, c'est difficile. Abdallah: Oui, parce qu'il y a des... La configuration de Spacemacs, c'est comme si... La configuration de Emacs avec beaucoup d'abstractions. C'est comme si on ajoute des couches de programmation, couche de langage, je ne sais pas, Java ou bien quelque chose comme ça. Donc, on va ignorer le fait qu'il y a des serveurs LSP et tout. En fait, il faut juste spécifier quel serveur tu veux utiliser et Spacemacs va configurer tout. Donc, c'est une abstraction de la configuration Emacs. Mais ça reste en Emacs Lisp. Sacha: Est-ce que c'est difficile de traduire ta configuration de Spacemacs à ta propre configuration? Abdallah: En fait, je ne connaissais pas assez Emacs Lisp, donc je n'ai pas essayé, mais ce n'était pas évident parce que Spacemacs, je pense que c'est C'est très différent de la configuration Emacs. Je pense qu'il y a beaucoup d'abstractions. Ce n'est pas évident de transférer la configuration et la traduire. Prot: Parce que si Spacemacs utilise [les macros Emacs Lisp], tu dois connaître les macros. Autrement, tu ne peux pas transférer le même code. Abdallah: Oui, évidemment, vous avez raison. Oui, les macros, c'est un peu sensible. Sacha: J'aime bien ta configuration. Ta façon d'utiliser des variables pour simplifier ta configuration d'org-capture est une bonne idée. Peux-tu rendre cette section de ta configuration pour nous la montrer? Abdallah: Oui, bien sûr. Je vais juste partager mon écran. Sacha: J'avais piqué l'idée. C'est plus simple que mienne. Prot: Voler à volonté. Abdallah: Oui, bien sûr. C'est disponible dans GitHub, donc je pense que c'est... Ok, donc là, j'ai essayé de créer une configuration spécifique pour cette démo, juste pour montrer les différents trucs d'Org Mode et tout. Donc, on va aller vers la configuration des Org Capture, c'est ça ? Sacha: Oui, org-capture-templates. Oui, oui. Oui, oui, oui, j'adore. J'adore l'utilisation de variables pour simplifier la configuration. Abdallah: Oui, ce qui me plaît dans cette configuration, c'est que la partie où je définis le template, On dirait que c'est la note parce qu'il y a le titre et puis il y a des sauts de ligne et la concaténation ici, elle fait comme si c'est une note réelle. Et puis, la partie ici, ce n'est pas assez chargée parce que là, je définis juste la variable. Donc, je peux voir toutes mes captures dans une seule page. Je n'ai pas besoin de... Faire un scroll tout au long du fichier pour voir toutes les captures que j'ai définies. Sacha: Ta variable heiwiper/org-jira-task est définie dans un autre fichier, je pense? Abdallah: Non, j'ai transféré toutes les parties intéressantes dans un seul fichier juste pour la démonstration. Donc, vous pouvez l'avoir ici. Donc, cette template, elle me permet de créer une tâche et aussi associer le lien Jira pour cette tâche parce qu'on utilise Jira au travail. Donc, je vais vous montrer un exemple. Par exemple, ici, je vais... Bon, j'ai exécuté l'org-capture. Vous voyez ici, il y a plusieurs captures, ce qu'on a défini ici. Et là, il y a Jira Task. Donc, je vais cliquer le J. Et bon, vous pouvez ignorer ceci. On va voir le prompt. Donc ici, ce que je fais, c'est que je prends la tâche Jira que j'ai sur email ou bien sur le navigateur. Je copie le lien. Par exemple, on va faire un exemple. https://jira.com/... Et là, d'habitude, les tâches Jira, c'est quelque chose comme ça. On va dire BG comme si c'était un bug ou... et une référence. On va dire 1, 2, 3, 4. Et puis, je vais cliquer entrer. On suppose que celui-ci est le lien de la tâche. Et là, je vais copier le titre de la tâche. Là, je vais juste écrire quelque chose. Et puis là, j'ai quelques tags. Ça va me servir plus tard pour organiser les tâches. Donc j'ai Bugfix, Feature, Refactor, Enhancement. Je vais sélectionner Bugfix. Et là, vous pouvez voir la tâche finale. Il y a le lien de la tâche. On peut cliquer sur C-c C-o pour accéder directement à la tâche. Il y a aussi la description. Et ce que j'aime dans ce workflow, c'est que je peux écrire Des choses ici à propos de cette tâche. Par exemple, des fois, j'écris des commandes de shell pour exécuter un appel d'API ou quelque chose comme ça. Je vais écrire tout ici. Par exemple, curl. Je ne sais pas. Donc, c'est ça. Et puis, on clique sur C-c C-c pour sauvegarder. Et à ce point, j'ai sauvegardé la tâche. Je vais vous montrer l'agenda que j'ai spécifique pour les tâches. Vous pouvez voir ici Tasks by Type et Tasks by Service. On va dire Tasks by Type. Voici la tâche que j'ai définie. C'est bien catégorisé sous la section Bug fix. Et vous pouvez aussi l'avoir ici parce que là j'aime déplacer les tâches vers des fichiers spécifiques donc parfois je déplace les tâches ici pour avoir des fichiers un peu organisés. Sacha: Tu as un fichier très organisé, je pense, parce que tu as aussi des comptes de tâches dans ta mode-line. Abdallah: Ah oui. Oui, en fait, à propos de ce compteur, c'est quelque chose que je suis en train d'expérimenter avec. Donc, j'utilise une méthode para, je ne sais pas si vous avez entendu parler, pour organiser un peu mes notes et mes tâches. Et j'aime savoir combien de notes j'ai sur le fichier inbox. Parce que la plupart du temps, les tâches, je les déplace vers des autres fichiers parce que j'utilise l'application Orgzly. Donc, les tâches ne restent pas généralement dans ce fichier inbox. C'est plutôt les notes. Bon, je peux vous montrer le fichier ici, c'est juste un exemple. Mais c'est plutôt comme ça. Il y a des notes et des tâches. Voilà. Plus la tâche qu'on a créée maintenant. Et pour être honnête avec vous, j'ai jamais atteint le nombre zéro. D'habitude c'est 10, 20, mais ça n'augmente pas trop, parce que, généralement, c'est juste des notes. Ils sont disponibles au cas où je veux chercher les notes. Je me sens pas la pression de les déplacer. C'est just quand j'ai assez du temps J'ai le compteur devant moi et c'est bon, je vais devoir déplacer quelques notes puisque j'ai un peu de temps. Sacha: De mon côté, je pense que ma boîte de réception a grandi constamment, sans cesse. Est-ce que tu as déjà ton bullet journal? Abdallah: Oui, je l'ai utilisé il y a deux ans. J'ai aussi écrit un blog post à ce propos. Pour être honnête, c'était une expérience, mais je pense que ce n'est pas pour moi parce que j'ai arrêté après un an car je pense que j'ai besoin des notifications. Ce que je faisais, en fait, c'est que je pouvais garder la routine de voir mon journal chaque jour. Mais le problème, c'est que parfois, j'ai besoin de me rappeler que je dois faire quelque chose, par exemple, 12h30. Et je ne peux pas garder les tâches sur ma tête. Donc ce que je faisais, c'est chaque matin, je vois les tâches sur le bullet journal et je le déplace. Je les écris dans mon téléphone, in to do list. Mais c'est un peu pourquoi ne pas utiliser le téléphone. Prot: C'est double de travail. Abdallah: Oui, double de travail. J'ai essayé de l'intégrer avec Emacs en utilisant Org Journal, mais Le problème, c'est que j'utilise pas beaucoup l'ordinateur, donc c'est plutôt le téléphone. Donc la méthode Bullet Journal, c'était pas pour moi. Donc j'utilise maintenant Org Mode avec Orgzly et ça marche très bien. Sacha: Est-ce que tu as aussi de l'agenda d'Orgzly Revived ou juste pour saisir les tâches? Abdallah: J'ai pas bien compris. Sacha: Orgzly a aussi des agendas. Maintenant, ton agenda sur ton ordinateur est bien organisé. Il a beaucoup de sections. Mais sur ton téléphone, tu utilises aussi Orgzly pour voir ton agenda? Abdallah: En fait, mon agenda personnel est celui par défaut du Org Mode parce que ma vie personnelle est assez simple. Donc j'utilise l'agenda par défaut. L'agenda que je vous ai montré, c'est pour le travail seulement. Et pour le travail, je ne garde pas les notes dans Oxley, c'est juste dans l'ordinateur de travail. Donc dans mon cas, je pense que Orgzly, il fait le travail. Donc j'utilise le même agenda, c'est pour ça. Prot: Et c'est plus facile comme ça, d'avoir l'agenda seulement à l'ordinateur. L'agenda plus organisé. Abdallah: Oui, l'agenda de travail, c'est plus efficace. Sacha: L'écran est plus grand. Abdallah: Oui, et aussi pour les tâches en relation avec le travail, je n'ai pas besoin de mon téléphone pour les accéder. Quand je suis au travail, je vais voir sur mon PC, sinon ce n'est pas la peine. Sacha: Utiliser Emacs pour d'autres intérêts comme l'apprentissage d'une langue étrangère ou... Abdallah: En fait, j'ai passé par la phase de ce qu'on appelle Rabbit Hole, Emacs. Donc, je peux vous dire que j'utilisais Emacs pour plein de choses. J'ai même utilisé EXWM, le Window Manager. Oui. J'ai aussi utilisé l'autre, je ne me rappelle pas comment il s'appelait. C'était un Window Manager en Common Lisp, pas en Emacs Lisp. Je ne me rappelle pas de son nom, mais il est assez connu dans la communauté Lisp. Donc oui, j'utilisais plein d'autres trucs, mais pas pour l'apprentissage de langue. Mais avec le temps, j'essaie d'être plus pragmatique. Donc j'utilise les outils adaptés quand je trouve qu'il y a des difficultés ou bien il y a des problèmes. Par exemple, je vais vous donner un exemple réel. Je voulais utiliser Emacs pour envoyer des requêtes quand je fais du programmation pour tester des API et tout. Parce que c'est très efficace pour mon workflow. Je vais vous dire un exemple plus tard. Mais parfois, je rencontre des problèmes où il y a certains types de requêtes où ils ne sont pas supportés par le package qu'offre Emacs. Donc je me trouve avoir switché à un logiciel qui est adapté pour ce truc. Et donc dans ce cas, j'utilise plutôt les logiciels adaptés. Et pour l'exemple que je voulais mentionner, c'est que j'utilisais des macros pour envoyer des requêtes à travers Org Mode. Et puis je récupère des données de cette requête et pour exécuter une autre requête, juste pour simuler un workflow d'un utilisateur réel. C'était très utile parce que ça m'évite de cliquer plusieurs boutons dans plusieurs logiciels et j'exécute juste le macro Emacs et il fait tout et je vais juste voir le résultat. Prot: C'est mieux comme ça. Abdallah: Oui, c'est bien mieux. Plus efficace. Oui, bien sûr. Sacha: Et moins d'erreurs. Je déteste le clic qui est nécessaire pour le flux de travail dans d'autres applications. 01: Oui. Sacha: Ton flux de travail. J'aime les petites conditions que tu utilises dans ta configuration, comme helm-chart-template-p dans magic-mode-alist ou org-refile-target-verify-functions pour filtrer les tâches et ton-before-save Hook qui reformat le tampon selon le mode majeur. Dans ta configuration, quelles sont tes modifications préférées? Abdallah: En fait, j'ai du mal à répondre à cette question parce que c'est tout le fichier qui est configuré et ça fonctionne un peu interconnecté. Donc, je ne peux pas vraiment choisir une partie préférée. Mais je vais dire les modifications qui ont relation avec Org Mode, c'est ce que j'aime trop parce que ça me facilite un peu le flux de travail avec Org Mode. 25:10 Compter les items dans l'inbox Abdallah: Par exemple, celui-ci où je compte les items que j'ai dans l'inbox. Sacha: Parce que nos auditeurs peuvent rater les petites icônes, les petites affiches dans ta mode-line avec les boîtes. Abdallah: Ah oui, je ne sais pas s'il y a une méthode pour l'afficher un peu plus grand, mais c'est juste là, à côté du Org Agenda. Je vais changer ici pour montrer que ça compte ces lignes. Sacha: C'est une bonne idée. Si tu accumules beaucoup de tâches, les chiffres dans ta mode line te harcèlent. Abdallah: Oui, bien sûr. C'est toujours là pour me rappeler en cas où j'oublie de... En fait, mon Emacs actuel, il contient, je pense, environ 160. Mais attention, c'est juste parce que je viens de migrer mes notes depuis un autre logiciel. Après avoir migré vers Org Mode, j'ai utilisé AnyType pour les notes. Donc je viens juste de l'émigrer la semaine passée et j'ai pas eu assez de temps pour les déplacer. Donc là je sais que je dois les déplacer parce que sans eux c'est trop. Sacha: Le problème de tout le monde. Abdallah: Oui bien sûr. Sacha: J'aime aussi ta fonction pour récupérer des données, app-core-get-device-ids-by-username. Il y a aussi une autre fonction app-core-delete-items-by-store-id qui semble utile pour ton travail. Tu utilises Emacs pour automatiser des fonctions et tu utilises le shell script. 27:36 Emacs Lisp et d'autres langages Sacha: Dans quelle situation est-ce que tu préfères écrire ce genre de fonction dans Emacs Lisp plutôt que Shell ou un autre langage? Abdallah: En fait, j'aime bien le langage Lisp en général. J'aime bien écrire en Lisp malgré que je n'ai pas assez de code base écrit en Lisp. J'ai un peu contribué à, enfin, 1 ou 2 Repos. Mais pour ces fonctions-là, je les générais avec l'intelligence artificielle parce que ça me facilite des tâches un peu répétitives, trop répétitives. Et pour optimiser un peu le temps et aussi pour pouvoir les appeler à travers Emacs. C'est très utile parce que juste en cliquant un bouton, je peux savoir l'information que je vais utiliser. Et je pense que c'est mieux comparé à un shell script où je dois savoir où est le shell script et aller l'exécuter et un peu ouvrir un terminal. Donc là, j'utilise Emacs pour programmer. Je peux appeler cette commande pour extraire une information. Il y a aussi le fait qu'il y a des prompts. Dans Emacs, donc je sais exactement ce que je dois fournir. Et ça me facilite trop le travail, surtout les tâches répétitives, parce que si ça ne répète pas, je ne vais pas écrire une fonction. Et puisque je suis intéressé juste aux résultats, donc je les génère en utilisant l'intelligence artificielle, puisque ça me donne un bon résultat. Je ne m'intéresse pas à ce que ça soit optimisé ou non. 29:32 L'intelligence artificiale Sacha: Je me demande que tu utilises quelques interfaces pour l'IA dans Emacs comme aidemacs. Ah oui, oui. Qu'est-ce que tu penses? Abdallah: En fait, je ne sais pas si tu as remarqué dans ma config, il y a pas mal de packages d'IA. J'ai dû utiliser la plupart pour les comparer. Parce qu'en fait, la partie plus difficile pour moi, c'est d'observer les changements qui sont faits par l'IA. Donc, j'ai utilisé tous les packages d'Emacs pour les comparer. Je pense que le meilleur package que j'ai utilisé était eca. Je ne sais pas si vous êtes au courant. Mais actuellement, j'utilise OpenCode dans Emacs. Donc, j'ouvre un terminal dans Emacs et j'utilise OpenCode. Ça me permet de mieux observer les changements et tout. Et parfois j'utilise gptel pour des petites questions sur Emacs sans avoir à ouvrir le terminal. Donc les packages que vous voyez dans ma config, c'est juste pour tester les différentes intégrations. 30:56 Les terminals Prot: Et quel est le terminal de ton choix ? Abdallah: Actuellement, j'ai migré vers Ghostel. Ça fait un mois, je pense. Mon problème, c'était Vterm, c'était très bien. Il a résolu tous mes problèmes. Mais il restait un seul problème, c'est les applications TUI. Ça ne marche pas bien sur Vterm. Donc, j'ai dû migrer vers Ghostel. Et là, ça marche très bien. Je peux vous montrer, par exemple, je vais ouvrir un exemple. Vim, par exemple. Bon, je ne sais pas si j'ai... Oui, mais je sais bien comment quitter, mais je ne vais pas ouvrir Vim. Bon, je ne sais pas si ça marche dans cette configuration, puisque c'est une nouvelle configuration. Peut-être je vais partager ma configuration originale pour juste vous montrer la différence. Sacha: Je pense que tu as partagé seulement la fenêtre d'Emacs. Abdallah: Oui, je vais changer vers l'autre fenêtre et je vais mettre sur que je ne partage pas quelque chose de sensible. Merci. D'accord, donc là... Est-ce que vous voyez la nouvelle fenêtre avec un... Oui. Parfait. D'accord, donc v-term... Ça doit compiler, d'accord. Je pense que j'ai lancé une mise à jour. Donc si je vais ouvrir Open Code ici. Je ne sais pas si ça va marcher bien. Ah oui, vous pouvez voir il y a un peu de décalage. Il y a ici le prompt. Là, c'est un peu bizarre. Oui, je vais ouvrir une autre fenêtre Ghostel juste pour vous donner une idée. Donc cette fenêtre est Ghostel, je vais ouvrir la même application. Donc là, vous remarquez déjà les couleurs, ils sont mieux que la session Vterm. Et oui, je pense que c'est clair que l'intégration est un peu mieux dans Ghostel. C'est très intéressant. Oui, parce que j'utilise pas mal de terminal TUI dans le travail, donc j'ai toujours une terminal ouvert, mais depuis que j'ai installé Ghostel, ce n'est plus le cas parce que je n'ai plus besoin d'une terminal pour ouvrir ces applications. Sacha: Emacs assimile une autre fonction. Abdallah: Oui. 34:14 Les jeux et les amusements Sacha: Ça m'amuse quand je vois les jeux dans ta configuration et aussi la présence de Nyan Cat dans ta mode line. Quel est ton jeu préféré dans Emacs? Abdallah: En fait, mon jeu préféré c'est Tetris. Le jeu du Emacs, oui. Celui qui est built-in. Mais j'ai découvert un truc, je ne sais pas si vous êtes au courant, mais le package Emacs de Fedora, il ne contient pas le jeu Tetris. Prot: Oh non ! Seulement Tetris ? Les autres jeux ? Abdallah: Oui, seulement Tetris. Parce qu'apparemment, il y a des trucs de copyright, je pense. Parce que j'ai cherché et j'ai trouvé que Ils l'ont enlevé parce qu'il y avait des trucs de droits. Mais les autres jeux que j'ai dans ma configuration, c'était juste pour les tester. Parfois, je lance Tetris, mais c'est rare. Sacha: Le bricolage d'Emacs est un jeu aussi. Abdallah: Oui, bien sûr. Et pour le Nyan Cat, je pense que ça fait un changement. Par exemple, quand tu es en train de travailler sur quelque chose, tu prends assez d'efforts et tout, et tu vois le Nyan Cat courir dans le mode line, ça te fait un peu du plaisir. Et je me rappelle que je dois relaxer. Oui. 36:07 La communauté Sacha: Tu as des collègues qui utilisent Emacs aussi ? Ou tous les collègues pensent que tu es fou ? Abdallah: Oui, je pense que c'est le deuxième cas. La communauté Emacs dans l'Algérie, ce n'est pas grande. J'ai seulement rencontré une seule personne dans ma vie qui utilise Emacs. Je n'ai même pas son contact, donc je l'ai juste rencontré dans une formation, je pense. Parce que je l'ai vu utiliser Magit. Je pense qu'il y a deux collègues qui utilisent Neovim. Je ne sais pas s'ils sont en train de nous regarder parce que j'ai partagé le lien avec eux. Donc s'ils sont en train de nous regarder, je leur passe le bonjour. Et je pense que les autres utilisent VS Code. Donc seulement ces deux utilisent Neovim et les autres VS Code. C'est tout. Prot: Je crois que c'est le même partout. Abdallah: Ah bon? Je pensais que c'est un peu différent en Europe ou bien en Amérique. Parce qu'il y a, quand je lis le feed de Sacha, je vois toujours des meets. Des événements organisés, oui. Et à chaque fois que je vois ces événements, je me dis peut-être il y aura un événement en Afrique ou bien en Afrique du Nord, mais il n'y a jamais un événement dans ces endroits. Je pense que c'est juste en Europe ou bien en Asie ou en Amérique. Sacha: Les événements sont ouverts à tous, donc... Je pense que je vais à l'Emacs Berlin en ligne de temps en temps. Tu veux aussi le rejoindre? Abdallah: Bon, rejoindre un événement dans l'Europe, c'est un peu compliqué. Donc, je peux seulement rejoindre virtuellement? Sacha: Oui, bien sûr. Abdallah: Mais je parlais des événements présentiels. Il n'y a pas d'événement présentiel dans ces régions. C'est juste en Europe. Sacha: Je ne peux pas aller à l'événement présentiel. Abdallah: Ah d'accord. Sacha: Donc je me focalise aussi sur les événements virtuels. Abdallah: Ah d'accord. Donc c'est le cas pour tous. Je pense que Prot aussi. Prot: Je ne [connais] personne ici. Même que Vim. Abdallah: Bon, mais je pense que... Est-ce que tu as des contacts avec des gens qui ont un peu le... Un peu de connaissances techniques dans la région où tu vis, parce que j'ai vu que c'est un peu éloigné de la ville et tout. Prot: Oui, non, non. Ici, les gens ne sont pas techniques. Avec les ordinateurs. Ils sont plus techniques avec les autres choses. Par exemple, l'agriculture. Abdallah: Ah oui, oui, bien sûr. Oui, donc... Ton cas est pire que moi, parce que moi je rencontre des gens, mais ils n'utilisent pas Emacs. Sacha: Heureusement, la communauté Emacs est très bien en ligne, donc je ne me sens pas isolée. Abdallah: Oui, oui, évidemment. Je pense que si la communauté en Reddit, je trouve que c'est rare qu'il y a une communauté qui est assez, comment dire? Donc tous les gens sont bien, ils parlent d'une bonne façon, ils te donnent des conseils. Il y a rarement ces commentaires toxiques qu'on trouve généralement sur Reddit. Donc c'est ce que j'aime dans la communauté Emacs. Et tout le monde, ils sont bien. Prot: Est-ce que tous les gens veulent t'aider? Parce que tous les gens comprennent que Emacs est très difficile. Abdallah: Oui, c'est le cas, oui. Je peux imaginer. Parce que j'ai partagé un post il y a quelques jours sur Magit et il y a plein de gens qui me donnaient des astuces parce que j'ai demandé s'il y avait des astuces supplémentaires. Ils m'ont donné des astuces. Il y avait même des paragraphes très longs. C'était très sympa, oui. 41:44 Accent Sacha: En lisant ta configuration, j'ai aussi des questions sur le paquet accent pour saisir. Utilises-tu, au lieu de méthode de saisie ou input method sur Emacs ou sur ton système, qu'est-ce qui te plaît dedans? Abdallah: En fait, je n'utilise pas le français souvent. Donc, et mon clavier est anglais. Donc, quand je veux écrire quelque chose en français, je vais juste écrire en anglais et puis ajouter des accents. Par exemple, je vais dire, je ne sais pas, j'étais dans un live stream et je vais aller ici, je vais faire Accent Menu. Je vais juste changer, sans devoir changer le clavier parce que je ne me rappelle pas l'emplacement des lettres accentuées dans le clavier. Donc je veux juste le faire dans Emacs et je le copie dans un autre navigateur ou bien quelque chose comme ça. J'ai seulement le clavier anglais et le clavier arabe parce que c'est totalement une différente méthode d'écrit. Est-ce que vous utilisez ce package puisque vous apprenez le français? Prot: Moi non, moi j'utilise l'input method. Abdallah: Ah d'accord. C'est quelque chose intégré dans Emacs j'imagine, parce que je pense que j'ai entendu parler. Oui, c'est exactement comme ça. Sacha: Il y a peut-être une vidéo récente sur les méthodes d'input, non? Abdallah: Je pense que c'est une fonctionnalité intégrée dans Emacs. C'est vrai? Parce que je me rappelle que j'ai une fois, je l'ai activé par accident. Sacha: C-\. Abdallah: Oui et je pouvais écrire en arabe dans Emacs. Et je me demandais pourquoi parce que le clavier était en anglais. C'était un peu... Mais c'est une fonctionnalité très intéressante. Je vais voir plus tard. Sacha: Je pense que tu as répondu à toutes mes questions que j'ai préparées sur ta configuration, donc la conversation est libre. J'ai une question. 44:45 Tes prochaines étapes Sacha: Quelles sont tes prochaines étapes pour apprendre Emacs? Qu'est-ce qui t'intrigue? Abdallah: Actuellement, je veux apprendre, un peu me familiariser avec les macros parce que je les ai utilisés précédemment, comme je vous ai dit dans l'exemple. Mais je ne suis pas assez familier et je veux l'intégrer plus dans mon flux de travail pour un peu automatiser des trucs. Et je veux aussi... Je veux aussi apprendre Emacs Lisp. En fait, je connais le langage Lisp, donc c'est un peu facile, mais je trouve qu'il y a des fonctions très spécifiques d'Emacs qu'il faut apprendre pour maîtriser Emacs Lisp. Oui, c'est très intéressant, surtout pour pouvoir contribuer dans la communauté Emacs. J'ai voulu contribuer il y a quelques mois sur un package Emacs, mais j'ai trouvé qu'il fallait faire un peu [de] paperasse, paperwork parce que c'est en relation avec GNU. Et oui, donc c'était un peu difficile. Il fallait demander à mon employeur de signer quelques trucs et tout. Et il pense que je vais travailler ou quelque chose comme ça. Oui, donc c'était un peu difficile, mais je veux bien apprendre Emacs Lisp pour pouvoir contribuer et aussi pour faciliter des flux de travail personnels. Sacha: Si tu veux aller contribuer à NonGNU ELPA, je pense que la paperasse n'est pas nécessaire. Abdallah: Je pense que le package que j'allais contribuer à était sous la licence Emacs. Il s'appelle dape. C'est un debugger pour eglot. Il s'intègre avec eglot. Je pense que c'est une exigence dans le package lui-même. Prot: C'est pour tous les paquets dans le répertoire GNU ELPA. Abdallah: C'est le cas. Mais je pensais que c'était juste pour les packages qui sont intégrés dans Emacs. Parce que ce package, il était disponible sur GitHub, mais le maintainer, il exige que le code soit sous licence de GNU. 47:39 Org Mode et des tableaux Abdallah: Aussi, j'aimerais bien manipuler Org Mode De plusieurs façons. Par exemple, récemment, j'ai un peu testé les tableaux. J'ai utilisé les tableaux pour essayer de gérer mes dépenses personnelles. Oui, c'était très intéressant. Parce que des fois, il y a des fonctionnalités dans Org Mode, même dans Emacs, où on ne sait pas vraiment ce qu'on va avoir comme fonctionnalités. Si on ne va pas vers le manuel, donc si tu ne lis pas le manuel, tu ne sais pas que cette fonctionnalité existe. Par exemple, les tableaux, si on ne va pas dans le manuel et on voit que les tableaux, il permet de faire des calculs et automatiser des formules, ça ne serait pas évident de savoir cette information parce que le format Markdown, il n'offre pas cette fonctionnalité. Je peux, je pense, vous montrer un exemple. Je pense que je l'ai quelque part sur cette démonstration. Là, je vais démontrer comment je cherche une note. Donc, je vais chercher « budget ». J'espère que je vais le trouver. D'accord, donc « monthly budget ». Là, j'ai changé les valeurs pour la vidéo. Mais vous pouvez voir par exemple là, j'ai des catégories de dépenses. J'ai par exemple le salaire ici et le salaire du mois. Par exemple, en cas où dans un certain mois, j'ai plus ou moins de ce chiffre. Et là, j'ai le nombre que je peux associer à ces catégories. Et ça diminue à chaque fois que je... J'associe un numéro ici. Par exemple, là, si je vais changer celle-ci en 4 et je vais faire un calcul, ça change toutes les valeurs ici pour savoir combien il nous reste pour la catégorie Savings. Si je vais augmenter, ça va aussi changer, je pense. Oui, vous remarquez que ça va changer ici. Donc, je peux associer parce qu'en fait, j'utilise la méthode Budget... Non. Sacha: You Need A Budget. Abdallah: Enveloppe. Enveloppe, budget. Oui, oui, oui. Sacha: Moi aussi, moi aussi. Abdallah: Ah, d'accord. Sacha: Je connais le livre. Abdallah: J'utilise cette méthode et chaque mois, je vois ce tableau et je commence à diminuer pour chaque catégorie et je mets l'argent dans chaque enveloppe pour m'organiser un peu. Et cela me permet de... 50:40 Ledger, Hledger, Gnucash Sacha: Dans Emacs, j'utilise Ledger pour faire ça. J'utilise aussi le système d'enveloppe virtuelle pour gérer mes dépenses, mes économies. J'adore le système d'enveloppe virtuelle. Tu connais Ledger? Abdallah: Ledger, oui. Ledger, le mode sur Emacs. Sacha: Et aussi un outil, un outil de lien de commande. Abdallah: Oui, oui, bien sûr. Je pense que c'était écrit par John Wiegley. 01: Oui, oui. Abdallah: Je l'ai utilisé à un certain moment, j'ai oublié de mentionner. Donc, oui, je l'ai utilisé pendant, je pense, quelques années. C'était très intéressant. Mais mon problème, c'était la visualisation. Il y avait une intégration avec gnuplot, si je me rappelle bien. Mais c'était un peu compliqué à configurer et j'avais besoin de quelque chose de simple. Donc j'ai arrêté d'utiliser Ledger et j'utilise maintenant Gnucash. Sacha: Je [connais] aussi hledger qui a beaucoup de visualisations sur l'interface web. Donc si tu veux des visualisations... Abdallah: Il s'appelle comment? Sacha: Hledger. Abdallah: hledger, ok. Je vais noter. Prot: Avec le h. Sacha: Le format des données est assez pareil, mais il y a une interface web pour explorer des données. Abdallah: Ah d'accord, je vois. C'est intéressant, je vais voir plus tard. Est-ce que vous avez utilisé Gnucash ? Sacha: [J'ai utilisé Gnucash] il y a beaucoup d'années pour gérer les finances de mon entreprise, mais je préfère ledger parce que c'est dans Emacs. 02: Oui, oui. Sacha: Donc, j'ai fait justement un fichier Org avec tous mes reports. Et une fois que j'ai fait les reports, je les laisse. Je les laisse pour juste reexecuter. Abdallah: Est-ce que vous avez documenté votre méthode de gérer cela ? Sacha: Oui, j'ai une blog post de mon système d'enveloppe virtuelle avec Ledger. Je vais t'envoyer le lien. Abdallah: Oui, ce serait intéressant de voir. Sacha: Tu peux utiliser ta transaction virtuelle et tu peux définir les règles pour ajouter ou [soustraire] des comptes [correspondants] pour chaque transaction. Abdallah: En fait, je faisais exactement ça. C'est de créer des comptes virtuels et puis l'utiliser pour faire des budgets comme enveloppe budgeting. Oui, j'ai fait exactement ça. Je pense que je l'ai trouvé quelque part dans Reddit. Sacha: Donc si j'importe les données de ma banque, presque toutes les transactions sont catégorisées automatiquement. Abdallah: Ah d'accord, c'est très bien. J'ai toujours voulu avoir cette intégration mais les banques ici n'offrent pas des fonctionnalités similaires. Sacha: J'ai téléchargé chaque [CSV] manuellement. Abdallah: Ah, le fichier CSV? Sacha: Oui, le fichier CSV. Abdallah: Ah d'accord, donc vous allez manipuler le fichier CSV pour le convertir. D'accord, je vois, je vois. Prot: Et c'est difficile de le convertir? Sacha: Non, non, j'ai créé une fonction pour utiliser la bibliothèque pcsv pour [extraire] les données [du] fichier CSV et après ça traduire vers le format Ledger. Abdallah: C'est très intéressant. En fait, ça aurait été très utile dans mon cas parce que je le fais manuellement actuellement. Bon, je n'ai pas tellement de transactions sur mon compte puisque je gère mon compte personnel. Mais quand même, ça prend, je dirais, deux heures par mois. Juste pour synchroniser un peu. Les deux comptes. Le compte de Gnucash et celui de banque. Sacha: Apparemment, une bonne excuse pour automatiser avec Emacs. Abdallah: Oui, peut-être. Mais je ne sais pas comment... Est-ce qu'il y a une façon d'importer les données dans Gnucash? Je pense qu'il y a une manière, mais je ne l'ai pas encore explorée. Et aussi, je me demande si... Comment vous... Vous déplacez les dépenses dans les catégories. Comment vous le programmez? Sacha: Par le nom du payee. Abdallah: Ah d'accord. Sacha: Donc si j'achète les aliments au supermarché, le nom du payee est No Frills. J'assigne les catégories par le nom. Abdallah: Oui, parce que c'est la partie un peu que je trouve un peu difficile à automatiser dans mon cas parce que je dois le faire manuellement et il n'y a pas de nom de payee. Oui, parce que le CSV que je peux exporter dans la banque, il ne contient qu'un numéro que je ne sais pas le numéro de compte, je pense. Oui, les banques ici ne sont pas assez développées. C'est pour ça. Tant que tu peux extraire ton argent et que tu peux faire des transactions en ligne, tu es super. Sacha: Je pense que je dois réveiller ma fille pour notre grande aventure au parc d'attractions. Donc, un grand merci à tous les deux pour notre conversation et [ta] patience avec nos erreurs techniques. À la prochaine. Abdallah: Ça m'a fait un grand plaisir de converser avec vous. J'espère que c'est demain pour vous et on se voit dans la prochaine. Prot: À la prochaine à vous aussi et à bientôt. Merci. À bientôt. Au revoir. View Org source for this post (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/08/20-aout-emacs-chat-abdallah-maouche/index.org) You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com (mailto:sacha@sachachua.com?subject=Comment%20on%20https%3A%2F%2Fsachachua.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F08%2F20-aout-emacs-chat-abdallah-maouche%2F&body=Name%20you%20want%20to%20be%20credited%20by%20(if%20any)%3A%20%0AMessage%3A%20%0ACan%20I%20share%20your%20comment%20so%20other%20people%20can%20learn%20from%20it%3F%20Yes%2FNo%0A).
14 Aug 2026
Emacs Chat 28: Fabrice Niessen (en français)
Nous avons parlé en direct avec Fabrice Niessen (https://github.com/fniessen) (Formation Emacs Boost (https://emacsboost.com/)) d'Emacs, de ses flux de travail, de sa configuration, et d'autres sujets en français. Watch on YouTube (https://youtube.com/live/b4lwD2QS_6c) J'ai essayé de corriger la transcription (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#ID-emacs-chat-28-transcript), mais je crois qu'il y a encore beaucoup d'erreurs, donc n'hésitez pas à m'envoyer un message. 0:00 Introduction 1:46 Le parcours 4:15 Emacs sur Windows : Cygwin et WSL 8:26 Les automatisations 12:15 Emacs Boost 21:15 Emacsclient 28:49 org-html-themes 35:02 Review 37:25 PDF 40:03 Key-chord 45:41 Copier sans sélectionner 48:29 fill-paragraph 50:02 Les macros 51:02 Volatile highlight 52:47 Les tableaux Org 55:43 Les formations et les cours particuliers La transcription un peu corrigée (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#org44e6f04) Details 0:00 Introduction Sacha: Ça marche! Prot: Maintenant, nous sommes en direct. Sacha: Succès! Bonjour à toutes et à tous et bienvenue dans le deuxième épisode d'Emacs Chat en français. C'est le 28e épisode de la série. J'espère que j'ai lancé la diffusion correctement cette fois. Aujourd'hui, notre invité est Fabrice Niessen, un consultant informatique qui habite en Belgique et qui a beaucoup de dépôts dédiés à Emacs et à Org Mode, tels que le kit de configuration Leuven et le thème de publication d'Org Mode org-html-themes. Il propose aussi des formations à Emacs en présentiel à Paris, à Rotterdam et dans d'autres villes. Merci d'être là, Fabrice. Fabrice: Merci pour l'invitation. C'est très sympa de votre part. Sacha: Merci aussi à Prot de m'aider pour la conversation. En fait, je pense que mon niveau de français est un peu trop faible pour ce genre de conversation, même avec le sous-titrage automatique de mon navigateur. Donc, je vais étudier le sous-titre après la conversation pour mieux en tirer parti. Nous faisons de notre mieux ensemble. Prot: Merci. Je t'en prie, je t'en prie. Non, de fait, très bien, très bien. Sacha: C'est parti. Fabrice, tu utilises Emacs depuis très longtemps. 1999, c'est plus logique en Belgique. Fabrice: Absolument. La Suisse est encore mieux avec le 8 ans. Sacha: Oui. 1:46 Le parcours Sacha: Comment t'as-tu découvert Emacs? Fabrice: En fait, j'ai découvert Emacs en 95, lors de mon stage de fin d'études. J'ai été dans une entreprise pendant six mois et là, ils utilisaient Linux. Enfin, Unix plutôt, un serveur Unix. Et donc, j'ai dû apprendre à développer sous Emacs. Alors, j'ai appris les keybindings, j'avais la refcard imprimée avec un stabilo pour souligner tous les trucs que j'apprenais au fur et à mesure. Ça m'a beaucoup aidé d'ailleurs, d'en apprendre comme ça, C-x C-s, et puis tous les suivants. Et après les six mois, c'était donc en 95, c'est l'époque de la sortie de Windows 3.11, je pense. J'avais un ordinateur avec Windows 3.11. Après, j'ai repris les habitudes point and click, donc des interfaces graphiques. Jusqu'en 99, à peu près 99, où un de mes collègues, Dominique, utilise Emacs. Et en fait, à l'époque, on avait déjà du versionning au boulot et c'était PCL CVS, c'était CVS le versionneur, donc un ancêtre de Subversion et un ancêtre de Git. Et il y avait un mode PCL CVS d'utiliser dans Emacs. Et quand j'ai vu ça une fois, c'est en fait un peu ça qui m'a fait sauter le pas de me dire il faut que je retourne parce que retourne regarder Emacs. Parce que c'était beaucoup plus simple pour lui, il avait modifié ses fichiers dans Emacs, il avait son petit truc où il sélectionnait les quelques fichiers qu'il voulait committer, il les sélectionnait, il faisait je ne sais plus quel key binding, et puis il mettait son message de commit, C-c C-c, et voilà, c'était fait. Et donc quand j'ai vu ça, alors que moi, il fallait que je passe dans le shell, il fallait que je fasse sans doute des CVS add ou des choses comme ça, des quelques fichiers, c'était beaucoup plus long. Beaucoup plus compliqué. Donc, j'ai recommencé à me réintéresser à Emacs. J'ai utilisé son .emacs et puis j'ai retiré un petit peu de trucs et j'en ai rajouté énormément. Et c'est comme ça que ça a commencé. Et voilà, c'est fantastique. Évidemment, une fois qu'on rentre dans Emacs, c’est-à-dire le C-s, rien que ça, la puissance du C-s, l’incrémental search, c’est dingue. Donc, c'est comme ça que j'ai commencé et puis je n'ai pas pu m'arrêter. 4:15 Emacs sur Windows : Cygwin et WSL Sacha: Tu utilises Emacs sur Windows. Fabrice: Exactement. Donc, effectivement, à l'époque, j'ai fait plusieurs tentatives. J'ai utilisé Cygwin, donc j'ai utilisé Emacs ou Cygwin. Je vais aussi utiliser le Emacs natif. Ce qui était compliqué, parce que j'écrivais quand même aussi beaucoup de shell scripts, etc. Donc là, c'était dans mon Cygwin. Avec les Emacs natifs, il y avait les montages, le /mnt, etc. Donc c'était surtout le Emacs Cygwin que j'utilisais. Et depuis maintenant 3-4 ans, 4-5 ans, Windows a eu la géniale idée de mettre le WSL, donc Windows Subsystem Linux, et donc dans mon Windows, j'ai un vrai Linux, encore mieux, qui est plus puissant que Cygwin encore. Et tout est prévu, tout est interconnecté. Donc je peux passer, je peux être dans le monde Linux et voir mes fichiers qui sont sur le c: et vice versa, ce qui était plus compliqué avant. Donc voilà, c'est fantastique et donc j'utilise maintenant WSL. Je n'ai plus que ça et ça marche extrêmement bien. Et c'est mon environnement de travail. Prot: A-t-il des difficultés d'utiliser Emacs sur Cygwin ? Ou c'est comme WSL ? Fabrice: C'était un émulateur. Il y avait à peu près tout ce que je voulais quand même. Mais il n'y avait pas tous les outils. Peut-être des outils style... Non, et encore, je dirais des bêtises. Top, je pensais à top, etc. Mais je pense que non, ça, c'était aussi implémenté. Mais bon, il y avait un certain souci. Il y avait un certain nombre de commandes implémentées. Ici, c'est un vrai Linux. Et alors avec sudo apt install, tandis que sous Cygwin, il fallait installer des packages séparément. Donc on a une petite interface, on sélectionne les packages. Ici, je recopie ce que je peux trouver sur le web. Si je veux installer R, j'utilise le langage R, sudo apt install R et des choses comme ça. Donc c'est beaucoup plus facile. C'est vraiment typiquement tout ce que les gens font qui n'ont que Linux. C'est exactement les mêmes commandes. Je trouve ça beaucoup mieux, c'est beaucoup plus intégré. Sacha: Je pense que c'est aussi plus vite qu'utiliser Emacs sur Windows directement parce que Magit, par exemple, Magit est trop lent, je pense, si tu utilises Magit sur Windows directement. Fabrice: Ça c'est un truc, c'était déjà pareil avant avec Cygwin aussi. Au début, j'avais installé mon WSL Linux, donc il est monté, et j'avais mis Emacs, je pense... Attends, comment ça allait ? Non, je mettais mes repos à l'extérieur, dans le C:. Et en fait, là, il y a quand même un passage entre les deux mondes qui est extrêmement lent. Rien que pour lancer Emacs, mon Emacs se lance en une à deux secondes. Là, dans ce cas-là, ça se lançait en une ou deux minutes. Donc, il y a une différence énorme. Donc, en fait, il faut vraiment tout mettre, vivre uniquement dans le monde WSL, dans le monde Linux. Donc, mes repos sont dans Linux. Mon Emacs, il est dans mon Linux. Mais en fait, les fenêtres sont partagées. C'est ça aussi qui est bien. Je peux avoir une fenêtre, ma fenêtre Emacs, elle est à côté d'une fenêtre Outlook, par exemple. Et les presse-papiers, etc. sont complètement interconnectés aussi. Donc, c'est vraiment comme si c'était une application Windows. Sauf que réellement, elle est dans le sous-système Linux. Mais il faut vraiment mettre tout dans le sous-système Linux pour que les performances soient potables. Sinon, il y a quand même des lenteurs pour les fichiers qui sont lus d'un domaine à l'autre, d'un espace à l'autre. Les shared files, quoi. Tout ce qui passe par le point de montage est quand même beaucoup plus long. 8:26 Les automatisations Sacha: Maintenant, tu as un environnement plus pratique pour tes automatisations. Parle-moi de tes automatisations préférées pour les tâches répétitives. Fabrice: Volontiers. En fait, j'ai préparé un fichier Org, évidemment, pour préparer cet entretien. Et donc, vous voyez mon écran ou je dois partager ? Oui, vous le voyez, c'est ça ? Toujours ? Prot: Oui, oui, oui, oui, je peux voir ton écran. Fabrice: Donc, voilà. Voilà, ici, j'ai mon Emacs en grand. Et vous voyez dans le titre ici ? Le titre, je le... Oui, toutes les 20 secondes, il y a un petit truc comme ça. Toutes les 20 minutes, il faut poser les yeux pendant 20 secondes. Toutes les 20 minutes, j'ai un programme qui m'interrompt pendant 20 secondes. Ça va encore arriver deux fois tout à l'heure. Et donc ici, dans le titre, vous voyez GNU Linux Emacs. Donc, on voit vraiment que c'est l'Emacs du GNU Linux. Et avec ici, j'ai la date dans laquelle il avait été compilé. Et puis j'ai le PID aussi. Parfois, dans le temps, j'avais plusieurs Emacs, donc j'ai le PID qui est aussi indiqué. Comme ça, quand je devais faire un kill, ça arrivait parfois de devoir faire des kills, je savais au moins lequel il fallait que je kill, parce que j'avais l'information directement dans le titre. Donc ici, j'ai une petite présentation Org. Avec un agenda. On a parlé de mon parcours, de comment j'ai fait la connaissance d'Emacs. Tu posais des questions sur différents repositories que j'ai rendus publics sur YouTube. Il y a le fameux thème de couleur Leuven. Leuven, pour information, c'est la ville où j'habite. Prot: Une belle ville. Fabrice: Très belle ville, absolument. Et voilà, j'ai un peu copié Till Tantau, je pense, le créateur de Beamer, qui avait donné des noms pour ses thèmes, Madrid, etc., Hanover, là où il était passé faire des séminaires. Donc c'est comme ça que j'ai pris le vœu au début. D'ailleurs, ici, vous voyez ce thème Leuven Theme qui est appliqué avec des titres plus gros pour les sections de premier niveau et puis des couleurs un peu différentes pour les to-do keywords, pour les titres, pour les sections, pour les tags, etc. Il y a des morceaux qui sont dans Leuven theme, il y a des morceaux qui sont dans ma configuration Emacs. Le thème de couleurs s'appelle Leuven Theme et la configuration Emacs. Pour l'instant, le repository sur GitHub s'appelle Emacs Leuven. J'ai mis ici un lien. D'ailleurs, pour information, cette note que je partage, c'est aussi sur GitHub. Vous pouvez très bien la chercher sur https://github.com. Et alors ici, donc, Emacs Chat Sacha Chua. Donc, vous pourrez le trouver là. Donc ici, il n'y a qu'un fichier, il y a juste l'heure et demie. Prot: Oui, bonne idée de... 12:15 Emacs Boost Prot: Et c'est quoi Emacs Boost ? Fabrice: Donc en fait Emacs Boost, je fais des formations à Emacs depuis 2024 et j'ai appelé ça Emacs Boost, l'idée étant de booster l'utilisation d'Emacs, d'être plus efficace, d'être plus rapide, d'avoir des automatisations qui soient incluses dedans. Mon projet s'appelle Emacs Leuven depuis longtemps, mais pour être cohérent entre la formation que j'ai appelée Emacs Boost et mes configurations qui s'appellent pour l'instant Emacs Leuven, je suis en train de renommer tout doucement des fonctions, des variables, etc. vers Emacs Boost. L'idée, ce sera que tout mon fichier de configuration, que je peux vous montrer, Emacs Leuven, Je fais du literate programming. Donc ça c'est mon fichier de configuration d'Emacs. C'est le fichier à partir duquel est anglé ma configuration Emacs. Donc ici si je vais montrer de l'autre côté le fichier liste. Donc, ça, c'est mon fichier de configuration avec toutes mes configs à moi. Il fait, je pense, 7500 lignes. Je pensais qu'on était à 10 000 déjà. C'est un petit peu de nettoyage. Bon, alors évidemment, c'est facile parce que j'ai quasiment toujours, devant cette queue, j'ai toujours un commentaire. Donc, si on regarde ici, si je remonte un petit peu, voilà, tous mes sets de pubs. Je vais agrandir un peu. J'ai systématiquement une ligne de commentaire au-dessus. Voilà, define. Donc, j'ai une ligne blanche, une ligne de commentaire et puis une ligne de commande. Donc, en fait, si on retirait tous les blancs ou tous les commentaires, je serais à 2500 lignes. C'est déjà pas mal. Voilà, mais donc ça, c'est le fichier que j'ai commencé en 99. Et donc qui est aussi public avec toutes les configurations que j'ai et tous les packages que j'utilise. J'utilise un certain nombre de packages. Donc si je regarde, par exemple, un dont je vais vous parler tout à l'heure, je vais retourner au début du fichier. Je vais retomber sur ma liste, voilà. Donc ça c'est les packages que je charge ou en tout cas que je customise. Donc voilà, ça c'est toute la liste. Je crois qu'il y en a à peu près 70. Oui, un petit peu moins peut-être. Deux packages que j'utilise. Alors certains, je les ai commentés parce que je n'utilise plus tellement. Et sinon, ça c'est les packages que j'utilise couramment et pour lesquels il y a des configurations. Et donc d'ailleurs, le but d'Emacs Leven, c'était de dire c'est un fichier de configuration qui est pour moi, il y a mes configurations, la façon dont je veux travailler, mes automatisations, mes settings par défaut, ou des fonctions supplémentaires, des commandes supplémentaires. Mais l'idée, c'est que n'importe qui pourrait faire require Emacs Leven, donc évidemment cloner le repo, faire require de ce fichier-là, et ça ne devrait pas perturber son système. Ça devrait rajouter toutes les configs que j'ai faites, mais sans perturber, sans imposer, par exemple, je ne sais pas, fancy narrow. Donc, en fait, au démarrage, ça regarde, est-ce que ça va demander, ça va regarder les packages qui sont installés dans, si je prends l'exemple de Sacha, si Sacha faisait ça, ça regarderait les packages qu'elle a installés, qui sont appelables, qui sont loadables, qu'elle a installés dans son système. Et ça dirait, tiens, voilà, il manque tel et tel package, voulez-vous les installer ? Donc, ça va proposer d'installer tous ces packages-là. Mais on peut dire non. Et dans tous les cas, toutes mes configurations, je vérifie chaque fois si je modifie web-mode. Par exemple, je vérifie, est-ce que web-mode est installé ? Si oui, alors voilà les configs. S'il n'est pas installé, il n'y a aucune config qui se passe. Donc, j'ai toujours un... Si je vais regarder web-mode, par exemple, pour cet exemple-ci. with-eval-after-load, voilà. Donc ici j'ai toujours with-eval-after-load de web-mode. Et donc ma configuration de web-mode ne sera active que si web-mode a été trouvé et est utilisé. Donc je ne vais pas, en théorie, je ne vais pas rajouter des raccourcis clavier, etc. pour des modes que vous n'auriez pas. Et en théorie, le fichier, il n'y a pas de truc qui soit vraiment privé. Donc il n'y a pas mon nom, mon prénom, mon username, par exemple, il n'est pas dans ce fichier là. Mon adresse email n'est pas dans ce fichier-là. Donc j'ai un petit fichier init-local.el qui est vraiment spécifique à moi. Tout ce qui est là, en théorie, c'est relativement générique et universel. Très bien. Donc maintenant, si je repasse sur la... C'est ce que je considère être les meilleurs packages, ceux que j'ai testés. J'ai lu des centaines, si pas des milliers, sur une vingtaine d'années, si pas des milliers de fichiers de config. J'ai vu beaucoup de choses chez plein de gens et c'est comme ça que j'ai trouvé beaucoup de packages au fur et à mesure. Et quand c'était des choses qui me plaisaient, j'ai rajouté des configurations de ces packages. C'est pour ça que c'est aussi gros, mais ça fait beaucoup de choses. Et malgré tout, ça se charge quasiment instantanément. Donc aussi, les packages un peu plus longs, je fais des idle require. Donc j'attends qu'il y ait 5 secondes d'inactivité dans la session Emacs pour aller charger certains packages. Mon adresse email n'est pas dans ce fichier-là. Donc j'ai un petit fichier init local.el qui est vraiment spécifique à moi. Tout ce qui est là, en théorie, c'est relativement générique et universel. Prot: Très bien. Fabrice: Donc maintenant, si je repasse sur... Sacha: Même si ta configuration inclut beaucoup de package, parce que tu délais le démarrage du package, c'est vite, c'est rapide. Fabrice: Exactement. Je dis que c'est une à deux secondes maximum. Et en fait, l'idée, et on va en parler encore tout à l'heure, on verra, j'ai beaucoup de choses que j'aimerais bien dire, on va voir le temps qu'on a. Mais l'idée, c'est qu'en plus, une fois qu'il est démarré, il passe en mode serveur. Et donc, je peux lancer, ouvrir un fichier directement dans Emacs sans lancer une nouvelle instance d'Emacs. Donc je n'ai qu'une seule instance d'Emacs et c'est celle-là qui est utilisée tout le temps. Donc après, chaque fois que j'appelle Emacs pour écrire un message de commit ou des choses comme ça, c'est instantané. Il n'y a vraiment même plus de temps d'attente du tout. Il n'y a même pas les une à deux secondes de démarrage. Et par exemple, un petit truc que je voulais montrer éventuellement, deux petites automatisations que je trouve extrêmement utiles, qui font le pont. En fait, j'ai trois applications que j'utilise tout le temps chez Emacs. J'ai le Shell, ici, le terminal. Donc j'utilise pas, j'ai pas l'habitude, et ça c'est plutôt d'ailleurs à cause, entre guillemets, à cause de l'époque Cygwin, où le shell dans Cygwin, un shell dans Cygwin, dans l'Emacs Cygwin, ça marchait pas bien, il y avait des problèmes de C-m qui apparaissaient, etc. Donc j'ai pas pris l'habitude d'utiliser le shell dans Emacs. Donc j'ai toujours, voilà, mon petit shell sur le côté, j'ai Emacs et j'ai le browser. En gros c'est mes trois, et puis alors... Pour le boulot, évidemment, Outlook. Mais sinon, c'est les trois applications que j'utilise vraiment le plus. C'est Emacs, le Shell et le Browser. Et j'ai envie d'avoir des ponts entre ces deux mondes. Donc ici, mon Shell, mon terminal et Emacs. Du style, je veux donc voir si je vais ouvrir un fichier. 21:15 Emacsclient Fabrice: Par exemple, je vais ouvrir le fichier Emacs... Leuven, tout doux. Donc ici, j’ai un petit alias e qui en fait va faire emacsclient. Quand je fais ça, si tout se passe bien, voilà. Donc ici, il m'a ouvert ce fichier tout doux dans Emacs. Donc ça, c'est pour ouvrir un fichier. Je peux aussi ouvrir Le répertoire dans lequel je suis, ça ouvre le répertoire et je passe en direct. Par exemple, si j'étais dans ce repository Emacs Leuven, imaginons que je veux faire un guide status. J'ai aussi des alias évidemment pour... Si je veux faire un Git status, je vois qu'il y a ces fichiers-là. Je pourrais éventuellement vouloir garder les modifications. Je vais les faire avec Emacs. Je pourrais faire simplement up point pour me retrouver directement ici, dans le bon répertoire. Et comme ça, là, je vais faire, chez moi, je vais faire C-<f9>, qui va me lancer vc-dir sans me poser la question de savoir où je veux lancer vc-dir. Donc, mon C-<f9> ne prompte pas, il lance vc-dir sur le répertoire ou le fichier dans lequel je suis. Et donc, c'est avec ça que je commencerai. Ici, je regarderai les différences avec un égal. Je vais voir si c'est bon ou pas, puis je vais committer. Donc ça, c'est pour passer du shell vers Emacs. J’ai le petit e. Beaucoup de gens connaissent emacsclient, donc ce n'est pas très nouveau. J'ai juste abrévié en e. Deux choses qui sont plus marrantes ou plus utiles. Il y en a une qui est marrante et une qui est utile. Celle qui est marrante, c'est cate, qui est une petite fonction dans le terminal, un petit shell script, et qui fait un cate. Sacha: Cat plus Emacs. Fabrice: cat de ce qu'il y a dans Emacs. Donc, si je fais cate, il va en fait m'afficher le contenu du buffer working-dir. C'est génial. Si j'ai ce todo-là, par exemple, je peux faire ici si je fais cate, ou si j'en avais plusieurs, on peut imaginer que j'ai plusieurs fenêtres. Donc, si je vais ici, voilà. Pour l'instant, la fenêtre active, c'est celle-là. Donc, si je fais Cat, Cat, Ça va me remontrer ça. Si je mets mon curseur là et que je refais cate, ça va m'afficher l'autre fichier. Alors ça c'est plus... Et alors c'est emacsclient aussi. Alors ça c'est plus marrant, entre guillemets, parce que ça n'a pas beaucoup d'intérêt, sauf éventuellement, parfois. Imaginons que je ne sache pas faire un grep. Il y a des opérations que je connaîtrais mieux dans le terminal. Par exemple, compter le nombre de lignes. J'ai un petit... Je suis sous et j’ai un global w qui va me faire le compte. Donc ici, je vais savoir directement, voilà, j'ai 1397 lignes dans ce fichier-là. Ce qui revient à faire, juste pour expliquer, ça revient à faire pipe wc -l. Donc voilà, je pourrais faire ici aussi un grep, éventuellement, grep, je ne sais pas, test, je ne sais pas si j'ai... Voilà. Donc il y a toutes les lignes qui sont dans ce buffer là avec le mot test. Donc ça c'est plus marrant entre guillemets, c'est pas tout le temps utile. Par contre un qui est extrêmement utile, c'est imaginons que je sois, je vais ici me redéplacer dans mon route, dans mon home directory. Je suis dans le home directory et en fait ici dans Emacs, j'ai ouvert ce fichier là. Et j'aimerais bien faire le status, par exemple, le guide status, dans ce repo-là. Mais donc, il faut que j'aille dans le repo. Donc ici, si je fais C-x C-k, avec direct plus, je sais passer à la vue directe et je vois que le chemin d'accès, donc le chemin, c'est ~/.dotfiles/emacs-leuven. Donc, je pourrais faire ici cd slash... En fait, ça, ce qui est juste au-dessus. Mais si je veux l'automatiser, en fait, je peux faire cde. Donc cde, comme cate, c’était cat de ce qu’il y a dans Emacs, cde, c’est cd de ce qu’il y a dans Emacs. Donc cde va me conduire là où je suis dans Emacs. Donc dans le même répertoire, voilà. Sacha: Je vais voler toutes les idées. Fabrice: C'est le but, parce que j'ai trouvé quelque part cette idée, et je l'ai peut-être un peu modifiée, mais c'est génial. Donc ici, maintenant, si je vais sur n'importe quel fichier, je ne sais pas si je prends de nouveau notre exemple ici, Readme. Est-ce que vous voyez assez grand ? Est-ce que je peux augmenter la taille aussi ? De la fonte. Donc ici, je suis dans le fichier que j'ai préparé pour cette présentation. C'est un autre repository. Imaginons que dans mon shell, je veuille retourner dans ce repository, cde. Et je suis dans le repository Emacs, Sacha Chua. Je peux faire mon guide status. Je suis directement bien placé. Je n'ai pas besoin de devoir taper des chemins d'accès. Sacha: Tu as aussi un script pour récupérer ou retrouver le nombre de fichiers qui est courant en Emacs dans la command line? Fabrice: Je ne l'ai pas, mais ce serait facile à faire puisqu'en fait, il y a ici ce que je... Imaginons que je veuille le faire. Je vais prendre quelques touches en plus. Je vais faire C-x C-j. Et puis... Je ne sais pas si vous savez, w, le petit w, ça me copie. Donc, le contrôler, il me place dans direct sur le fichier en question. Et w, dans le presse-papier, le nom du fichier. Je pourrais faire cat. C'est facile d'implementer. Ce serait facile, parce qu'ici, je l'ai récupéré. cat, ceci. Donc j'ai directement le fichier comme ça. Donc ce serait extrêmement facile. Plus dur, ce sera de lui trouver un nom. À cette commande. Sacha: Génial, génial. 28:49 org-html-themes Fabrice: Non, vas-y, j'allais éventuellement, maintenant on était dans, j'allais éventuellement parler d'export HTML, etc. Sacha: Oui, oui, oui. Fabrice: Donc vous voyez ici, on est dans le buffer Emacs, alors c'est déjà agréable à lire parce qu'il y a un certain nombre de couleurs, etc. J'aimerais bien d'ailleurs ici que les notes soient colorisées avec une certaine couleur, mais bon, ce sera pour une prochaine fois. Mais il y a évidemment un moyen de lire qui est quand même beaucoup plus agréable, c'est de lire ce même document. qui est assez long, ce serait de le lire en HTML ou en PDF. Et donc, en rajoutant un setup file, donc ici simplement une ligne comme ça. Donc, il faut avoir cloné le repository à org-html-themes. Et alors, après, il faut taper le chemin d'accès vers le HTML thème readtheorg.setup. readtheorg est un des deux thèmes HTML que j'ai écrit. Et donc, simplement en mettant une ligne comme ça, quand on va faire C-c C-e h h, ça va générer. Voilà, c'est déjà fait. On voit ici dans l'écho area, ça va générer la version HTML. Et donc, oui, pour aller l'ouvrir, il y aurait moyen d'aller encore plus vite, etc. Ce que je fais encore toujours pour l'instant, je fais C-x C-j, je passe dans Dired. Et dans Dired, j'ai un petit raccourci qui est extrêmement pratique, que j'ai nommé pour l’instant o pour Open. Et en fait, ça ouvre le fichier sur lequel je suis en utilisant l'application standard Windows. Donc, c'est ça aussi l'intérêt ici. Donc, ça montre bien qu'avec WSL, je suis intégré avec mon Windows. Donc, en faisant O sur ce fichier-là, Ça va m'ouvrir Edge. Si je fais O sur le fichier PDF, ça va m'ouvrir sous Matra PDF. Parce que j'ai configuré dans Windows que mon lecteur, c'est sous Sumatra PDF. Et donc ici, je vais faire O. Et ça doit m'ouvrir ici. Alors voilà, ça m'ouvre un fichier. Vous voyez ? Et donc ça m'ouvre le fichier avec... Le fichier Org, mais avec une présentation beaucoup plus sympathique, beaucoup plus jolie, beaucoup plus agréable à lire. Sacha: Je l'adore. Fabrice: Elle est géniale, elle est magnifique. Et en fait, il y en a une deuxième, et je vais vous montrer des petits trucs de la deuxième, parce que je n'ai pas encore tout mis dans celle-ci. J'aurais bien porté des choses que j'avais créées dans l'autre, mais que je n'ai pas encore portées, donc j'aurais bien les partager dans tous les thèmes. Si je retourne ici dans mon fichier Org et que je mets Big Blow à la place, c'est le nom de l'autre thème. Je vais refaire un export. Cette fois-ci, je n'ai plus qu'à faire F5 ici pour faire un refresh. On a une autre vue où là, chaque section devient un tab. On a tous des tabs. Donc ça peut être aussi intéressant en fonction de la taille du fichier. Ça peut être aussi intéressant de voir une vue plus monolithique où on a tout en une seule page ou une vue avec des tables ici où on voit section par section ou chapitre par chapitre. Mais alors cette vue-ci, elle a des trucs un peu spéciaux. Donc j'ai notamment la possibilité de faire un collapse. On va aller à un endroit où j'ai ici... Quelques astuces, voilà. Donc j'ai collapse all ou extend all. Donc je peux collapser toutes mes sections. En fait, j'ai voulu faire comme dans Org. Et j'ai mes petites flèches ici. Donc je peux, en cliquant sur n'importe quel item, je peux l'expander ou le collapser. Donc si j'expand ou je collapse. Sacha: Pardon, je vais apporter des tissus à ma fille. Prot: C'est effectif comme ça, oui. Et tu as d'autres thèmes aussi ? Fabrice: Non, pas encore publics. J'en ai en deux, mais ils ne sont pas encore publics. Et donc voilà, ça peut être intéressant quand on a beaucoup de tâches, etc., pour pouvoir de nouveau, un peu comme dans le fichier Org, de collapser tout sauf un certain truc. Et alors, j'avais mis exprès ici, donc là j'ai deux tâches, j'ai fait deux tâches, en todo et en startit, avec des petites tags. Et en fait, j'ai même... Ici, un petit dashboard sur le côté. Il y a un petit truc dashboard qui s'est mis quand on l'ouvre. On voit le nombre de tâches en todo, le nombre de tâches en started. Donc, dynamiquement, ça va questionner, ça va afficher tous les statuts qui existent. Si j'en ai que deux dans tout mon fichier, c'était pour un petit exemple. Là, pareil, j'ai tous les tags et on peut même highlighter carrément tous les trucs qui sont en todo. C'est des flags, en fait. On peut les highlighter. Je peux highlighter et ça prend la couleur du todo. Comme ça, si je veux scanner tous les trucs qui seraient en todo, je peux les mettre en todo et je peux scanner, quand j'ai un long fichier, je peux scanner tout ce qu'il y a dedans. Et ça marche aussi, si je me souviens bien, avec les petits tags. Je peux highlighter toutes les tâches qui ont le tag personnel ou toutes les tâches qui ont le tag work d'un coup. Ça me permet de scanner, de regarder ce qui est important. C'est un peu un fonctionnement à la Org, mais dans le browser. 35:02 Review Prot: Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire r ? r, or click here to review. Exactement. Fabrice: C'est ce que je voulais te montrer. J'ai un petit truc en plus pour faire un vrai review. Si je clique sur r, ça va faire comme un narrowing. Tout le reste de l'écran va devenir foncer. Sauf la tâche, une tâche à la fois. Et donc ça va aller chaque fois sur la next tâche. Donc ici, quand je vais cliquer sur R, il va passer à la tâche suivante, qui est active, c'est-à-dire ici la tâche qui sera en start-it. Et donc ça collapse tout le reste. Et si je refais un r, ici c’est bloqué, donc je peux faire q pour quitter. Donc r, il va à la première tâche, et donc je vois cette première tâche ouverte, et puis il va à la deuxième. Donc on pourrait passer, scanner une par une toutes les tâches. Et ça va chaque fois mettre en évidence uniquement cette tâche-là. Et donc, je peux faire grand R, donc c’est pour faire le reverse, donc aller en arrière. Donc r, ça va vers le suivant, la tâche suivante. Si j'en ai que deux, on pourrait imaginer que j'en ai 100 dans un fichier. Et donc, je peux faire mon review comme ça et relire le truc et puis éventuellement changer. Ce qui serait génial, c'est de pouvoir changer le statut ici, etc. aussi. Et que ce soit répercuté vers le fichier Org, mais ce n'est pas le cas. C'est un petit ensemble de Org ici. J'ai aussi là un petit mini-talk, comme la mini-talk dans les chapitres LaTeX. Et donc vous voyez que simplement en mettant une ligne ici, BigBlow ou ReadTheDocs, On a accès à l'une ou l'autre. Je génère l'autre version. F5, voilà. Ici, il y a un petit truc de recherche en plus que je n'ai pas dans l'autre. J'ai des petites différences dans les deux thèmes. Et donc, ça, c'est l'export vers HTML. L'idée, c'est d'avoir... J'ai mis une référence ici, vers le repo. Et l'idée, c'est d'avoir 0 CSS à écrire. Une navigation confortable, une lisibilité plus grande, un rendu professionnel. 37:25 PDF Fabrice: On peut carrément imprimer ça. Voilà, une personnalisation qui est assez simple. J'ai fait aussi un petit repository pour l'export vers la tech. Donc ici, si j'exporte, je l'ai déjà fait, mais je peux directement l'ouvrir. Oh, donc je vais faire de nouveau... Oh, et ça va ouvrir l'application dans Windows qui est liée pour les PDF. Chez moi, c'est sous Sumatra PDF. Voilà. Et donc, ça m'ouvre ici mon fichier. Cette fois-ci, comme un PDF, avec une table des contenus, une table des matières. Et voilà, j'ai essayé de nouveau de faire les notes, les types, etc. Donc, de les faire un rendu qui soit assez joli. Tout à l'heure, on était ici dans Emacs Leuven Boost. Et donc ça, c'est aussi public. C'est une classe qui s'appelle mcreport. Je l'ai appelé mcreport pour l'instant. Donc, il faut juste charger la première fois. Il faut charger, donc la première fois que je lance Emacs, je devrais le faire automatiquement, mais pour l'instant je ne l'ai pas encore fait. Je dois le faire une fois à chaque session. Je vais évaluer ce buffer-ci dans lequel j'ai les définitions de mes différents... de mcarticles, de mcreports, de mcbooks, etc. Donc je dois juste évaluer une fois C'est un package. C'est des accords sur une guitare où on peut gratter plusieurs cordes sur une guitare. Ici, l'idée, c'est qu'on peut appeler une commande avec deux touches simultanées. Donc, par exemple, eval-buffer. Donc ici, quand je dois évaluer ceci, je ferais, si je faisais comme avant, je ferais M-x, eval-buffer, Enter. 40:03 Key-chord Fabrice: Mais en fait, avec key-chord, je peux simplement faire vb en même temps. Donc, si je fais vb, il y a genre 100 ou 200 millisecondes. Donc ça doit être fait quasiment simultanément. Et le b peut être avant le v ou le v avant le b. Et donc quand je fais les deux en même temps, vb, ça fait eval-buffer. Si vous voulez, alors ici on voit rien, c'est pas très visuel. Si vous voulez voir un truc, hh par exemple, quand je tape hh rapidement, ça fait la sélection d'abord du mot. Si je retape rapidement, ça grandit chaque fois la région. Donc ça fait un expand region. Et grand H, ça fait l’inverse, je retourne vers du plus petit au plus petit. xk par exemple, si je tape xk, ça va faire kill-buffer. Donc c'est chaque fois juste, si vous voulez voir dans ma configuration, où ça se trouve, Emacs Levenel, XK par exemple, voilà. Donc c’est là que j’ai mis other window, ww, xj, ça fait le C-x C-k, donc le direct jump. Et le eval-buffer dont j’ai parlé, où est-ce qu'il est ? On va mettre un peu… Donc eval-buffer, voilà, vb, ça fait eval-buffer. Donc pratique ça pour écrire en français. Quand j'écris plus petit, plus petit, deux fois rapidement, donc il faut que ce soit chaque fois rapidement, ça va faire un insert de caractères guillemets français. Donc ici, je vais faire si je le fais lentement, il ne se passe rien. Si je le fais vite, il insère les guillemets. D'accord. Tant que j'y suis, vous avez vu aussi, si je fais plus petit, plus petit ici, et puis je fais un save, vous voyez que j'ai à ce moment-là ici une ligne bleue dans le gutter, dans le fringe. Donc j'utilise git-gutter, si je me souviens bien, de Dmitry, j'ai oublié son nom de famille. C'est diff-hl, de Dmitry Gutov. Sacha: Moi aussi. Fabrice: Ouais, ça doit être ça. Et donc ça me met en fonction, si j'efface ici des lignes, ça va mettre du rouge. Et si je fais une insertion, et si je fais des insertions, ça va mettre du vert. Donc je vois directement dans mon buffer, systématiquement, où est-ce que j'ai des choses qui ne sont pas encore commitées. Et alors pour, ça c'est la première customisation que j'ai indiquée, si je retourne dans mon... Je peux en même temps parler de F5 et F6. J'ai quelques trucs assez sympathiques. F5, ça va me faire... Si j'ai un seul window, quand je fais F5, ça me crée un deuxième window. Ça fait l’équivalent de C-x 2 ou de C-x 3. En fonction de la place que j'ai. Donc si j'ai assez de place pour avoir 80 caractères présentés, il va passer à un mode vertical, côte à côte. Sinon, si j'ai moins d'espace, il va passer sur un mode dessus-dessous. Et si je suis à l'inverse, dans une situation avec plusieurs buffers, avec plusieurs windows, donc ici j'en avais encore une troisième, quand je fais F5, en fait, c'est l'équivalent de faire C-x 1, donc ça va faire Ça va garder uniquement la fenêtre qui était active. Et donc souvent, quand je dois passer d'un buffer à l'autre, quand je veux ouvrir autre chose, je vais faire F5, ça me crée un deuxième buffer. Et puis je vais mettre le contenu ici d'autres choses. Je vais retourner sur ma présentation. Et je voulais parler, par exemple, du C-w et du M-w sans sélectionner de région. Ça, pour moi, c'est un des trucs les plus... Les plus importants, que j'utilise tout le temps, tout le temps, tout le temps. Donc, imaginons que je veuille... Si je veux copier cette région-là, je dois commencer à sélectionner une région, et puis je vais pouvoir faire un copie. Si je veux, en fait, si je me rends compte... Imaginons que je veuille faire une ligne qui ressemble à celle-là, celle-ci, avec le kk. Imaginons que je veuille aussi faire qq, que qq ait la même... Appel la même commande. Donc je pourrais dupliquer la ligne. J'ai aussi une petite commande pour dupliquer les lignes. Et sinon, en fait, il faut que je copie cette ligne-là. Dans un Emacs standard, pour copier la ligne, je dois aller au début de la ligne, faire la sélection, aller à la fin de la ligne et puis faire M-w. Et à ce moment-là, je peux la copier. En fait, c'est trop long pour moi. Donc j'étais là au milieu et donc je veux copier la ligne. Simplement, je vais prendre un autre exemple, je vais prendre celle-là. Je fais M-w. Et M-w, donc j’ai un advice au-dessus de M-w. M-w, s’il n’y a pas de région, il considère que la région, c'est la ligne courante. Donc ici, si j’insère, je fais C-y, voilà. J'ai la ligne que j'avais mise dans le presse-papier. 45:41 Copier sans sélectionner Fabrice: Et ça, ça sauve en temps fou de pouvoir... C'est quand je veux copier une ligne ou à l'inverse couper une ligne parfois. C'est le même principe. Donc le C-w, donc le cut, si on parle en Windows. Donc si je veux faire un cut de cette ligne-là, de nouveau, si je n'ai pas cette customisation-là, je vais devoir, au début de la ligne, sélectionner la région et puis je peux faire C-w. Mais avec la petite customisation, avec l'advice que j'ai, sur n'importe quelle ligne, je suis au milieu, C-w, ça fait le cut. Et donc ça m'arrive très souvent, si je veux supprimer, par exemple, ces trois lignes-là, alors je pourrais me remettre au début, puis sélectionner ma région, faire C-w. Ça ne me dérange pas que ça aille dans le presse-papier. Ou encore plus rapidement, je suis là-dessus et ces trois lignes qui ne m'intéressent plus, je fais C-w C-w C-w. Et les trois lignes ont disparu. C'est plus facile. C'est beaucoup plus rapide, c'est beaucoup plus facile. Le fait de pouvoir faire un copier ou un couper sans sélection. De nouveau, je reviens ici, je fais un M-w, et puis je vais là, C-y. Heureusement que j'ai Git, parce que là, je suis en train de casser mon fichier. Ce n'est pas grave parce que je vais faire un revert après. Mais bon, voilà, ça, c'est un truc extrêmement utile pour moi, ce C-w, M-w. Donc, j’ai mis un lien. Ceux qui veulent aller chercher les notes de cette présentation, j'ai mis un lien directement vers L'endroit, ça se trouve dans mon fichier de config Emacs qui est sur GitHub. Ça va ouvrir directement la section deletion and killing. Vous pourrez avoir le code. Ici, voilà le code qu'il faut copier si vous le voulez. Ça, c'est pour le cut. C'est un slick cut, ce que ça s'appelle. Et puis ici, pareil pour le copier. Donc le M-w, il faut copier ça. Et donc ça regarde, en fait, est-ce qu'il y a une région ou pas. Et s'il n'y a pas de région active, ça sélectionne la ligne courante. Sacha: J'adore ce genre de fonction, do what I mean. Fabrice: Oui, j'en ai plusieurs autres, mais exactement. 48:29 fill-paragraph Fabrice: Par exemple, un autre do what I mean, je l'ai pour le M-q. Imaginons ici que je vais rajouter... Tiens, j'ai des trucs dans le presse-papiers, je peux les mettre là. J'avais upcase, la region. Donc maintenant, si je veux remettre en forme le paragraphe, je vais faire metacue. Et en fait, imaginons par exemple que je veuille... En fait, ça, c'était un paragraphe qui pourrait être beaucoup plus long. Je vais faire loremipsum. J'ai un yasnippet qui va me faire un message un peu plus long. Et imaginons que je veuille remettre ça en une seule ligne, parce que je dois copier ça, par exemple, dans Outlook. Et dans Outlook, ce sera moche si j'ai des retours dans la ligne physique à chaque fois. Ou si je veux le copier dans WhatsApp, un message. Donc, ce que je vais faire, en fait, je vais faire M-q. Il va faire l'inverse, il va toggler. Donc, mon M-q à moi, il tog… Donc, la première fois, il fait un M-q normal et la deuxième fois, il passe à la version sur une seule ligne. Quand je refais M-q, je repasse en version multiligne. Une seule ligne, plusieurs lignes, une seule ligne, plusieurs lignes. Sacha: Donc, ça fait un toggle. Fabrice: Donc, ça regarde la dernière commande. Si la dernière commande est déjà le M-q, alors je refais le M-q, mais dans l’autre sens. 50:02 Les macros Fabrice: J'ai la même chose pour les macros. Maintenant, il y a F3 et F4 qui, depuis une dizaine d'années, ont été bindés pour les macros. J’utilisais Shift F8 pour définir une macro et F8 pour l'exécuter. Donc Shift F8. Imaginons que je veuille supprimer les deux premiers caractères de la ligne. Ça n'a aucun sens, mais c'est pour l'exemple. Je vais faire Shift F8. Voilà. Non, je me suis trompé. Shift F8. Et donc on voit Define Keyboard Macro. Je vais supprimer les deux premiers caractères. Je passe à une suivante. Et je refais Shift F8. Et parce que j'étais en mode définition de macro, il sait qu'il doit arrêter la macro. Et puis pour l'exécution, ce sera juste F8 tout seul. 51:02 Volatile highlight Fabrice: Un truc aussi extrêmement utile, je trouve, visuellement, c'est si je vais faire un undo, maintenant, les deux premières lignes de chaque phrase vont se remettre, de chaque ligne vont se remettre. Mais en fait, j'utilise Volatile Highlight qui va me montrer ce qui vient de changer. Quand je ne fais pas de mouvement dans le buffer, je vois qu'il vient de rajouter gr. Et si je refais undo, undo, undo, undo. Je vois chaque fois la modification qu'il a faite dans le buffer. Donc quand on fait des yanks, des copies, etc., des insertions ou des replays, on va voir, volatile-highlight va montrer juste comment j'ai déplacé mon caractère. Et ça, c'est très utile pour voir un peu visuellement qu'est-ce qui s'est passé. C'était la même chose avec mon metacue. Si je fais un undo, si je refais le metacue ici et que je fais un undo, voilà. On voit les insertions d'un retour en ligne à chaque fin de ligne. Il ne reste que quelques minutes. Je n'aurais pas le temps de montrer tout ce que j'ai imaginé. Je ne sais pas si vous avez des questions. Sinon, j'ai encore un truc que je voudrais montrer qui est assez utile. Et puis le reste vous pourrez lire. Prot: Oui, je crois que c'est OK. Pardon ? Oui, je crois que c'est OK pour toi de démontrer. Parce que si on a des questions, on peut voir le Elisp que tu as écrit. Fabrice: Tout à fait. Prot: Tout est public. 52:47 Les tableaux Org Fabrice: Un truc qui m'intéresse dans les fichiers Org, j'utilise beaucoup les tableaux. Par exemple, mes factures que je fais chaque mois. Je l'ai fait avec Org. J'ai un fichier qui ressemble à ça. Ici, j'ai mis dans le fichier de note de cette présentation, j'ai mis un petit exemple avec des personnes, des prix. Ici, on a un total de 2250 euros. Et ça, c'est un prix hors TVA. Ici, j'ai une autre table qui va appliquer la TVA. Elle reprend. Ici, j'ai un remote. Donc je vais chercher dans la carte participant, je vais chercher ce montant là. Et donc il vient se copier là tout seul. Et sur ce montant là, j'applique une TVA à 21%. Donc j'ai le montant, toutes charges comprises, donc avec la TVA. Et donc le truc que je trouve embêtant, par défaut, enfin qui m'embête moi, c'est que potentiellement, je vais dire en fait non, et si c'était pas 500, c'était 1500. Et je vais sauver mon buffer. Et en fait, c'est totalement incohérent maintenant, puisque la somme n'est plus correcte. Et en plus, un tableau qui se trouve ici juste derrière, mais qui pourrait se trouver totalement ailleurs dans le document, n'est plus du tout à jour non plus. Et si je fais un export, je vais publier un document qui sera totalement avec des fautes, en fait. Et donc, j'ai surchargé le Save Buffer dans le mode Org. Et dans le mode Org, quand ça fait Save Buffer, ça fait aussi le recalcul de toutes les tables dynamiques, le recalcul de tous les blocs dynamiques, pardon, le recalcul de toutes les tables et aussi le réalignement des tags. Par exemple, ici, je vais mettre un tag. Tout ça, vous verrez en même temps. Mon tag. Les tags, par défaut, sont alignés à 80 caractères. À la fin, ici, il y a une petite ligne grise. Je ne sais pas si vous la voyez bien. Elle est assez fine. Maintenant, quand je vais faire simplement save, chez moi, c'est F2, ça va calculer les montants. On va voir que ce montant-là va être changé, ce montant-là, celui-là et celui-là. Je vais faire save ici. Et mon tag a été réaligné aussi. 80 caractères, sauf qu'ici j'ai une présentation avec les deux chiffres, c'est pour ça qu'il y a un petit décalage. Donc de nouveau, si je mets 11500, C-x C-s, je suis sûr que mon document est correct. Je n'ai pas d'information incorrecte de table avec des erreurs, simplement parce que j'aurais oublié. Vous m'entendez encore ? Prot: Sacha, je ne peux pas t'écouter. Sacha: Je suis muette. 55:43 Les formations et les cours particuliers Sacha: Ma fille s'est réveillée, donc je veux consacrer du temps pour la publicité de ta formation avant qu'elle devenue grincheuse. Si c'est acceptable, dites-nous sur les formations en présentiel. Fabrice: Je fais effectivement des formations sur Emacs parce que je suis tellement passionné par cet outil et que je le trouve magnifique, je le trouve extrêmement puissant. que j'ai envie d'aider des gens à pouvoir s'en servir de la même manière que moi. Donc l'idée, c'est de montrer tout ce que j'utilise, un peu comme je le fais maintenant, mais ici, c'est avec quelques petits éléments à gauche, à droite. Et donc, j'aimerais bien en faire tout le temps, mais bon, j'ai fait pour l'instant déjà trois formations, deux à Paris, une à Rotterdam, et je compte en refaire une soit en Q4 d'RGSI, J'avais quelques notes, voilà. Soit en Q4 2026 ou alors probablement plutôt le Q1 2027, en refaire une autre à Paris, où l'idée, c'est en fait d'apprendre aux gens à utiliser Emacs et de montrer, comme je le fais un petit peu ici, montrer les packages que j'utilise et qu'est-ce qu'ils apportent, donc qu'est-ce qu'ils font de plus, qu'est-ce qu'ils permettent d'apporter plus, comme donc le keychords, le volatile-highlight. Les petites fonctions que j'ai écrites sur le recalcul des tables, par exemple sur Org, le M-w, C-w qui sélectionne la ligne d’office s'il n'y a pas de région, tout ça en fait, le but c'est de le montrer, de l'expliquer et que les gens puissent ou bien utiliser mon Emacs Leven tel quel et puis connaître tout ce qu'il y a dedans ou bien aller piquer des choses intéressantes qui sont dans ce fichier-là. Sacha: Est-ce que tu es aussi disponible pour les cours particuliers comme le coaching de Prot ? Tu offres aussi les cours particuliers ? Fabrice: Absolument, absolument. Je suis passionné par Emacs et donc effectivement, des cours particuliers, je suis aussi tout à fait disponible à le faire. C'est le même enthousiasme pour... En français et en anglais. En français, en anglais, en irlandais et en espagnol. Sacha: C'est très cool. Tu as un autre rendez-vous. J'ai un fil. Merci beaucoup à Fabrice et à Prot. Prot: Merci, merci Sacha et Fabrice. Fabrice: Merci à vous. Merci beaucoup pour cette invitation. J'espère que ça donnera quelques idées. Je suis disponible pour... Pour toute question supplémentaire ou pour toute info supplémentaire, voilà, un grand plaisir. Sacha: À la prochaine, je pense que nous devons à une autre conversation. Fabrice: Avec grand plaisir. À la prochaine. Merci beaucoup. Prot: Au revoir, au revoir, à bientôt. Fabrice: Merci, au revoir. View Org source for this post (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/08/13-aout-emacs-chat-fabrice-niessen/index.org) You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com (mailto:sacha@sachachua.com?subject=Comment%20on%20https%3A%2F%2Fsachachua.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F08%2F13-aout-emacs-chat-fabrice-niessen%2F&body=Name%20you%20want%20to%20be%20credited%20by%20(if%20any)%3A%20%0AMessage%3A%20%0ACan%20I%20share%20your%20comment%20so%20other%20people%20can%20learn%20from%20it%3F%20Yes%2FNo%0A).
6 Aug 2026
Emacs Chat 27: Richard Bonichon (en français)
Prot (https://protesilaos.com) et moi avons parlé en direct avec Richard Bonichon (https://rbonichon.github.io/non-posts/about/) (emacs.d (https://github.com/rbonichon/emacs.d/), GitHub (https://github.com/rbonichon)) d'Emacs, d'OCaml, de ses flux de travail, de sa configuration et d'autres sujets en français. J'ai raté le début de la diffusion en direct. Je suis vraiment désolée ! Heureusement, j'ai enregistré toute la conversation localement. Voici la vidéo complète : Watch on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxqsIgXYkVw) J'ai essayé de corriger la transcription (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#ID-emacs-chat-27-transcript) (voici le fichier VTT (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/08/6-aout-emacs-chat-richard-bonichon/emacs-chat-27-richard-bonichon-en-fran%C3%A7ais.vtt)), mais je crois qu'il y a encore beaucoup d'erreurs, donc n'hésitez pas à m'envoyer un message. Merci beaucoup à Richard, à Prot, et à tous les auditeurs ! À la semaine prochaine pour le 13 août : Emacs Chat avec Fabrice Niessen (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/08/13-aout-emacs-chat-fabrice-niessen/) ! La transcription un peu corrigée (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chat-avec-richard-bonichon-en-fran-ais-la-transcription-un-peu-corrig-e) Chat (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chat-avec-richard-bonichon-en-fran-ais-chat) Si vous voulez parler d'Emacs avec Prot et moi (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/07/voulez-vous-parler-d-emacs-avec-prot-et-moi/) en français, n'hésitez pas à me contacter! La transcription un peu corrigée (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chat-avec-richard-bonichon-en-fran-ais-la-transcription-un-peu-corrig-e) Details Chat (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chat-avec-richard-bonichon-en-fran-ais-chat) sachactube: J'ai totalement oublié de commencer la diffusion en direct ! Je vais publier l'enregstrement. alainlamourec6332: ca rigole syshYarak: bonjour j'ai une petite question pour vous j'ai deja travaillé pour emacs , avec la version préconfigurés spacemacs , orgmod etc ….. je préfère édité avec vim juste pour ne pas utiliser la souris, syshYarak: ma question c'est la suivante, je pense que c'est une rabbit hole au lieu de focaliser sur les choses les plus importantes, au lieu de créer des projets etc on se concentre sur les dotfiles etc ….. phyzixlab: Sacre bleu protesilaos: Salut les gens! alainlamourec6332: Salut Prot JonKishore11: Vous ne connaissez pas l'anglais ? sachactubeC'est: en français aujourd'hui, pour le pratiquer ! =) 8:28 AM@syshYarak mr si tu veux sauver un ancien utilisateur d'emacs on me proposant un M2 ou une thèse , car je suis ingénieur au Maroc , prot je ne t'ai pas reconnu t'avais de Long cheveux, protesilaos: Oui, maintenant mes cheveux sont courts. C'est une catastrophe, haha! syshYarak: j'avais l'habitude de suivre tes cours de politique européenne prot. from emacs to politics syshYarak: lisp programmation fonctionnel ? ahyassoui: c'est du fonctionnel 8:42 AM@ahyass dans mon école d'ingé tout le monde utilise vim/neovim, emacs est considérer comme sauvage un peu ahyass: j'ai plus d'amis qui utilisent helix que emacs, même zed est plus populaire j'ai l'impression syshYarak: Gestionnaire de fenêtres genre i3wn ou …? ahyass: niri est d'après mon expérience le meilleur window manager protesilaos: moi j'utilise herbstluftwm syshYarak: i3wm on Windows et zellij come Terminal session manager au lieu de tmux , et glazewm dans ma windows machine syshYarak: j'essaie de laisser les choses simples, car l'optimisation prématuré et la source des pbs. syshYarak: next step learning french with emacs , en intégrant des algorithmes de répétition espacé protesilaos: en ce sujet là, il y a un paquet nouveau qui s'appelle "srs.el" protesilaos: je croix que "package" est "paquet", mais je ne suis pas sur syshYarak: oui c'est ça prot , de toute façon je t'ai compris t'inquiète syshYarak: j'ai une petite remarque est ce que vous êtes averti qu'on peut utiliser emacs vim etc avec termux dans votre poche avec le SMARTPHONE et synchroniser votre travail avec synchthing??? syshYarak: non , la confite en elle même tu peux la synchroniser et compilé sur termux , syshYarak: non mais plus tôt une intégration d'ai au niveau du kernel pour ce qui est tout tâche, en ce qui concerne ce que vous voulez spécifiquement pour vous , un entraînement SUBJECTIVE de chaque individu syshYarak: sera envisageable pour réduire les erreurs pour chaque personne pour reprendre au prof View Org source for this post (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/08/6-aout-emacs-chat-richard-bonichon/index.org) You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com (mailto:sacha@sachachua.com?subject=Comment%20on%20https%3A%2F%2Fsachachua.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F08%2F6-aout-emacs-chat-richard-bonichon%2F&body=Name%20you%20want%20to%20be%20credited%20by%20(if%20any)%3A%20%0AMessage%3A%20%0ACan%20I%20share%20your%20comment%20so%20other%20people%20can%20learn%20from%20it%3F%20Yes%2FNo%0A).
29 May 2026
Emacs Chat 24: Omar Antolin Camarena
[2026-05-31 Sun]: Updated transcript and added a link to Karthik's notes (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/karthik-s-notes-on-emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena/). I chatted with Omar Antolín Camarena about Emacs, keyboard macros, temporary buffers, Embark, and other workflow tips. Video not supported. Thumbnail: View in the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena/), read the transcript online (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#ID-emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-transcript), watch or comment on YouTube (https://youtube.com/live/M7-dJb2GTN4), download the audio (https://archive.org/download/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena.mp3) or the transcript (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena.vtt), or e-mail me (mailto:sacha@sachachua.com). Related links: Omar Antolín Camarena (https://www.matem.unam.mx/~omar/): a researcher at Instituto de Matemáticas, UNAM in Mexico City M-x apropos Emacs (https://www.matem.unam.mx/~omar/apropos-emacs.html) oantolin/emacs-config: My personal Emacs configuration · GitHub (https://github.com/oantolin/emacs-config) oantolin/placeholder: Emacs package to treat any buffer as a template with placeholders to fill-in · GitHub (https://github.com/oantolin/placeholder) oantolin (Omar Antolín Camarena) · GitHub (https://github.com/oantolin) Omar Antolín (@oantolin@mathstodon.xyz) - Mathstodon (https://mathstodon.xyz/@oantolin) u/oantolin on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/user/oantolin/) #Emacs #Embark with Omar Antolin, Ramin Honary and Kent Pitman #lisp and more #interview #lispyGopherClimate - toobnix (https://toobnix.org/w/752ix2RNx5BijosuYtSGCv) Karthik's notes on Emacs Chat 24: Omar Antolin Camarena (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/karthik-s-notes-on-emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena/) You can add the iCal for upcoming Emacs Chat episodes to your calendar. https://sachachua.com/topic/emacs-chat/upcoming-emacs-chats.ics (https://sachachua.com/topic/emacs-chat/upcoming-emacs-chats.ics) Find more Emacs Chats or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat (https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat) Chapters (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chats-emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-chapters) 0:00 Ignore this part 0:18 Opening 0:46 How did you get into Emacs in the first place? 6:01 Repeating edits 7:28 dot-mode: repeating commands 9:24 block-undo: undo things as a chunk 10:29 Starting and stopping keyboard macros 12:15 Keycast and Embark 13:33 apply-macro-to-lines-of-paragraph 16:34 embark-on-last-message 18:06 tmp-buffer with a major mode 19:26 placeholder 20:38 enable-recursive-minibuffers 22:57 Overriding embark-select 23:32 quick-calc 26:30 Multiple cursors 27:40 Block-undo and regular undo 28:53 Cycling through Embark targets 31:39 Imenu for navigation 32:51 Collaboration 38:01 Technology adoption and Emacs packages 40:06 Personal packages and naming conventions 42:26 find-file-at-point and directory names 43:49 The value of using Emacs’s APIs 44:56 org-ql and usual files 47:06 Shortcuts for org-ql search syntax 47:43 Org TODO states: TODO, WAIT, DONE, NOPE 48:26 The inserter macro 50:05 luggage: generative art experiments 53:49 Teaching and Emacs 54:53 The print10 generator 56:23 arXiv 58:29 Toggle keymap 1:00:54 isearch-delete-wrong 1:03:14 isearch - continue from the beginning of the match 1:05:12 Using keymaps to remember sets of commands 1:06:04 Other things from the config Transcript (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chats-emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-transcript) Expand this to see the transcript and screenshots 0:00 Ignore this part Sacha: Cut off at, you know, roughly an hour and seven minutes from now. She's going to come out and have lunch. Okay. All right. Going live. Alright folks, we are here a little bit early. 0:18 Opening Sacha: This is Emacs Chat 24 with Omar Antolin Camarena, whom we know from Embark and Orderless and a lot of other little packages that I personally use on a daily basis. I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. Omar: Yeah, so am I. Very excited. Sacha: Of course, before we dive into all these lovely details, tell us a little bit more about your context. You're a researcher at the Mathematics Institute. I can see why Emacs would be a great fit for that. 0:46 How did you get into Emacs in the first place? Sacha: How did you get into Emacs in the first place? Omar: I think it's just by virtue of being old. When I started out looking for a text editor, there were not that many great options. When I was a teenager, 30 years ago, I decided to install Linux because I heard about it. That was the era where you went to a newsstand and you bought a Linux magazine that came with a CD, and I installed Linux from that. I think it was Slackware, maybe. I was already a hobby computer programmer. I've been learning programming languages since I was a child, when my father gave me my first computer. I think that was the main reason I switched to Linux. I noticed that people wrote many more interpreters and compilers for Linux than for Windows. That's why I wanted to use Linux. I needed a text editor that handled all sorts of weird programming languages. I was looking for a general purpose one, not an IDE. I used IDEs, younger ones, like Turbo Pascal. Probably that was the main one. I loved that. It was great. I went through the Linux distro, tried a bunch of editors. I settled on Emacs and Emacs-like editors. I tried Jove, which stands for Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs. And there was also an editor called... Oh, I forget. There was one that had its own extension language called S-Lang. I used that for a while. A little later, I remember using Slava Pestov's jEdit. I really like that, too, although Java is not that fun to write extensions in. I was looking for an editor and I wanted it to be extensible, which is funny because I hardly ever extend it. I just wanted there to be the option. I used Emacs for a long time. But when I got serious at being efficient at text-editing, I actually switched to Vim. I switched back to Emacs many years later because of one very specific problem in Vim. The syntax highlighting for LaTeX files is pretty slow. On a normal computer, you won't notice that it's slow. But I had a little netbook that was like 10 years old when I had it. I took it to class to take notes in math courses. I was writing in LaTeX Live with a bunch of macros to insert things. The syntax highlighting meant that Vim lagged behind my typing. I'm not that fast of a typist, so it was problematic. The Vim manual has an entire section on what to do if text highlighting is slow. You can look for it with Vim :help tex-slow That pops up the right section of the manual. I tried everything that it said there and they all made it slightly faster, but none of them really solved the lag, other than turning off syntax highlighting. I turned off syntax highlighting and took notes for like half a semester, and then I decided to try Emacs on that old netbook. Its syntax highlighting was perfectly snappy. This is just a weird thing in Vim that specifically LaTeX syntax highlighting is slow. I never noticed it being slow in any other... I don't know what Vim calls them, what Emacs would call a major mode. It was only ever slow in LaTeX, but that was enough to get me to try Emacs. But by then in Vim, I had learned that you want very granular motion commands to move by word or by sentence, and you want to be able to be placed at the end of the word or at the beginning of the word. All of these higher-level editing constructs that Vim really pushes you toward. In Emacs, I hadn't done any of that before. I moved around with the arrow keys. But when I came back to Emacs after having been in Vim, then I wanted to get serious about editing efficiently in Emacs. I think I actually like it better than Vim now. But yeah, that's why I switched back to Emacs. It's just this quirk that LaTeX syntax highlighting is slow in Vim. Sacha: Well, their loss. So you tried a whole bunch of other editors. You got into Vim because you wanted to be more efficient. Getting deeply into Vim was great, but you ran into that bug. So you switched to Emacs because it was more efficient, more performant. All that experience with Vim has made you a better Emacs user because now you're like, okay, you appreciate all the navigation and movement. And you were telling me over email... Omar: Things I missed from Vim. Sacha: Yeah, You were telling me over email how the kind of the keyboard macros that you got used to in Vim, you've translated some of that over to Emacs and how you use them. We definitely want to get into that. Omar: Keyboard macro-like things. In Emacs, for a while, I used multiple-cursors. I liked it a lot. 6:01 Repeating edits Omar: One thing I really missed from Vim is the dot command that repeats the last edit. But in Vim, edits are composite things. You have a command to change a sentence, for example. That will delete the current sentence, put you into insert mode, let you type a new sentence, and when you press escape, that concludes the edit. The whole edit is the operation of deleting the current sentence and replacing it with the specific thing you typed. That is a thing you can repeat. The repeatable edit commands in Vim are much coarser and more conceptually appropriate units than in Emacs. The repeat command repeats the last Emacs command, but everything runs a command in Emacs. You can repeat inserting the last character. That's not very useful. You want to repeat at least the whole consecutive stretch of characters you inserted. Undo in Emacs does do that. Undo coalesces. If you type a bunch of characters and you undo, it doesn't undo them one by one. It undoes them. It clumps them depending on pauses between your typing. That's fine. I want that sort of coarseness. I don't want to undo every single step at a time. Similarly, when you repeat things, you don't want to repeat every single step. I think Vim has like a pretty good unit of things you can repeat. I was missing that in Emacs. 7:28 dot-mode: repeating commands Omar: There's a package called dot-mode which I used to use and I like a lot. I'm not exactly sure why I stopped using it. So this gives you a more Vim-like experience for repeating commands in Emacs and what it does is that it watches you as you type and it constantly makes a keyboard macro out of the last consecutive stretch of buffer modifying commands. So, for example, in Vim, if you want to change a word, there is a change word command, and you type c w, and then you change the word, and then that thing gets repeated. In Emacs, to change a word, it's not a single unit, right? You delete the word, and then you type in something new, and each character you type is running insert-char. dot-mode will coalesce all of that into a single keyboard macro that you can repeat, right? If you do some motion command that doesn't modify the buffer, and then you delete a word and type a new word, everything from the deletion to the end of the typing would be what dot mode repeats. The experience is actually very similar to using dot in Vim. In my opinion, a little bit better, because in Vim, I often had this problem. It gets you into this competitive video game mentality. How do I do the edit in a single repeatable command? I want to be able to use dot to do this again. So that you have to think ahead. It's kind of distracting. Of course, if a sensible person would not get caught up in that, it would just... do the edit whichever way they can, but I wanted to maximize the repeatability. dot-mode lets you be a little bit more relaxed. It still catches all of the thing that should have been a single edit. So yeah, I like it a lot. Sacha: So that's dot-mode. 9:24 block-undo: undo things as a chunk (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-01-06-05-633.jpg)Sacha: You also mentioned block-undo. Omar: That is a package of mine I can show you. That's the entire package. It just uses this with-undo-amalgamate command. Whatever you run inside with-undo-amalgamate undoes in a single step. I use it for executions of keyboard macros. A keyboard macro, if you run it all over the place, if you apply it to every line in a region, or you just repeat it a hundred times, that is a lot of tiny individual edits. If you undo that, you do not want to undo them one by one. This just makes them all undo in a single step, which is what Vim does, actually. This is one of the things that I said, no, Vim has this right. I need this in Emacs. Sacha: Okay, that makes sense. So dot-mode is more like implicit keyboard macro boundary definitions. This one is like the undo-ness of it. 10:29 Starting and stopping keyboard macros (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-11-29-533.jpg)Sacha: I saw in your config, you also have more convenient shortcuts for starting and stopping keyboard macros. It's like a modifier and the keystroke instead of two or like function keys, which are further away. I'm guessing you use keyboard macros a lot. Omar: Yeah, I do. When I got rid of dot-mode, it was an experiment to see if I could just remember to record keyboard macros. The thing that the dot-mode or the dot command in Vim solves is that you don't always have the foresight to record a keyboard macro. Sometimes you realize, oh, I need to do the same at some other places, but you didn't record it ahead of time. Then you wind up doing it once, realizing you need to do it a bunch of times, then recording the macro, then doing it again. I wanted to see if I could remember to record macros. I decided that I needed to make it as as frictionless as possible. This is the command that is bound by default to F3. I like it better than the thing that's bound to C-x ( because this kmacro-start-macro-or-insert-counter does both things. It could start a recording, or if you are recording, it will insert the keyboard macro counter. Sacha: For folks who are like, what? Macros? Counters? Yes, you can have your keyboard macro automatically add one to a number, for example. There you go. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-12-10-867.jpg)Sacha: Hello, hello, hello. 12:15 Keycast and Embark (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-16-44-033.jpg)Omar: I also activated keycast. I hope people can follow along. I have some small modifications to make embark transparent to keycast. If I use embark, you see embark-act, but then you also see what command I call. Sacha: I just stole that from your config. I wasn't entirely sure if I was using it correctly, but it definitely looked like something interesting and useful. Omar: If you don't use that change, then keycast doesn't see through embark and you don't get which actions you called. Sacha: Yeah, the opacity of some of these kind of key binding niceties... they hide a lot of stuff from the standard Emacs ways of doing things. That's one of the criticisms of transient and other tools. I'm glad that you're finding these ways to make these packages work well with other packages. Omar: I think this was by request. Somebody requested it. Maybe it was Prot. It's definitely a good idea. The code for that is on the Embark Wiki as well. 13:33 apply-macro-to-lines-of-paragraph Sacha: The other thing that I wanted to point out that you make a convenient keyboard shortcut for in terms of keyboard macros is apply-macro-to-lines-of-paragraph, which I personally had not been using until I saw your config. And I was like, that is a thing. Omar: Yeah. Well, that's a command that I wrote. It’s a wrapper around apply-macro-to-region-lines, but it automatically uses the paragraph. That way you don't need to select it. I find that extremely convenient. What would be a good example of that? You want to wrap something. What should I do as an example of this? For some reason, I needed to convert these things to, say, unwrap the parentheses and turn them into an Org Mode table. Sacha: Yeah, that makes sense. Omar: I just apply it to the rest of the paragraph. Sacha: Magic. That's great, because I would normally just start executing the macro and hope I remember to stop at the end, but then I overshoot, and then I have to undo, j and then it's a mess. Omar: Or you could select the paragraph and then just use the built-in apply-macro-to-lines-in-region. Sacha: Yes, yes, that's a possibility. Omar: It just saves you the step of marking the paragraph. I found that I most often when I used apply macro to lines in region, the region was exactly a paragraph. So I figured like there's no point in... Sacha: All right, all right. Omar: It's undone in a single step. Like the application. The thing I recorded as a macro, that is not coalesced. Yes, of course. Sacha: Because that's the actual recording of it. Charlie Baker in the chat says, "Definitely going to add the keycast transparency to my config. I've been wanting that for a while." These little demos of like, oh, this is what this thing in your config does. It's very helpful for people to be able to see its awesomeness. Omar: Where is that? Sacha: One of the other interesting things you mentioned was your placeholder package. I can see how the keyword macros help you with text that's already there. Then you've got these placeholders for informal snippets or quick snippets. Show us that. You use it a lot. Omar: Yeah, I do. Oh, that tmp-buffer is a command I have for popping up temporary buffers in specific major modes. Maybe I can quickly show that first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's see. Oh, yeah. So let me... 16:34 embark-on-last-message Omar: There I used another little command I have. embark-on-last-message It just calls Embark on the last thing in the messages buffer. Often I want to act on the thing that is the last word in the echo area, so that's what this does. Sacha: Okay. Omar: The last thing in the echo area was this symbol embark-on-last-message so I can act on it directly. Sacha: Which is brilliant because I keep switching to the messages buffer to try to copy something, and by the time I switch, sometimes there are other messages, so it's great to just be able to do something. Omar: If there are other messages, then I also switch to the messages buffer, but if I want to act on the very last thing, I have that command for it. Sacha: Yeah. I'm saying this is faster, so I get the chance of just hitting the shortcut before another timer goes in and messes around with my messages. So yes, shortcuts. Okay, temp buffer. Tell us about that. Omar: You can configure single... Wait, where am I? Transcribing job. I ran Whisper by accident. Sacha: Which is another thing I wanted to check. Many things I want to talk to you about… Omar: The idea of using Whisper, I stole from you using it to dictate. I thought, oh, this looks convenient if the model is good. I tried it and it is very good. 18:06 tmp-buffer with a major mode (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-18-10-233.jpg)Sacha: Temp buffer. Omar: Different major modes. It has a customizable list of bindings for specific major modes. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-18-19-533.jpg)Omar: It also has an option to just prompt you for a major mode. It pops up a temp buffer in whatever major mode you chose. I use it all the time to make new scratch buffers. Sacha: Yeah, I can see that's useful. I switch to a buffer that's got a name that doesn't exist yet, and then I have to press more keys to get to the major mode. Omar: But if you're doing certain things, just type random letters to make a new buffer, this is much better. They might as well all be called temp. Sacha: Do you reuse the buffers, or it's always just the one buffer? Omar: New buffer, then I kill it. Sacha: Very temporary. Gotcha. Omar: By the way, kill-current-buffer doesn’t have a default key binding. I don't understand why not. OK. I bind it to C-c C-k, which normally, I think, is kill-buffer, but why would you want to kill a buffer that's not the one you're looking at? Wait, what was I going to show you? Sacha: You were going to show me placeholders. Omar: Right. 19:26 placeholder (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-19-42-100.jpg)Omar: I often need to send several similar email messages. I'm going to invite you on some day of some month to give a talk, etc. That's the body of an email. I'll write it once. Here I’m using placeholder-insert to insert this symbol. It appears in green, but it doesn't matter. It's just text. You could type that symbol yourself. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-20-05-633.jpg)Omar: Then the placeholder-next and -previous commands will cycle among those and let you fill each one in. You don't have to fill it in right now. If you repeat the command, it restores the placeholder and moves you to the next location. Sacha: That's one of the things I liked about the implementation compared to yasnippet, because yasnippet, you’ve got to actually remember to fill in the fields before you move on to something else. If you get out of it, you can't tab to the next field. The placeholders will let you go and come back and look up some information and put that in and so forth. 20:38 enable-recursive-minibuffers Omar: Yeah, there's lots of things I loved about Vim, but one thing I grew to strongly dislike is modal computer programs. Not just modal editing, modal anything. I don't like being forced to finish what I started. I want to be able to get distracted and go off and do something else. For example, in Emacs, I very much dislike the default value of enable-recursive-minibuffers. The default value is nil. They don't let you use the minibuffer if you're already using the minibuffer. Emacs is supposed to be about freedom. Why is that the default value? So I set it to t, which is more sensible. That way you're not stuck in the minibuffer. Sacha: Actually, one of the things that I've been trying to figure out is when I'm in a minibuffer, sometimes I want to use Embark to insert something into the minibuffer, but then I end up inserting it into the buffer buffer. Omar: Yeah, there's no... Embark doesn't have any solution to that problem. It doesn't always do that. It does that if you're in the minibuffer in a completion session. If you're in the minibuffer in a non-completion session, then it acts as a regular buffer. So if you're in eval and here you had... You can use embark-insert in the usual way to duplicate stuff. Sacha: I have a workaround. I just use kill. I copy the text instead of inserting it and that works out fine. Omar: Yeah, I do too. The behavior of inserting into the previous buffer is so useful that I don't think I would want to change that. But yeah, it is unfortunate that for that specific instance, you can't use insert. Sacha: I appreciate that Embark allows us to have all of these key bindings that we can do stuff with. I noticed in your config, in addition to Embark, you also modify a lot of the standard key maps to add other shortcuts to rebind things that make sense to you. Key bindings are something that a lot of people struggle with, trying to figure out more places to put more shortcuts that make sense. What are the key shortcuts that work really well for you? 22:57 Overriding embark-select (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-23-18-367.jpg)Omar: One thing I don't like about the default Embark configuration is that SPC is used for embark-select, which marks a target for later use. I hardly ever use embark-select, so I would rather SPCbe for marking the region, which is something I do pretty often, and have embark-select on C-SPC, which is not a command I use very often. I swapped those. I think most of this is just adding new actions that feel specific to me. 23:32 quick-calc (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-24-05-733.jpg)Omar: quick-calc is the thing usually found to C-x *… calc-dispatch is the command. It’s C-x * q. That’s quick-calc. It's useful as an Embark action. If you have an expression and you... Wait, what am I doing wrong? I forgot what my binding to mark what Vim calls a word in capital letters, which means a consecutive stretch of non-space characters... If you mark this, I can act on it with =, get the result. Sacha: And specifically this embark-region-map is what you can add in the selected region. Incidentally, I've been playing around with using the Selected package for this because it also gives you the key map. Omar: Yeah, yeah. I love the Selected package and recommend it often. I don't use it myself just because the only thing it would save me is calling embark-act, because the commands I would put in the selected key map are exactly the commands I have in the embark-region-map. For me, Selected would only save me one keystroke, which is Embark Act, so I don't feel it's worth it, but it's a great idea. For example, I do use the rectangle keymap. Yes. So they're the only difference. It's equally good an idea as Selected is. The only difference is that the rectangle keymap comes with Emacs and Selected is an external package. I decided it's not worth installing an external package when I could just use Embark Act, which I do have to use because otherwise I won't understand people's bug reports. But the rectangle mode there, that one is built in, so I just found a bunch of useful stuff in it. Sacha: Yeah, and I noticed you have also like you have a narrow-to-point so that you can use your rectangle commands to yank something into it, so I get the sense that you use rectangles a fair bit. Omar: You've really read my configuration very carefully. This narrow-to-point is subtle. I am very impressed that you figured out the reason for it. Sacha: I started digging through narrow-extras because I saw your narrow-or-widen-dwim and I said, yes, I need that in my life. Omar: I don't think... I took it from somebody. Endless Parentheses, probably. The issue with narrow-to-point, the reason you need it, is that if you insert a rectangle somewhere, try to insert it in a blank line, and it'll overlap with what was after it. But if you first narrow to the point and then insert the rectangle and then widen again, it gets its own blank lines. That's the reason I have it. 26:30 Multiple cursors Sacha: @zor_org asks, was there a time you wanted multiple cursors? Have you ever been tempted? Omar: Multiple cursors. I think it gave me a false sense of security which is why I experimented not using it and then the experiment just never stopped. The thing with multiple cursors... Multiple cursors are more interactive than keyboard macros, because if you can see several cursors on the screen, you can visually make sure that what you're doing does apply correctly at each of those locations. But then I started noticing that that made me feel very confident I was doing things the right way in multiple cursors, but there were some cursors offscreen where I wasn't paying attention to what was happening there, and then I got it wrong and was more confused. Just psychologically, a keyboard macro, since I know I don't see the other places where I'm going to run it, I'm more careful when I record the keyboard macro. It's a psychological trick I'm playing on myself. By using keyboard macros instead of multiple cursors, I force myself to pay more attention to what I'm doing. 27:40 Block-undo and regular undo Sacha: Does the block undo still let you select a region in order to undo just the part that was within it, in case you notice offscreen that it's done something bad in just these entries? Omar: Yeah, that's completely independent. That built-in Emacs behavior is not affected by undo boundaries. Sacha: Wait, is it? Omar: If it overlaps with part of... I don't know. Sorry, sorry. I don't know. So if I have a big change that I amalgamated into a single undo, and then I pick a region that overlaps partially with that but not completely, what would undo and region do? I don't know. I think it... I'm just guessing. I would just think that it sees that the affected region by the big block undo is not completely contained in the region and then it doesn't undo it. Sacha: Okay, so I'm just going to conclude that you do not make mistakes with your keyboard macros. Omar: I can easily undo them instead of having to keep running on undo. So it's not that I don't make mistakes, but that I try to fix them right after running the keyboard macro. Sacha: All right, all right. I had another question. 28:53 Cycling through Embark targets Sacha: Ou've got a lot of different Embark maps and you've got a lot of different Embark targets. How do you handle going through the different ones that are at the point? At the moment, I've got the label at the top and I just flip through it. I know sometimes I need to hit it twice or sometimes I need to hit embark-act three times for this kind of thing. How do you distinguish between lots of them when you're just going through it? Omar: I think that's the poorest part of the user experience with Embark Act currently. I don't really like it, but I don't have a good alternative. A lot of people like expand-region and I don’t like it because I feel like I have to hammer it off. I prefer to have a lot of… This is another thing I learned from Vim: have a lot of commands to mark specific things and just memorize all of them. But expand-region says, no, don’t memorize that. Just hammer on expand-region until you get the thing you want. Ffor me, even though it's objectively fast, it just feels very slow. It feels like I have to hit it four times whenever I want to mark something. I get the same feeling from cycling in embark-act. I don't really like it. But if we had come up with a better alternative, and I say we because I discussed this in the GitHub issues with with Daniel Mendler and Prot, and I think @hmelman was also in those discussions, and maybe Clemens Radermacher? I just couldn't come up with a much better alternative, so I put up with it. I don't need to cycle that much. I almost always want to act on the first target. Which is unfair, because I decided what the first target is in the default configuration, so it's sort of tuned so that I hardly ever need to cycle. I apologize if it means other people need to cycle a lot. Sacha: Nonsense. We can all modify our target list, so we can always tune it to what we want. Omar: I mean, it's a lot of work, right? I think the default Embark configuration is over half of the source code of Embark. The configuration is... Where does that start? Oh, I wish the autoload cookies were not in the outline. Sacha: If you do a space, oh, I guess it doesn't do that, right? Omar: Oh, yeah. For orderless, I use the escapable spaces, so I can do that. 31:39 Imenu for navigation Sacha: I should also point out that your config uses a lot of imenu also, which was another interesting thing I picked up. Omar: Yeah, I like imenu, yeah. I should add imenu for this. One thing I did to imenu is I added a section for key maps. Sacha: I saw that. You have a regular expression so you can see it easily. Omar: Right. It's not half, but a big chunk of Embark is just the default configuration. It would be a lot of work to configure Embark from scratch. That's why the package comes with an extensive default configuration. Sacha: Charlie Baker says, “I have embark-act set up to expand in the same way expand-region does, but with Embark’s type awareness, it's easy to add a contract function.” I guess maybe also some highlighting helps with that. Charlie also says, “I also have a completing read interface in the transient menu to jump directly to one of the many types under point that I'm seeking.” Charlie, you're going to share somewhere so I can steal that part of your config, right? Omar: I mean, that would be something I would consider adding to Embark itself. 32:51 Collaboration Sacha: You mentioned having all these conversations with Daniel and others through GitHub and other things. I wanted to touch on that because I think in the Emacs community, it's pretty rare to find people who are collaborating on packages and packages that work so well together. The partnership between your packages and Daniel Mendler or Minad's packages with Consult and Vertico and Marginalia is really nice. We don't see a lot of examples of that kind of inter-packaged conversation as much. How did that start? Omar: I think it was mostly Daniel's initiative. I had started work on Orderless and Embark. I think his first package was Consult, maybe, of this family of packages. I remember Embark was a pretty sad shape when Daniel started raising issues on the Github. He really lit a fire under me to improve Embark. It started with him complaining about things in Embark, and I immediately realized that he was thinking very carefully about the user experience, so I thought he is full of good ideas and I should listen to them. Back then at the start of Embark and Orderless, Prot was also very involved in discussing the design. All of this is on GitHub issues. Some software archaeologists can find all of it. So I think we started working together when we realized we were both writing Marginalia, so we decided to merge those two packages into a single one. I think maybe the name Marginalia was suggested by Prot, I don't remember, but it's a very good name. The collaboration was completely unplanned. We just did it because we had already talked on the Embark issues and Daniel's suggestions improved Embark a great deal in a short amount of time. So then when we both realized we were writing something like Marginalia, we decided to just merge those two packages and write a single one. Since that worked out well, we kept on collaborating. So far, we haven't co-written any other package. One thing like that is that now Daniel is a co-maintainer of Orderless, which is great because Daniel is extremely efficient at fixing bugs. He does it instantly. He figures out what's wrong and has a patch in a few minutes after he looks at the issue. He looks at the issue the day it was posted or the day after. I can't do things that quickly. It's great that he's helping out with orderless. It wasn't planned. It just felt right from the very beginning. I immediately realized he had some great ideas and implemented a lot of them. Then we started doing that the other way around. I started commenting on a bunch of issues in Consult and Vertico. I think I exerted some pressure on Daniel to add features to Vertico, like the grid view and the horizontal view. Or maybe specifically the grid view, because at the time I was... I'm sort of slow to switch basic Emacs infrastructure. I wasn't using Vertico for a long time, even though I was like opining on the Github issues for Vertico, and the reason was that I was stuck with the vastly inferior embark-live. There was this embark-live thing where you could pop up a buffer with the targets in the minibuffer, which just means a completion candidate. So you could use Embark as a kind of completion user interface. It was very slow, but it was very featureful. You could do a vertical list. You could do a grid. In the list, you could activate zebra stripes. Yeah, you can see that's been removed from Embark. But I kept saying to Daniel, I'll switch to Vertico if you add a grid view. He eventually did add the grid view. I kept my word and switched to Vertico, which is much better than the thing in Embark. I was just being stubborn by not switching earlier. But if I had switched earlier, maybe Vertico wouldn't have a grid view. Sacha: I think it's definitely a good example of a set of packages that has... So all this started in about 2020s or so. So we actually can see how people have gotten into using Vertico and all the other packages compared to, say, looking at more popular packages that have been around for a long time. "Of course everyone's been using Org Mode for a long time." It's there. It's part of the fabric. 38:01 Technology adoption and Emacs packages Sacha: It's very interesting to see the technology adoption around it. A lot of the things that people struggle with as package authors is getting other people to try out their stuff. With Orderless and Embark probably in the early days, what was that like to put this thing out there in the world and have people start to try it? How did people find it? Omar: I personally found it very scary. At the beginning, I still thought Embark was a part of my personal Emacs configuration that sort of grew out of control and I decided to publish separately. But then I have all these people telling me how to improve what I still thought of as part of my personal configuration. I think one thing that helped was that people made very good suggestions. So I realized, no, no, it's worth publishing reusable parts of your configuration just for the GitHub issues, just for people finding bugs and suggesting improvements and so on. But yeah, I had to adjust to having some users. At first, it was very few people. But then they got added to Doom. I think they were made the default in Doom. That was a huge influx of users. That was very scary. We were suddenly flooded with new bug reports, like all of the packages in the family. I remember feeling like there's a horde of Doom users running at us. Sacha: All right. So, starter kit, then everybody gets into it, and then everybody starts talking about it because they're like, yeah, you know, it's great. You can specify things out of order. You don't have to remember what words come in, which order when you're completing things. Those of us who aren't on starter kits are like, yes, we should try that too. That's how it's done. Omar: Doom helped a lot to raise awareness and adoption. 40:06 Personal packages and naming conventions Sacha: You've got a lot of other small packages. For something as small as block-undo, which you showed us, it really just fits in one screen. Is that something that you would set up as a different repository or just as a file within your current one? Omar: No, those are all in my user-lisp directory. Sacha: I have actually successfully used use package to grab stuff out of your user-lisp directory and use them in my config. Yeah, it works. I just say, all right, my load path is here where I've checked out your source code. It defines these commands. Then I can bind your functions to my shortcuts. Although, because your functions are named the way that I would expect Emacs functions to be named, I've been defaliasing them so that I don't accidentally say, oh yeah, that's totally built in when it isn't. Omar: Yeah, I'm inconsistent with these little packages in my user-lisp directory. In some of them, I do stick to the convention that the package name is a prefix for all the functions, and for some, I don't. For some, I just try to name them the way exactly what you said. Like, what would these be called if they were built into Emacs? Which means they don't share a consistent prefix often. I should probably make that more consistently use the package name as a prefix so that they're easier to dot. Sacha: Or I have another suggestion. You could get apply-kmacro-to-paragraph or whatever that is into core Emacs. That would be great for everyone. Omar: Yeah, maybe that one is useful enough. Some of these I don't use anymore because I think I've substituted them with workflows with Embark. For example, eval-region-advice. It bothered me that none of the evaluate commands are “do what you mean” in the most common sense in Emacs. The most common sense of do what I mean in Emacs is if the region is active, use the region. Otherwise, do the normal thing. All of the evaluate commands should evaluate the region if the region is active. So that's what this does. But I don't use that anymore, because to evaluate a region, I usually use embark-act e. What else is here? 42:26 find-file-at-point and directory names (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-43-06-133.jpg)Omar: Oh, some of these things are like tiny things that are almost invisible, like this. In Eshell buffers, By default, find-file-at-point doesn’t realize that if it sees the filename printed in an eshell buffer, it won't look at the prompt to figure out what directory it came from. If you type ls and you're in your current working directory, all of those listed files, the find-file-at-point guesses that they are files in the default directory, and that guess is correct. But if, further above, you had gone into a different directory, called ls there, then those files are no longer in what is now the default directory. So this just adds a little bit of smarts to find-file-at-point. It looks at the prior prompt to see what directory that was run in, and then tries to see if the files it sees there are in that directory. Of course, the only reason I want this is because I sometimes use embark-act on files I see written in the Eshell buffer. Sacha: I love this. I love how all these little bits of code show that at some point you were annoyed by a tiny, tiny problem and you're like, that's it, I'm just going to write some code and it's never going to be a problem again. 43:49 The value of using Emacs’s APIs Omar: One thing I like about this is it also shows sticking to Emacs APIs. Embark uses find-file-at-point to guess what things are referred to files. I did this to improve the functionality of Embark in Eshell buffers, but what it really does is improve the functionality of find-file-at-point, which I hardly ever use directly. I almost always use it through Embark. Sacha: Send it upstream! Okay, so you use Emacs for working with a shell, working with your files, doing math, doing some programming as well. Are there unexpected things that you use Emacs for? Omar: I don't think so. Mostly I write. It's mostly writing prose. I think I was slightly misled about what a job in academia is like. I mostly write emails. That's the bulk of my job by the time consumed. 44:56 org-ql and usual files (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-45-18-667.jpg)Sacha: You have some shortcuts around org-ql for managing your agenda or other things. Omar: This notion of the usual files. I was often using org-ql to search this set of files: every file mentioned in a refile target, every file mentioned in a capture template, and every file agenda file. Here it is. So I thought that's what I want to search. I want to search every file I mentioned in a refile target, every agenda file, and every file that I mentioned in some template. That's what this does. Sacha: I don't know if you trust your hiding things enough for us to try that. Since you put so much work into it... Or do you want me to hide the screen first and then you can let me know when it's safe to look? Omar: No, no, that's fine. I can show you the censorship process. What I thought I would do is I could show you the... Wait, what is this? Why is that not an action? Oh, library. Oh, I have not loaded this. Yes, now it's loaded. Oh, so this should be... Why is this not recognizing org-ql usual files as a variable now that this is loaded? Sacha: Oh, great. I'm also open to debugging demonstrations live because that is something that a lot of people do. Omar: Sorry, I think it just hadn't loaded this file. Now I ran a command from here and now I should have a variable. Yes, I have a variable. So we can go to Customize. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-46-33-967.jpg)Omar: The ones that have sensitive information are tasks, home, health, Definitely work. Journal. I don't really mind people seeing my journal, but that's boring. There we go. Yeah. So now I got rid of all of the sensitive files. And so now I can show you. I usually just search through all of these files at once. So I had a list of things I wanted to tell you about. 47:06 Shortcuts for org-ql search syntax Sacha: I should also point out that your config has some stuff for inserting things into the org-ql search syntax. Omar: You're extremely prepared for this chat. Yes, C-,has a little key map that will insert stuff like priority. Oh, I don't have, let me remove “Sacha”. Oh, yes, everything that I have with priorities is in one of the files I removed. I only use priorities for work. Sacha: Okay, gotcha. Omar: We could use to-dos. 47:43 Org TODO states: TODO, WAIT, DONE, NOPE (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-47-45-733.jpg)Sacha: I love that you have a to-do state called NOPE. Omar: It's for things that are cancelled, but I don't want to delete them yet. Actually, it's mainly there because when I archive them, I want to know that I had that task at some point, but decided not to do it. Sacha: Well, it's so much less verbose than CANCELLED, so I think I might actually just... Omar: For a long time, I was using monospace fonts, so I wanted to have everything fit in four letters. So I have... Yeah, all of my, I have TODO, WAIT, DONE, NOPE, and they're all four letters long. Sacha: Nope. Gotcha. Okay. So that's org-ql and that's your inserting thingy. 48:26 The inserter macro (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-48-36-667.jpg)Sacha: The other thing that I wanted to point out that your definition of the inserter was nice because it's a macro. So you have this thing that allows you to just define all these interactive functions. You can add it to the key map because the key map expects interactive functions. If people are watching, yeah, this is something you can do. Omar: I should tell you that there was actually a serious performance bug previously. What I had before this… This string is a keyboard macro that inserts those letters. It is extremely slow if you do it that way for some reason. I think org-ql searches after the T, after the O, after the D, after the O, after the colon. For some reason, that was extremely slow. So I switched to these lambdas that just call insert. That does it in a single step, and it's instantaneous. But my first instinct was, oh, well, this is a good use of keyboard macros. I'll just assign these to keyboard macros. It's not a good idea in this particular case. Sacha: I imagine there should be some kind of debouncing on org-ql to make it not do that if you're typing very quickly, but... I don't think there is. Omar: Let me see if... Maybe also do a longer one so it... Sacha: That's okay. I take your word for the bug that you ran into. Omar: I wanted to show you just because it just feels like a really long pause, but it didn't work right now and I don't know why not. That's okay. Sacha: Curse of the live demo. So that's inserter. 50:05 luggage: generative art experiments (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-51-32-367.jpg)Sacha: One thing that I definitely want to make sure we had time for was your little generative art experiment, luggage, because you're having fun with Emacs. Omar: Yes. Yeah. There are some people doing amazing generative... Oh my gosh. I do not even have it installed. Yeah. Let's... I forgot that we were going to do that. That's okay. But it should be easy. How is :vc used? Sacha: (:vc (:url …)). Omar: I have to go to a previous example to figure out. Sacha: I'm surprised you don't have a consult-line and then just embark-insert. Omar: I do that. I do that a lot. But I forgot this time. Sacha: Actually, looking at your config, I learned about consult-multi-occur because apparently there all these multi-buffer equivalents to the commands that I've been using. That is really useful for using stuff from buffers I'm not even looking at. Omar: Okay, load it. Sacha: Let's see if it actually can still do the thing. There we go. So you have some Emacs Lisp to generate this SVG. Yeah, and it's just got... Omar: And which other ones do I have? Luggage. There we go. Tubes. I think this one has some nice other color schemes. Classic? Classic is the one. Oh yeah, stained glasses is the one I wanted. Sacha: Nice. I wanted to mention it specifically because a lot of times people think, oh, Emacs is a text editor. But because it's also got support for SVG and other types of graphics, you can play around with it. Sometimes it's just doing it for fun like this, but also there might be some other visualizations that you can do with Emacs. That is actually pretty interesting. Omar: Yeah. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-52-26-800.jpg)Omar: Have you heard of this program? Sacha: No, I haven't come across it. Omar: There's an entire book with this title. So it's a single line of BASIC. 10 print. Oh, I'm not, I don't know BASIC, but the idea is like you randomly pick either forward slash or backslash. Sacha: Oh, yeah, yeah, that makes sense now. Omar: I'm sure this is not correct BASIC, but, you know, something like that. Yeah, I get the idea. Yeah. And that's what this does. And then you GOTO 10. It's like... It makes these elaborate mazes. It's an extremely simple program. Sacha: So this is the kind of stuff you do for fun. I mean, you probably do lots of other things for fun, too. Omar: Yeah. But this... No, that's not the buffer I wanted. Where is... Did I kill it? I killed it. Yeah, one of these I did. What is it? Dominoes. Yeah, this I did for a math talk I gave. It just produces random domino tilings of the board. I gave that talk from an Org file using Prot’s Logos package. I usually use PDF slides, but that time I wanted to use an Org mode buffer because I was going to run code on the computer. Like this, for example, generating random domino tilings. 53:49 Teaching and Emacs Sacha: So you've given a number of talks. Do you also teach any courses? Omar: Yeah, I do teach both undergraduate and graduate math courses. Recently, mostly graduate math courses. But yeah, I really like teaching. You always learn something. Even the subjects that you think you know very well, teaching a course always teaches you something new. Sacha: Have you gotten students into Emacs? Omar: No, I don't even try. “I use this weird text editor Emacs, it's pretty cool, but it takes a while to learn. I'm not recommending it. I love it. If you do try to use it, you can ask me anything.” Sacha: Yeah, it's pretty hard. I know some professors are like, okay, this is what we're going to use for the course. But I imagine, depending on your subject matter, you might already have your hands full teaching the subject matter rather than adding it. Omar: Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. No, no. The students I try to talk to Emacs about are like the students that are writing their thesis with me. No, never in a course. I never mention it. 54:53 The print10 generator (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-54-56-900.jpg)Omar: Oh, there it is. In the docstring, I have the correct program in BASIC. The backslash and the forward slash are consecutive ASCII characters. 206 and 207. You add a random number between 0 and 1 to this one and then round to the nearest integer. Sacha: All right. You can get surprisingly interesting patterns out of it. That is also very cool. Fun with Emacs. This could definitely be like a zone screensaver if you wanted to. Omar: Yeah. I just thought it was really nice that Emacs displays SVGs natively. Those are very easy to generate by text. Sacha: Are there other interesting corners of your config that might not be immediately obvious to people who are just reading the source code? What other workflow things are nice for you? Omar: Sorry, what were you saying? Sacha: I can also start just occurring through my config for all the things that I've stolen from your config in the last two days. Omar: I don't think I have any concrete idea of what to show now. I think we've covered most of the ones I wanted. 56:23 arXiv (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-57-42-967.jpg)Omar: As an academic, I deal a lot with preprints on the arXiv, so I have a little library that will show me the PDF or copy the URL. I like personalized software because it does exactly what you needed to do. I noticed that there were a bunch of tags on Mastodon that related to archive papers. Often when I was in a Mastodon buffer, I wanted to do something to the paper mentioned at point. That's one of the acceptable inputs for my arXiv library. So, for example, this is an arXiv link and I can ask it to show me. So that's a bug. This should definitely have visual-line-mode activated. I can just quickly read the abstract without visiting the archive website. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-57-51-200.jpg)Omar: Or I can open the PDF. Sacha: Very cool. Very convenient. Omar: Yeah, so. I like that in Emacs you can do all these personal things that you'll need but are not likely to be needed by many people. They're just easy to do. Vim is also very configurable, but the Vim script language is sort of awkward, so I never did anywhere close to the amount of configuration in Vim that I do in Emacs. That's why I would never go back to Vim now. I would miss all the stuff I've written. 58:29 Toggle keymap (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-00-59-06-133.jpg)Sacha: One of the little personal customizations that I liked reading in your config was the fact that you have a key map just for toggling various things like the mode line or the header, you know? Yeah. You want to tell us more about your awesome key map for that? Omar: You don't need them that often, so it's OK if it's under a long prefix. It's just tedious when you want one of them, to have to type the command name. It also helps me remember which things I commonly toggle. I often have to hit C-h here and see what I have available to toggle. I don't know why toggle is a category for commands, because obviously these are very disparate commands that do very different things. But they're things that you occasionally turn on or off, and it's convenient to have them all together. Choosing the letters here was very difficult. Everybody wanted to have the same letters. L was for visual lines. P for variable pitch mode because I think of them as proportional fonts. It took a lot of tweaking. I'm sure if I looked through the GitHub history, you'd see a lot of tiny changes just changing the binding of one of these. Sacha: I find it difficult to get the hang of new key bindings, especially for things that I'm not using often enough for the key bindings to stick. Omar: I often forget that I have a key binding for something. Sacha: So how do you deal with that? I mean, yes, you stick it in an Embark keymap and you just bring it up to the target. Omar: Yeah, I do use Embark bindings in keymap a lot to just explore keymaps and remind myself. I don't need to memorize a binding. I just need to remember that I have a binding. If I have a binding, I can find it later. But sometimes I don't remember that I have a binding, so when I'm looking at my configuration, I'll just re-scan what things I have bound from time to time. Mostly I stick with just… I know under what the start of the prefix is, and then I'll just use Embark to remind me of what I have there. Which is nice, because you can also see the docstrings. 1:00:54 isearch-delete-wrong (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-01-01-32-267.jpg)Sacha: I like how you try to use some of the conventions to make it somewhat easier to remember. One of the key bindings that you have that I want to point out, because I think it's a useful technique, is you have an isearch-delete-wrong. Omar: Right. isearch keeps track of where the last portion of the search string that matched is. You can see it highlighted in the buffer, right? So this means it found up to “del”, and then it didn't find "tok". isearch-delete-wrong will just delete that entire part. Sacha: So that way, you can just restart from what actually exists. Combining that with the fact that you've got your search whitespace regular expression to be a wildcard means you can... Omar: Oh yes, this I stole from Prot. He recommends this. Sacha: Yeah, which means you can use isearch to find things, even if there's other stuff in between them. When you can't find something, you can restart. Omar: I'm not sure... I'm not sure if this is the best setting. I want to be able to search this way sometimes, and sometimes with whitespaces treated literally, so I should keep statistics on how often I actually have to turn this off. It might be that for me the better default is the other way around. You can turn it off with M-s SPC. Match spaces literally. isearch-toggle-lax-whitespace. I don't know. Maybe for me the default would be to treat whitespace literally, because I find that if I have a space in my search string, I often want to turn on the literal matching. But it's probably still this is the better default. I think I do it less than half of the time I have a space. But it's not that far from half, it feels. I don't have statistics. Sacha: How do you even collect statistics on this? Aside from making a little note every time you're like, oh, I didn't like this. Omar: I mean, I would instrument isearch somehow, but I haven't thought about that problem. 1:03:14 isearch - continue from the beginning of the match (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-01-03-44-400.jpg)Omar: One nice thing I do with isearch is another one of those things I got from Vim. isearch, by default, leaves you at the end of the match. I almost always want to be at the beginning of the match, because that's what I got used to in Vim. I think it must be here. I have something exit at start. I tell isearch to exit at the beginning of the match. The way you use this is you install it as a hook, I believe. Is that right? Sacha: You seem to have options. Omar: Yes. Sacha: I see. So S-RET lets you exit at the end, and then by default... Yeah, which is Emacs default. Omar: But I find that the better default is to exit at the beginning. Yes, and that's the whole point of that. For example, if I want to mark until that parentheses, then I would search for the parentheses, and I don't want to include the parentheses. That's not a good example. But with a word, it's often like, I'm looking for a word, but I want to highlight up to the end of the word. It's just like, if you want to mark a region from point to some search term, with the Emacs default, what you have to search for is the thing that is at the end of the part you want to match. But often I want to say until like the thing that starts here. It's just my brain works that way. So for me, it's much better to exit at the start of the search. Which means I don't understand isearch on other people's Emacs. It just leaves the point in the wrong location all the time. If you're going quickly, you won't realize that it's just a mess. It does mean that I can only use isearch if it's configured this way. Sacha: Well, that's the thing about Emacs, right? Once you've got it set up, you've got to use your config because everything else just feels off. It just feels weird. Omar: Yeah, that's right. Sacha: All right. 1:05:12 Using keymaps to remember sets of commands Sacha: Going back to the toggle keymap, @gcentauri says, I'm not lazy enough. I just M-x orderless consult, find the thing that I'm toggling, which I do a lot also. I just use M-x for all the things because I can just specify parts of it. Omar: There's some toggles I don't have in the keymap because I use them very rarely, but yeah. What I like also about the keymap is that it's a place to remind myself of the toggle commands. I often just do this. What was the thing? I haven't used that in a while. Sacha: Having a shorter list, it means you can just use recognition instead of recall, right? Omar: It's short enough that I can read through it. Sacha: I like that a lot. I like the fact that with that Embark C-h screen, you can use completion even to select the commands from that subset. 1:06:04 Other things from the config Sacha: A couple of other things that I picked up from your config: There’s your dired-open-externally, so it makes it very easy to open something in an external application. Omar: And it just calls Embark open externally. This function moved back and forth from different places. I think embark-open-externally used to be in consult. Daniel said he felt it didn't fit in with consult. Embark consult would put it in keymaps. He was right. Consult didn't have a very clear personality at the beginning. It was sort of like a grab bag of commands. Eventually, what gelled is that a command should be in Consult if there is a useful way to write previews for it. So, preview is the distinguishing feature of what is a good fit for Consult. Now, I hope Daniel would agree with that. That seems to be the criteria now. That's great. I absolutely love preview. That's one thing I miss a little bit with org-ql. I use org-ql mostly to search through Org files, but the preview is kind of manual in that I use Embark to do it. If I want to preview a command, I just use Embark to do what I mean. Sacha: Yeah, that's a good idea. I should try that. Omar: So any command that doesn't have a preview, I mean does, you can just use embark-dwim, it'll complete the command for you. Sacha: Okay, the kid has arrived, so I have to go off to lunch. But thank you so much for the quick peek into your config. I'll put the transcript together and then people can do that. But in the meantime, people can look at your config for all sorts of wonderful goodness. Omar: Thanks. Sacha: Thanks to everyone for hanging out. Looks like the isearch tip was popular, so you might see a lot of people getting that from your config. Anyway, thank you so much for this. I’ll see you around. Omar: Thanks, Sacha. This was fantastic. Sacha: Alright, nice. Chat (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chats-emacs-chat-24-omar-antolin-camarena-chat) takoverflow: Hello Sacha and Omar, thanks for this chat! :) CharlieBaker707: Definitely going to add the keycast transparency to my config! I've been wanting that for a while! gcentauri: i'm still a minibuffer noob - its been nil my whole Emacs life! CharlieBaker707: recursive minibuffers is amazing. biggest win for me is that it lets you select things and paste them in, like from a completing-read's history for example gcentauri: haha apparently i do have recursive minibuffers set to t, along with my Vertico config 🤔 Zor_org: was there a time you wanted multiple cursors? Zor_org: if so, was there any workaround you thought of with embark or kmacro? gcentauri: keyboard macros are a fun mini-game CharlieBaker707: I have embark-act set up to expand in the same way expand-region does, but with embark's type awareness. It's also easy to add a contract function. CharlieBaker707: I also have a completing-read interface and a transient menu to jump directly to one of many types under point that I'm seeiking. CharlieBaker707: For sure! CharlieBaker707: I was going to create a tiny extension, but I can open a PR in embark! Zor_org: even more crazy with elfeed 4.0 gcentauri: I found Orderless and Embark through Daniel's suggestions in his packages :) Zor_org: if emacs gets canvas patch soon, more things can be done in luggage (lik gifs and image frame as well) gcentauri: i am not lazy enough, i just M-x orderless consult find the thing i'm toggling PuercoPop: I didn't knew isearch had a built-in way to fix the isearch quirk. Now I can remove the snippet I use the implement it that I cribbed from the internets gcentauri: yeah adding something to a keymap you make does help recall PuercoPop: The isearch quirk is a common complaint from what I understand gcentauri: yeah i'm gonna use that iserach bit View Org source for this post (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/index.org) You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com (mailto:sacha@sachachua.com?subject=Comment%20on%20https%3A%2F%2Fsachachua.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F05%2Fmay-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena%2F&body=Name%20you%20want%20to%20be%20credited%20by%20(if%20any)%3A%20%0AMessage%3A%20%0ACan%20I%20share%20your%20comment%20so%20other%20people%20can%20learn%20from%20it%3F%20Yes%2FNo%0A).
21 May 2026
Emacs Chat 23: Emacs Chat with Raymond Zeitler
[2026-05-25 Mon]: Fixed ICS link I chatted with Raymond Zeitler about Emacs, life, automation, Org Mode, Diary, and Calendar. There were a couple of cuts to get rid of accidentally shown passwords, but it was a great glimpse into someone's system for managing things. View in the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/ec23-raymond-zeitler), watch or comment on YouTube (https://youtube.com/live/ro6BZI0Z64I), read the transcript online (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#ID-ec23-transcript), download the transcript (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-raymond-zeitler/ec23-raymond-zeitler.vtt), download the audio (https://archive.org/download/ec23-raymond-zeitler/ec23-raymond-zeitler.mp3), or email me (mailto:sacha@sachachua.com). Related links: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RaymondZeitler (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RaymondZeitler) (config is out of date) https://www.linkedin.com/in/raymondzeitler/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/raymondzeitler/) : Electrical Engineer | Electronic RF Components | Scripting & Automation | US Defense and Aerospace~ Modernizing your company’s legacy design tools Acting Historian, IEEE Connecticut Section https://codeberg.org/ZeitRa (https://codeberg.org/ZeitRa) The rest of his Internet presence is either private (Facebook) or anonymous (two blogs, Github and Gitlab, Mastodon, Bluesky). Writing Calendar Files (GNU Emacs Manual) (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Writing-Calendar-Files.html) - cal-tex-cursor-week-iso elisp/next-spec-day.el at master · chenfengyuan/elisp · GitHub (https://github.com/chenfengyuan/elisp/blob/master/next-spec-day.el) You can add the iCal for upcoming Emacs Chat episodes to your calendar. https://sachachua.com/topic/emacs-chat/upcoming-emacs-chats.ics (https://sachachua.com/topic/emacs-chat/upcoming-emacs-chats.ics) Find more Emacs Chats or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat (https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat) Chapters: 0:00 Opening 0:58 Introduction 1:59 I love automating workflows 3:15 Org Mode switch 4:08 diary-float 6:48 Tip: Add links to task titles 6:59 diary-float 7:59 The difference between active timestamps and SCHEDULED 10:06 Including other diary files 11:26 cal-tex-cursor-week-iso, printing planner pages on index cards 14:59 Holidays 16:45 Making calendars for other people 17:27 Keeping track of when things were done on the house 18:49 My first customizations: backspace, buffers 20:32 Windows and super key 23:23 Org Mode class on Udemy, agenda custom commands 25:00 toggling tags 26:57 TODO states 27:21 Functions for Org Agenda 28:34 exeln, shellfn: executing things in DOS 30:22 Middle mouse click 31:59 Keybindings in other apps: Vivaldi 34:09 M-s M-w, eww-search-words 35:50 Saving links with org-store-link 38:29 How I got into Emacs 41:45 Maybe my own theme? 42:26 Other editors? Always Emacs 43:57 Package names 45:54 What's next? Maybe auto maintenance 48:31 Vibe-coding? 50:53 Where people can find me 52:02 Org Mode source blocks 52:49 Slideshows? 53:50 Emacs Chats? 56:33 Other resources that would be nice to have Transcript (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chats-emacs-chat-23-emacs-chat-with-raymond-zeitler-transcript) Transcript 0:00 Opening Sacha: I'll go live if that's okay with you. Yeah, good to go? Raymond: Okay. Sacha: All right, going live. Raymond: Let me just stop sharing right now. Sacha: Hi everyone, this is Emacs Chat. Emacs Chat 23. Today I'm here with Raymond Zeitler who has been using Emacs for a long time. Your EmacsWiki page says since 2000. And I know for sure that you've been commenting on my blog since about 2008, probably even earlier, I don't know. Everything gets lost in the mists of time. I would love to chat with you about the things that you've learned over the years, what you're still fiddling with, and the things in your configuration or workflow that aren't obvious to people who are reading configurations. It's just Emacs Lisp, but it doesn't show people what you do with Emacs that makes you stick with it over all this time. 0:57 Introduction Sacha: So yes, but of course, we should do a bit of context setting. You have a lot of different hats. You're a historian, you're an electrical engineer. How would you describe yourself? Raymond: Well, right now, I would say I'm an electrical engineer, but I spend most of my time, instead of designing stuff, I work on the workflow for the design. And I'm writing scripts, you know, to automate various parts of the design. Now, I just want to pause here because I hear like a 10-second delay. Sacha: Yes. Oh, you have the video open in another tab. Yeah, so the 10-second delay is there in case we need to panic, you know, in case you accidentally flash something you'd rather keep private. But it can be quite disconcerting to hear yourself talking at the same time that you're trying to say something. Raymond: Okay, I think I fixed that. Okay. 1:57 I love automating workflows Raymond: Yes, so I'm an electrical engineer, but I also love to do scripting. Automating any kind of workflow is my favorite thing to do, and I would just love to go around and help people to find ways to automate the workflow. Basically, I was doing that ETL, you know, extract, transform, and load many years ago, I mean, dozens of years ago, and showing people how to do that too for them, and you know, when they look at me and they say, oh my god, thank you so much, I'm so glad... You know, it used to take me hours to do this. Automating a design flow is a good idea once you have all your script in place, that serves as your documentation. If there is a problem with the design, you can go back to the script and update it. So the next time, you're not going to have that problem, hopefully. Sacha: You've been learning Python recently, too, right? I can imagine that helps a lot with automation. Are you taking advantage of things like Org Mode as well for the things that you can partially automate? Raymond: Absolutely. Sacha: Tell us about that. Raymond: Oh, I figured that we should save for the last, because it could take the whole thing. 3:20 Org Mode switch Raymond: But yes, I started using Org Mode after you jumped ship from Planner Mode. I know that you and John Wiegley were big on that, and I used to use Planner. And I delayed switching to Org Mode, but eventually I latched onto it really well. So one thing I used Org Mode for at home was for bill pay, you know, because you can schedule things recurring. So you got your mortgage, you can recur, you know, and the recurrence is well thought out. You know, you could have it scheduled exactly 30 days away or one month. 4:05 diary-float Raymond: What I found recently, though, is you can use the diary: diary-float and diary-warning. Those functions can be used in Org Mode in place of the schedule. So that's really cool. I have a lot of meetings that occur, let's say, the second Wednesday of the month and stuff. There's really no way to easily do that out of the box with Org Mode. So that's fun to do. Let's see. I'm going to share my Org now, if you want. Sacha: Sure, go ahead. If that's okay with you. Raymond: Sure. Well, I deleted some of the stuff. You know, not all the files are there. Sacha: Thank you. It's always interesting to see, because a lot of times, when we're trying to demonstrate Org to people, we're like, okay, here's a small example. But when you see it in the context of someone's actual life, with the tons of reminders they have... Your agenda is very full, for example. I'm not the only one with things that are scheduled for over 100 days. Raymond: And actually, your talk isn't on here, so that's kind of strange. So, for example, I was talking about bills, right? I don't know if you can see that. Sacha: Yeah, I can see that. Raymond: It's not the same. Sacha: Yeah, I see. And you're using the logbook. You can keep notes in a task. You can put all the things there. Raymond: Yeah. So, you know, something like a mortgage or your utility, that's pretty standard. That's just +1m, you know, for the recurrence. Let's see. Yeah. Sacha: Yeah. So basically, you have the regular or repeat things, plus one month or plus one week for the things that can be expressed that way. But you also use diary-float for the things that are second Wednesday of the month. Raymond: Yes. So let me try a different Org file for that. Oh, everyone, I have to do this too. Sacha: Oh yeah, you can set a global font default scale thingy. I don't remember exactly how to do that, but... [cut due to passwords] I'll move your screen off the thing first while you talk, and then I'll move it back when you're ready. So we had a bit of a "Oh no, he's showing me like meeting passwords online." So if you saw that, which probably you didn't because 10 second delay, just ignore it. And then we'll go back and scrub things later. Let me know when it's safe to look again. Raymond: Okay, here we go. So here's a meeting. Sacha: Okay, okay. We got this. We got this. 6:48 Tip: Add links to task titles Sacha: I also want to point out, I love how you're using links in the task title. You know, that did not occur to me to have the links right there so it's easy to get to from just the overview. 6:59 diary-float Raymond: [cut due to passwords] ...which works really in a diary file. Sacha: All right. Let me move it back so people can see. Raymond: It works. This is great because it works in Org Mode too. If anyone doesn't know it, this is the month. And true just means that this meeting occurs every month. And I believe this means Monday. Sacha: No, Tuesday. Although... Your comment says Tuesday, yeah. Raymond: Yeah, Tuesday. So that's the second day of the week, with Sunday being zero. And then this is the week number, the second week. Second Tuesday of every month. And then you could just put the time there as well. Sacha: Yeah, yeah. I have actually personally never used this syntax, but I see people use it for things like Emacs meetups and they're like, okay, yeah, we meet every second Wednesday or whatever, but here's the thing that you can just put into your Org agenda and it'll work. 7:59 The difference between active timestamps and SCHEDULED Raymond: But the problem with this, though, is that it doesn't obey the, you know, if you mark it done, it'll be marked done. So it won't show up again. So I'm actually starting to put these in my actual diary because you know, I don't really need to mark the meeting done. Sacha: You know, you can take out, just remove the scheduled keyword. You can have the active timestamp and it will show up on your calendar, but it doesn't have to be marked as done. And it'll just keep showing up whenever you need to. So this is the distinction between scheduled, which is actually not like a scheduled appointment, it's like a task that you're scheduling for a specific day, versus just using an active timestamp, which is the stuff within the angle brackets. It can be anywhere in your entry. It doesn't have to be the second line after your heading. Then it will show up in your agenda, but it's not going to keep showing up like the next day. It's not going to say it's overdue. It's just going to be for that day. Raymond: Okay. Yeah. There was somebody who tried to solve the problem, though. And they came up with next-spec-day, a function, but it's not possible to compile that with the modern Emacs. So I'm just happy with the way I have it now, though. Yeah. But when I first started using Emacs, the diary and the calendar were one of the first non-text editing uses that I had for it. And I'm really getting back into diary. I hope I don't show anything else. Sacha: Tell you what, I'm going to move your window away. Okay. And then you can do your thing and then I can move it back when you're comfy. Raymond: Okay. Sacha: Yeah, I know how to do this now. This is good. I have two monitors so I can control. Raymond: Where's my screen? Oh boy. So what I'm showing here Sacha: I put it back so people can see. 10:06 Including other diary files (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-raymond-zeitler/ec23-raymond-zeitler-00-10-09-867.jpg)Raymond: My main diary is just diary. What I'm doing is I'm using includes, because I like to break it up into various files that I can comment them out if I don't want something so busy. The reason I'm doing that is because I was tooling around in calendar in the calendar functions and there's actually cal-tex-cursor functions that so when you go into calendar, for example... That's also small, right? Sacha: It's okay. Everyone has seen calendar. Well, most people have seen calendar at this point, so we know what the calendar is. Okay. What are we showing? What are we seeing? Raymond: So if I wanted to, let's say for next week, what I could do is create a, let's see, cursor... I forgot the command. Sacha: I'm surprised you don't have completion set up. Raymond: Yes. 11:26 cal-tex-cursor-week-iso, printing planner pages on index cards (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-raymond-zeitler/ec23-raymond-zeitler-00-14-04-867.jpg)Raymond: Okay, so this is what I like to do. So this function, cal-tex-cursor-week-iso Sacha: It's okay. It's the curse of the live demo. Raymond: All right, I'll create mine. Sacha: Change cursor shape, huh... Raymond: All right, so for some reason that's not working. But what you end up doing is you can create a weekly planner, kind of like a page in a date book, and it will show everything from your diary if you want... Sacha: In a nice printed format or like a nice visual format. Raymond: Yeah, I have to... How do I get that? I don't know why it's not working here. So... Sacha: Certainly the layouts of things, the layouts of date planners is something that I sometimes envy about my paper planner days. Like you could see things. I also wanted to point out something that I hadn't considered. You were using diary for diary entries, it looks like also not just appointments and reminders, but also this is what happened that day. Ooh, that is pretty. Do you actually print these out or like read them on an e-reader or just look at them? Raymond: I did. Yeah, I found out that my printer can print double-sided on index cards. Sacha: Oh yeah, double-sided. Raymond: So I actually created my own little book here. So what's nice about this is, you know, when you go into a store to look for some planner, many of them, like half of them, don't even have the lunar phases. And let's see if this has a lunar phase. Sacha: So printing planner pages on index cards. Very cool. Raymond: So you've got your full moon there. And because I was very active in photography, nature photography in particular, and doing landscapes and stuff. So it's really helpful to know when the full moon is, more so sunrise and sunset, which I have here. Because you get, especially in the winter, you get great shots at around sunset. Yeah, so that was something that I was really interested in. Sacha: Oh, it's so cool. It's something I'd never considered using Emacs to generate your custom, you know, calendar planner thing that you then take offline because you're out there in the field. You're taking pictures. You don't want to open your laptop or look at your phone or whatever. It's just your index card. Nice. Raymond: And there's some astrology in there. Sacha: [cut due to password] We're back to streaming. Yeah, birthdays. Gotcha. Raymond: Birthdays. And then, so I'll just... I wonder if I could do this safely. Sacha: Give me a heads up, I'll move the screen off and then I can move it back when you give me the heads up again. Raymond: I'm pretty sure my .emacs is pretty... If anyone wants to see this and download it, it's on emacswiki.org. Just look for the page RaymondZeitler. Sacha: Yeah, it's in the related links now for the blog post. Gotcha. 14:59 Holidays (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-raymond-zeitler/ec23-raymond-zeitler-00-15-07-533.jpg)Raymond: So what I was looking for here is my list of holidays. So what you could do with... This is basically a calendar thing, but you can set up all your holidays. For example, Towel Day is coming up. It will be Monday for you Hitchhiker's Guide geeks. You've got your Star Wars Day, you've got Pi Day, which you won't find on a regular calendar, of course. And that's an atrocious thing here. Sacha: I was just admiring that. It's a very complicated expression, but you can do it. Raymond: You can, right. So that's what I came up for Election Day. And if anyone's a Seinfeld fan, you've got your Festivus. So that's a neat thing. Yeah, and don't worry about the longitude-latitude. Everyone knows where I am. Sacha: [another password hiccup] ... dealing with the panic, it's good. It's good practice. And also everyone is very nice, so afterwards, I'll just probably make this unlisted and then see if there's anything that actually needs scrubbing. But probably it's all good. Yes, so you've got calendar, you've got holidays, you print them out. Are there other ways that you use Emacs, kind of in this online-offline way? Are there any other things that you like to print out, or do you do the rest of the things in your computer? Raymond: It's all on computer, yeah. So the only thing that's printed out is the planner datebook. By planner, I mean this thing. Okay. So... 16:45 Making calendars for other people Raymond: Oh, yeah. Anyway, getting back to why I break up my diary into multiple files is eventually I may want to create these things for other people, right? Print out a date book for my wife, for example. So she's going to want to know when Towel Day is, right? Well, that's a different thing, but she's not going to want a lot of other things. Sacha: Yeah, it's very customizable. You can just say, okay, include these, you know, modules in the calendar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Raymond: So, and then getting back to the diary again, yes. Sacha: I can move this. We're safe. Yeah. We're safe. Raymond: Okay. 17:27 Keeping track of when things were done on the house Raymond: So one thing I like to do is keep track of when things were done on the house. Sacha: You've got a license plate? Raymond: No, there's really nothing bad here. For example, if you want to know when you have to register your car, you can put that in there and it'll show up on your little planner. So I thought that was pretty neat. Sacha: And I like that you can say a number of years ago, so it automatically keeps track of that. You can wish somebody a specific number of years, happy birthday, instead of just a generic happy birthday. You don't have to do math. Nice, nice. Diary, I think it's underutilized. Raymond: It is, yeah. And what I like about Emacs is that the people who are, you know, creating functions and adding to it use it and have really good design ideas. So, oh, this is, let's go back to something else here. Okay, so back to my .Emacs. Let's see. Let me just... In the interim, before we come up with something else to talk about, I'll just talk about some of the modifications. 18:49 My first customizations: backspace, buffers Raymond: And by the way, when I first started using Emacs, I decided not to do anything. I'm a Windows user, so naturally you might want to use CUA mode, but I never did that. And the first customization I did was... For some reason the backspace key was doing the delete function. I think that was Emacs 19. So that was the one thing I changed. And then the other thing I changed is very soon I had multiple buffers. Like if you're using Emacs for any amount of time, even like 10 minutes, you'll have multiple buffers. And I was using a tabbed web browser at the time, so it's easy. To switch tabs by just pressing the Ctrl-Tab key or Shift-Ctrl-Tab key to switch between tabs. And I figured, let me do that with the buffers. And so that's somewhere in here. Sacha: Oh yeah, there's a control tab, control shift tab, next buffer, and previous buffer. Raymond: Yeah, so that was one of the first things besides the delete key modification that I did. But I'm also now, since I have multiple windows open as well, I'm using the windows... Next and Windows Prior. Next is, I think, the page down key, I believe. And Prior is the page up key. 20:33 Windows and super key (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-raymond-zeitler/ec23-raymond-zeitler-00-21-50-033.jpg)Raymond: And how you can get to use the Windows key is, I got that from Xah Lee's website. And where is that now? Sacha: Yeah, you make it the super key. I use Xmodmap but other people can use different things depending on their setup. Although lately I've been experimenting with using Kanata so that my modifiers are one-shot modifiers. I can tap the super key and then I can let go of it and then I can press whatever key is next so I don't have to hold them at the same time. Oh hey look at that it's actually an option! I didn't even know that it was. You can change it right from Emacs. Nice. Raymond: Yeah, so this is what I set up. I lifted this from the website. There's the URL. And if you're curious, you can go to that Emacs wiki website and see this. The only thing that I wasn't able to get this to work until I added this statement, which I found in Stack Overflow or something like that. Sacha: That is interesting. Yeah. All right. So does it mean that Emacs is entirely responsible for the Windows key? You don't do anything else with it outside Emacs? Raymond: Right. So yes, it intercepts the Windows key before Windows does somehow magically, which can be kind of frustrating because sometimes I do want to open the start menu from within Emacs and I'm pressing it and saying, why isn't this working? Sacha: This is where you just get used to having your own launchers within Emacs. Raymond: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know that you're a good Emacs user if you start using the Emacs key bindings in other programs. You know, how many times I've used C-y to paste something in, you know, my web browser. Oh, boy. Sacha: Yeah, it's not the C-y that gets me. It's the C-w because that closes your browser down. Raymond: Yeah, oh yes, that can be dangerous. But actually C-y can be bad too, because it's like the redo function in a lot of programs. So if you've undone something, and then you redo it, you can get very confused very quickly. Anyway, so this is a neat thing to do. Some people might want to try that. Sacha: Yeah, for sure. Having a super key means you can then go on and do other things with it. You can have all these key bindings because nothing binds to the super key. So you can have all the single character key bindings you like. Raymond: Exactly, yeah. 23:23 Org Mode class on Udemy, agenda custom commands Raymond: So I was taking, believe it or not, there's an Org Mode class on Udemy. And it's... Rainer König did it. I don't know if I pronounced his name right. But he inspired me to do custom commands. So for example, if I want to look at all my bills for the week, I would just press the b w. Sacha: Do you want me to move the window? Raymond: I don't know. Is there anything dangerous here? I'm not going to do it, but I'm just trying to point out my thing. Sacha: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Different agendas for slicing and dicing your Org data in different ways. Raymond: Yeah, yeah. Remember you pointed out earlier that my agenda was jam-packed with stuff. The way I manage that is I came up with a way to easily apply the today tag to all those things. And I came up with some functions somewhere which I bind to C-M-S-t. Let's see if I can find it. Sacha: That is interesting. So you're using a tag for the things you want to do today. Raymond: Yes. Sacha: Versus scheduling them, because if you schedule them for today, then they will still show up tomorrow. Raymond: Well, yes, that's true. 24:53 Toggling tags (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-raymond-zeitler/ec23-raymond-zeitler-00-25-00-400.jpg)Raymond: So yes, so these are the two functions I came up with. Oh, you're toggling. What's that? Sacha: You toggle that. You have something that lets you add or remove a tag. Raymond: Yes, yes. Yes, exactly. And maybe I could demonstrate that without displaying too much stuff here. Okay, so here, so in the agenda, I'm a little bit worried about updating. See, okay, so I don't know if you can see it, but I just invoked it and then down here in a little. Sacha: Oh, yeah. Raymond: It says you have to press s r to save and refresh the screen. And the reason why I didn't automatically refresh and save files is because I think that's a dangerous thing. Sacha: Yeah, because you've been removing things. Okay, okay. But the idea there is you can turn the tag on and off from your agenda directly, which is interesting. Yeah, it's there. And you have a different view that shows you just the stuff you're focusing on for today. Raymond: And I have that bound to "C-c a .". This is going to be small. So there on the top are my things for today. Sacha: Yeah, so different ways of prioritizing. So your agenda is the stuff that you want to keep on your radar. And the today stuff is the stuff like, okay, you got some time. This is what you're actually going to work on. Raymond: Right, so. Sacha: Yeah, there are different ways to approach it. Some people have a much more minimalist, okay, if it's on the agenda, it's because I want to do it that day. And then they have a different view showing them the stuff that they want to keep on their radar. But the nice thing about Org Mode is that it accommodates all these different ways of working. Raymond: Yeah. 26:56 TODO states Raymond: And getting back to the Rainer's class on Org Mode, you know, it's not like the way Carsten Dominik set it up with the default tags of to-dos. What is it? To do, started, waiting. He does something a little bit different, but it works for him. So I think that's kind of cool too. 27:21 Functions for Org Agenda (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-raymond-zeitler/ec23-raymond-zeitler-00-28-06-200.jpg)Raymond: And by the way, you need two functions. You need one that works in an Org file and another one in the agenda because they don't work the same way. Sacha: I have some functions that act that way, and I usually end up checking if the major mode is derived from the Org agenda. And then there's an with Org agenda. There's a macro that lets you run the code in the context of the task. So if you needed to kind of switch those together, it's possible. But you already have something that works, so it's fine. Raymond: Yeah, and it's easy because, you know, I copied this from some existing function like, you know, when you press Z, for example, it creates a note. So you can leverage that code and write your own code instead. Sacha: It's called org-agenda-with-point-at-orig-entry. It does the thing. You know, this part that you're doing at the moment with manually finding the marker and jumping to it and all that stuff. In the future, if you find yourself writing one of these agenda functions. Raymond: Yeah. 28:34 exeln, shellfn: executing things in DOS (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-raymond-zeitler/ec23-raymond-zeitler-00-29-15-767.jpg)Raymond: So what else do I have here? Oh, so sometimes I just like to execute. So I do a lot of batch files or scripts, and I'll just do C-c x to send that particular line to the DOS prompt just to execute it. Sacha: Oh, execute line. Okay, so that's what EXELN means. That's cool. So it's basically you can evaluate things without having to switch and paste and switch and paste and all that stuff. Raymond: Yes. And just to demonstrate, if I wanted to do the dir command. Sacha: It's like an eval-last-sexp, but for DOS. Yeah, so this is... And hats off to you for, like, batch scripting with DOS. I'm very spoiled with my bash and zsh, but you're in Windows and you're making it work. Raymond: Yeah. Which is like a handicap, isn't it? And then I can just send the whole buffer to the command prompt, which I think now there's a function that don't really does that, you know, out of the box. Maybe not. And then if I wanted to insert the date, you know, just some easy stuff like that. Sacha: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I recently added this insert date and time thing as an abbrev, So I just type it and that frees up more of my key bindings for other things. Yeah. But it's surprising. You always find yourself wanting to refer to the time and that way you don't have to look. 30:27 Middle mouse click Raymond: I don't remember how Emacs treated the scroll wheel or the middle mouse button, but I found that this was very useful. I believe what you can do is click the mouse. Let's see what happens. It pasted what I had there. Sacha: Yeah, yeah. I think middle is usually paste, but it sounds like you've got it. Oh, okay. So, so you, you can scroll if you're dragging, but you can also click, just middle click to paste. Yes. Raymond: Yeah. So it's fun. There are some things that down-mouse-2 does, and I'm not able to do that now. I think, for example, spell checking, if you want to correct a word at point, I think the command is to do the mouse-2 button, but I no longer can do that. But that's okay. Sacha: Over 20 plus years of Emacs, I'm sure parts of your workflow have come in and out of viability as things change. I feel like Emacs does make more of an effort to keep things pretty stable for the most part, hence all the contortions that new Emacs development has to do in order to keep things working but also adapt to the times. 31:59 Keybindings in other apps: Vivaldi Raymond: I think I mentioned before how I co-opted the ability to switch tabs. I got the idea from the web browser and incorporated it into Emacs. But I've started to do the opposite. So if you do C-k, which deletes anything from point to the end of the line... Sacha: Yeah, you've up-cased a bunch of things. Raymond: Yes, I am going to have to close this because I'm really scared now. Sacha: revert-buffer, maybe? Or undo? Raymond: Yes, I'm trying to do undo. That's what I meant to do. We're back. There we go. So, yeah, because I did C-x C-u instead of... whatever. So what I've decided to do then is if you're using a web browser and you're opening new tabs, which I do, so I am able to bind a key and I'm using control shift K to close all the tabs to the right of the current tab. So that's sort of like borrowing an Emacs keystroke and using it in my browser. [Sacha] How are you doing that? Are you using AutoHotkey or does Vivaldi let you do that automatically? into the Settings - Keyboard shortcuts... So actually, I don't know how to increase the size of this. Sacha: That's fine. We can see it. People can go open up Vivaldi if they're curious. But the idea there is you get used to these conveniences or these ideas from Emacs. And now you're like, OK, I want to make my other apps feel at least a little bit this way. Raymond: Yeah. Yeah, so. Sacha: Yeah? Raymond: And I still keep learning stuff about Emacs. 34:10 M-s M-w, eww-search-words Raymond: Believe it or not, I didn't know that you could select a region and then do an internet search on it, right? Sacha: Today I am learning. How do you select a region and do an internet search on it? Raymond: So M-s M-w (Alt s and Alt w) is loading in EWW. And this is what Atomic Chrome Start Server is. And that's actually a Chrome extension that you can... Okay, so if I go to some... Okay, okay. Sacha: It is EWW Search Words. Okay, good. Cool. Raymond: So if I go to your website now and I want to type a comment, which I think I can do, right? Sacha: Oh, I switched to just doing comments through email. Because Disqus was getting all ads-y and annoying and tracking JavaScript and stuff. So now it's like every post has an email me if you have thoughts. Sometimes it has a Mastodon link if I've remembered to post it to Mastodon beforehand. Raymond: So... What I'm trying to do is find a window that I can type into. Sacha: There's a search box up there to the top. But basically, you're going to show us how you can take stuff from the browser and put it into Emacs for easier editing. Raymond: Yes. Sacha: All right. 35:50 Saving links with Org-store-link Sacha: Charlie has a question. So Charlie asks, do you use Org Mode protocol at all for browser to Emacs interaction? If so, were there any complications to set it up on Windows? Raymond: I don't. Sacha: Is there like bookmarklets for capturing or doing things? Raymond: Yeah. So, oh yeah. So capture is just a wonderful tool. Okay. So I'm not sure I'm I can answer the question, but what I would say is, let's say if I wanted to... Alright, let's try this. This might not be too bad. So let's say I wanted to create a link to some ad. So no, I don't use EWW to capture the link. But I just learned out how you can do it. But if I wanted to go to another, all right, well, this is a silly example. But if I were to do just a help, Let's say, if I just wanted to find a place in the info, in info, if I do C-c-L, it'll create a link for me, and then if I wanted to here, put that link. So it's already there in the mode line. And I can have that there. So this will go, and I'll close this help. Sacha: Okay. Raymond: And then if I click this, it'll open back up. Sacha: So you use the org-store-link a lot. Do you use org-capture as well? Raymond: Yes. Sacha: I saw your keyboard, your key binding for it. But you don't necessarily have bookmarks or extensions in Vivaldi to do the capturing with the context from your browser. You'll just copy and paste the link manually. Raymond: Exactly. That sounds like fun, though. [Sacha] That's a nice thing about Emacs. There's always one more thing to tweak, one more thing to learn. You've been tweaking your Emacs for a long time, and yet there's still more to do, to fiddle with and explore. 38:24 How I got into Emacs Raymond: Yeah if you can think way, way, way, back, how did you get into Emacs in the first place? So, you know, I was thinking about how my career, like the first half of my career, I've been using an IBM PC and MS-DOS, and it was all command line based. And as well, those machines were quite slow. So what we would often do is Write batch files and basically have things happen while we were away. Go and get a cup of coffee or leave for the day and come back the next day and hope it was done. I was working with text files for 20 years. I had a really good text editor. It was called Brief. And it had a lot of nice features. It was, of course... You could record and playback keystroke macros, right? Sounds familiar. It also had a scripting language. Of course, it had undo. But the nice thing I really liked about it is that you could do column editing, right? So you could delete columns of text, or add columns, or cut and paste and move them around, and stuff like that. Because if you're using a lot of csv files, it's really columnar in nature. I guess I can't pronounce that word. But when I moved to Windows, that text editor didn't work so well. It wasn't very happy in a multitasking environment And so I started looking around for stuff. I did find an editor actually that it had the same key bindings as brief, but it had one problem. And if you open, for example, if you opened a binary file, that had a null character, it would crash. So I don't know if that bothered me. So then I started looking around for another one. And then I guess it was in Usenet that somebody said, why don't you try Emacs? As if I heard of it and decided not to. So I did, and I really liked it. So maybe I'm going to go back and search for that conversation and thank the person. That'd be something I could put on my Org agenda. 41:05 Did it click for you right away or is it something that grew on you over time? Sacha: Did it click for you right away or is it something that grew on you over time? I started right away with the tutorial And I said, ah, this is crazy to have to do. And I don't even know how to navigate with the original key bindings. So I expected to be able to use the arrow keys. And I don't think it was set up that way. But then I stuck with it. And like I said, I didn't adopt the CUA binding or anything like that. Yeah, and I just grew to learn it. 41:45 Maybe my own theme? Sacha: I had thought about coming up with a theme for it, a different color theme. And I tried that for a while, but then when I would use a different mode, it just looked terrible. So I'm keeping the same mode now. doing is they'll take something like modus themes and then they can change the colors of it without necessarily having to make all the mappings of, okay, this thing in this mode, you should use this kind of face. So if you still want to have your customized colors, that might be an approach to consider. Raymond: Yeah. Going to stop sharing for a second. Sacha: Sure. 42:26 Other editors? Always Emacs Sacha: Did you ever flirt with other editors again after getting into Emacs? Or has it basically been mostly Emacs for the last while? Raymond: Oh my gosh, how could you even say such a thing? No, it never occurred to me to do that. But some of the guys were using Notepad++, which, you know, mine is the only computer with Emacs. But if I go to another computer, they have No pad++. I would be using that. And it's nice. It has a tabbed interface so you can switch between files very easily. But I've never considered switching to something else. And even, you know, I took a vibe coding class. So they have you use VS code or anti-gravity or something like that. And I'm thinking, wouldn't it be nice if I could You know, switch to my Emacs editor and do the typing there and then switch back to anti-gravity. I don't know. But I hear some people are vibe coding with Emacs, so I might look into that. Sacha: Yeah, there's been an explosion of different ways that people are interacting with these systems. And of course, people are also totally welcome to keep using Emacs without it. But if people are curious, as the usual Emacs way of doing things, there are more than a handful of packages all with their different workflows. You'll find something that fits. Raymond: Yeah. 43:57 Package names Raymond: I wanted to ask you, speaking about EWW, do people pronounce that ew? The thing about a lot of these packages, they have these wonderfully self-effacing names. There's one called Dismal. That's the acronym for it. And it's Dismode Ain't Lotus. It's basically a spreadsheet. So I was just curious about that. Sacha: I think we spend so much of our time reading rather than you know hearing or talking to people so then it's only in the middle of a conversation of a very rare conversation one can have about Emacs either on stream or in person when you're like okay is it Magit or magic you know do I say ew but that that seems so rude ew ew ew the Emacs web thing yeah sure Raymond: And that's pretty new, isn't it? That mode? Because I remember doing W3 and then WW3. Sacha: There was a w3m and elinks. I remember that too. Raymond: Links, I had a version of that on my, you know, like a DOS version of it, believe it or not. But it was very utilitarian, you know. Sacha: Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you just want to browse the web or get the information without all the clutter that goes on and, you know, just like all the layouts and the cookie pop ups and whatever. Just get me the stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Raymond: Well, I do think I'm going to be incorporating EWW more as I think it was Charles who said, you know, creating a link using C-c l to create that link and it basically copies what's around it. I do see the usefulness of that. 45:54 What's next? Maybe auto maintenance Sacha: Yeah, yeah, because org-capture and org-store-link can just pick up the context for you and then it's so easy to go back to things afterwards. I've also heard good things about org-remark. So that's something that's on my to-do list as well. There are always all these things to be curious about and learn. What are you looking forward to exploring? So there's EWW. What's next for you in this Emacs journey? Raymond: Oh boy. I was thinking of using Org as a car maintenance tool. And as you know, Org is great for scheduling and projecting out things. The thing about auto maintenance, though, is a lot of times something has to be done at a certain mileage. Like every 5,000 miles, you have to rotate the tires, for example. If you're driving regularly, like maybe 100 miles a week, you could say, oh, that's going to happen in a year. But if you're driving as erratic, then you'll probably want a way to download your mileage from the car. Cars are basically just computers, aren't they? I mean, they're computers that we drive around, or sometimes they drive us around, frighteningly so. I'm sure someone is thinking about or has already come up with a link between a desktop computer and a car. Okay, I'm not seeing. Well, maybe. Maybe that's giving somebody an idea there. But maybe Lori Wired or something can come up with that. Sacha: And even, you know, even a manually scheduled reminder, hey, you know, just write down what your odometer says, and then some kind of logic that takes a look at that reading and says, okay, it's past this threshold, schedule this task. And have that done semi-automatically. Sounds really interesting. Because then you could have all sorts of things to say, all right, I have this manually scheduled recurring task to manually log something. But then it kicks off these processes that then surface all these other tasks that I should do. Could be fun. How would you do that? That sounds really cool. Raymond: So I don't know if I'll ever do that because I'm pretty lax with my car maintenance anyway. Sacha: It could be like every six months check to see whether, you know, it's time. Raymond: Yeah, yeah. 48:31 Vibe-coding? Raymond: But I probably would try the vibe coding with Emacs eventually. You know, every so often I see it on Reddit or Stack Overflow. You know, somebody is trying this package or that package. Yeah, it might be worth trying. Sacha: What are the challenges that people sometimes find when it comes to vibe-coded stuff? It's great for the initial prototype, but once you start digging into it, it's hard to modify it yourself, so then you become dependent on it. And then, of course, the large language model can't quite get some things. How are you finding this so far? I mean, this is very early in your journey. I think you're still experimenting with it. But do you find that it's working out for you? How is it with Emacs? Raymond: It was just like you said, like it just can't get it. Like I told it, well, fix this because I don't like that format, and then it will do it differently. And then, no, but it changed something else that it was doing correctly, and I just couldn't get it to work. And the other thing is, so the course that I was taking, they wanted... Next.js And I just can't describe it. So I was trying to back up my computer one day after installing it, and it's doing on and on in like 20 minutes. Just because there's so many files and it's just crazy. So I thought it was fun to try it, but I think I'll just stick with what I know best. Sacha: In a way, I'm delighted. We've come full circle. Emacs is now the lightweight solution. It is a lot of fun. Emacs, less AI. AI is not quite at the fun point yet, I think. But I'm glad that there's still more to tinker with and explore. I have about eight minutes before the kiddo runs out and starts lunch break. 50:52 Where people can find me Sacha: I'm guessing if people want to keep up with your adventures they can check your EmacsWiki page for updates. You have some code shared on Codeberg and you mentioned your LinkedIn profile which is in my thing, but how can people keep up with what you're learning? Raymond: I'm surprised that people would want to. Sacha: I want to. I do not have an auto to maintain, but I have a cargo bike that I've got to keep up with also. So I'm very interested in these mileage-based task reminders, if you work something out. Raymond: Yeah, I'm not pretty good about publishing stuff. I don't know. That's a good question. I'll come up with something. Maybe I'll be more diligent pushing my updates to the Lisp Codeberg repository. I don't know. Sacha: Sometimes it just takes somebody saying, your stuff is interesting. I'm telling you, your stuff is interesting. Raymond: Okay. Thank you so much. 52:02 Org Mode source blocks Raymond: By the way, I am using source code blocks now. So like we talked earlier about executing the batch file, I can now put a little batch file inside a source code and execute it that way. Sacha: You have those links in your heading and in your Org task bodies. I've been enjoying using Elisp and Shell link types so that I can put in those partially automatable things. In my workflows, because sometimes you're like, I do have to do it manually. I just can't write a function to do everything. But at least they can document it step by step and say, okay, do this, run this code block, you know, just do all that stuff. 52:49 Slideshows? Raymond: And the other thing I'd like to try to do is I know some people can create slideshows with Emacs. And so that looks like it would be worth pursuing. I'd like to try that. Sacha: Oh, yeah. Are you thinking of it for the history stuff that you're involved with or other things that you're teaching? Raymond: So I'm starting to present my photography as a slideshow. And I thought I would try that. And now I see that Emacs can support images. I don't know how it would work as an export, but I look into that now. Sacha: Yeah. And even, you know, the couple of times that I've wanted to use Emacs to create, you know, even just a PDF of these pictures, just being able to automate that instead of pasting and resizing, it's like, ugh, don't do that that way, just have the computer do it for you, and Emacs is great for it. 53:50 Emacs Chats? Sacha: I've been meaning to ask you, what is your viewership with these Emacs chats? Raymond: Are you starting to see a lot of traction with that? Sacha: I have no idea. My goal here is just to get stuff out of interesting people's heads. Interesting stuff out of, yes, interesting people's heads. And I think mainly I'm using it as a way to keep improving my transcription workflow. I guess I like to train everything into text afterwards. That way it's searchable. But it's been really fun getting a sense of how people are using it because we all have such different workflows. And as I was saying in the beginning, you don't see that when you're looking at someone's config. You're like, okay, I see that the code that sets the key bindings, but how does it work together? And then seeing your Org file, I'm like, Oh yeah, why am I not putting the links right there so that I can just get to them from the agenda? Diary can do that? All that stuff is really, really interesting. It's been great revisiting it after such a long break, taking care of the kiddo. Now the kiddo is slightly more independent and even has moments where she's like, bye mom, I don't need any help. Like, okay, yes, I'm just going to do my Emacs thing. Raymond: Asking for the car keys yet or not? Sacha: No, no, no. Also no car, but someday she's going to, you know, and she actually already likes to bike to the park on her own. So she's 10. She's not at the car level yet, but definitely in the biking and walking by herself, she's keen on that. Gradually, independence for both of us and the ability to explore things. I'm really liking these Emacs chats. With you and Shay Arison, who's also been a long-time reader, it's like this continuation of a conversation we've been having over decades now. I can't wait to see where this goes next. I've picked up a lot that I, again, would not have really understood just by looking at your EmacsWiki page and I hope that other people watching can also get a sense of, like, this is what it looks like in use. Sometimes people think oh, I need to make a video that's going to be a snazzy demonstration of this really technical setup, but sometimes it's just the little things that make your life better. Raymond: Well, I really want to thank you for doing this, not just this Emacs chat, but just having your web page and organizing all the Emacs information. It's just been a wonderful resource. Sacha: Thank you. In the last two minutes I have before I get like, "mom!", 56:39 Other resources that would be nice to have Sacha: what kind of resources would you like to see going forward? What would make your learning even better? Raymond: Well, you know, it's just, you know, just saying something that you did... For example, when you were... So when I visited your site and you showed how you could show the time in someone's native time zone, right? Which is a wonderful thing, right? But I had my own time thing that I was wondering. Like, I wanted to know if someone had a date, like May 21, what day of the week is that? I know that I can't go on a meeting on Tuesday. I'm trippable. So I figured out a way you could select it and send it to a custom search engine that searches on DuckDuckGo AI and says, what day of the week is this? And just include the date. And it tells you. Sacha: Yeah, yeah. It's nice to be able to modify things, not just in Emacs, but in browsers or anything else. And my personal approach for that date thing would be like, okay, I'm just going to do an insert date, like a C-c C-! in Org. Because if I type in, you know, the part of the date that will get it to show up, it will include the day of the week. But that only works in Emacs, of course. Everything should be in Emacs. So yeah, I guess one of these little workflows, oh, I just figured out something, sort of posts can ripple out into other people imagining other things that they can do. And on that note, I'm going to wrap this up very nicely. I will try to mark this as unlisted so I can see if I accidentally let any of your passwords slip past my 10-second panic window. You're okay with your coordinates. That's okay. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much, Ray. Raymond: Oh, thank you. Sacha: And I look forward to more conversations. Raymond: Yeah. Sacha: All right. Bye. Raymond: Bye bye. Chat (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chats-emacs-chat-23-emacs-chat-with-raymond-zeitler-chat) sachactube: This is for https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/em (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/em)… charliemcmackin4859: :D charliemcmackin4859: do you use org-mode protocol at all for browser -> emacs interaction? If so, was there any complication to set it up on windows? charliemcmackin4859: I did slideshows a few times at a previous job with org-reveal. I liked it decently. mtendethecreator: Hello sacha phyzixlab: Thank you both. Great interview View Org source for this post (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-raymond-zeitler/index.org) You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com (mailto:sacha@sachachua.com?subject=Comment%20on%20https%3A%2F%2Fsachachua.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F05%2Femacs-chat-with-raymond-zeitler%2F&body=Name%20you%20want%20to%20be%20credited%20by%20(if%20any)%3A%20%0AMessage%3A%20%0ACan%20I%20share%20your%20comment%20so%20other%20people%20can%20learn%20from%20it%3F%20Yes%2FNo%0A).
7 May 2026
Emacs Chat 22: Shae Erisson
[2026-05-08 Fri]: Transcript, yay! I chatted with Shae Erisson about Emacs, keyboards, Org Mode, and life. View it via the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/ec22-shae-erisson), watch/comment on YouTube (https://youtube.com/live/Ovya0O2otbU), read the transcript online (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#ID-ec22-transcript), download the video (https://archive.org/download/ec22-shae-erisson/ec22-shae-erisson.mp4) / MP3 (https://archive.org/download/ec22-shae-erisson/ec22-shae-erisson.mp3) / transcript (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/ec22-shae-erisson.vtt), or e-mail me (mailto:sacha@sachachua.com) your thoughts! Shae Erisson: Haskell, Python, Swedish, knitting, mountain unicycling, contact juggling Shae Erisson's blog - 1. DO SOMETHING 2. BRAG ABOUT IT (http://www.scannedinavian.com) Shae Erisson (@shapr@recurse.social) - recurse.social (https://recurse.social/@shapr) Shae Erisson's blog - Programmers want flow. when programming, light turns RED (https://www.scannedinavian.com/programmers-want-flow-when-programming-light-turns-red.html) shapr/markovkeyboard: keyboard layout that changes by markov frequency · GitHub (https://github.com/shapr/markovkeyboard) Chapters (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chat-22-shae-erisson-chapters) 0:00 Intro 0:57 1999, IRC, community building in Haskell 1:58 Emacs as a light-weight build-your-own-editor toolkit 2:51 LSP, treesitter, Magit, jujutsu, C++, Python, Haskell, rust 3:35 how does a new person experience Emacs? Emacs is always fun. 4:03 Markov keyboard project, moving to Finland, right-handed Dvorak, split keyboard; Jeff Raskin; I am not a koala 6:43 Purpose-specific function keys 7:30 Trackballs, scroll 8:14 1" trackpad rings 8:54 Pair programming: ttyshare, shwim 13:13 Recurse Center, "What is that keyboard? What is that editor?!", Emacs bankruptcy and starter kits 16:06 hippie-expand 17:14 yasnippet 18:52 Function keys 20:02 Org Mode 21:14 Show Org agenda when idle 21:58 Programmers want flow. When programming, light turns red 24:25 ef-themes and modus-themes, season 25:56 htmlize (does this still work on Wayland?) 26:37 lsp-ui-imenu, jumping through rust code 28:25 laptop with 126GB of RAM 29:46 LSP coolness, Haskell, treesitter 31:58 Combobulate 32:46 What else are you using your 126 gigabytes of RAM for? 33:25 TalonVoice 34:45 NixOS, following Steve Purcell about 5 years behind 35:03 envrc 35:52 time-tracking 37:01 taxes with Org Mode, remote lookup 40:55 finding notes with C-s 42:35 Org Mode, managing inbox 46:28 Timestamps 49:12 Org timers 53:53 Org Mode snippets 57:15 Compilation finish function: handle success Transcript (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#org9521271) Transcript 0:00 Intro Sacha: Okay, so I'm going to actually remember to hit go live. I've got a 10 second delay, so if we need to panic, we can panic. Okay, so let's see. I think we are live. Hi, everyone. This is Emacs Chat number 22 after a long hiatus. And today, I'm here with Shae Erisson, who is also like an Emacs friend from a long time back. So this is it. As you were just saying, this is the first time we're actually talking live. And I'm looking forward to hearing about your configuration, how you use Emacs, Shae. But before we dive into that, can you give us a little bit of context? Who you are, what sorts of things you do, and how you use Emacs for that? 0:57 1999, IRC, community building in Haskell Shae: I would say that... I guess I started using Emacs in 1999 when I moved to Finland. And I remember about the same time I was on IRC and I was really frustrated. I remember I got on the Perl IRC channel and I was like, hey, I want an editor that has syntax highlighting. I want to see colors to these words when I'm typing them. And they were like, noob, and they kick-banned me. And I was like, well, maybe I don't want to learn Perl, which I never did. And I guess that was an early introduction into I wanted to be part of communities where people were sharing positive things and building up each other. Actually, I ended up starting the Haskell IRC channel a couple of years later, and that became a very big thing. I would say that I'm mostly known for my work in community building in the Haskell programming language community, because I did that for, I don't know, 15 or 20 years. But I really like Emacs. 1:58 Emacs as a light-weight build-your-own-editor toolkit Shae: So like last week at the same time I had the standing chat with a friend of mine who is also a programmer and he said oh so you're going to do this thing in a week do you want to give me like a preview of the talk and I was like yeah I guess so and some of the things that were really interesting was he was like I've never really tried Emacs I don't know much about it I kind of have this impression that it is a very lightweight build your own editor toolkit and I I was kind of taken aback because, you know, I guess I still have this long ago and far away. I don't know if you remember 8 Megs and Constantly Swapping is what people used to call Emacs and things like that. And I was, it was just kind of, I realized I'm still in my little echo chamber. And this is why I like to talk to other people all the time is because I want to have some exposure to what other people are doing. 2:51 LSP, treesitter, Magit, jujutsu, C++, Python, Haskell, rust Shae: I guess things about Emacs that really changed stuff for me is language server protocol, TreeSitter. Those, I think, are two very powerful tools that are much more generic than, I mean, Magit, of course, is like magic. Although I've mostly switched to jujitsu lately instead for the last year. Let's see, I had, I guess, let's see, I did C++, I did Python, I did a whole lot of Python. And then I had Haskell jobs for five or six years. And then I switched to Rust about a year and a half ago. I now have a Rust job. And one of the things that Prot had asked, I think, or you had asked, and I forget exactly how this went. 3:35 how does a new person experience Emacs? Emacs is always fun. Shae: It was great fun watching your livestream. And it was, how does a new person kind of get comfortable with using Emacs for a particular purpose. And I look for things, in fact, like how do I use Emacs for Rust, Rust development? And I found a couple of good guides on, and I was able to follow most of them, although my Yesnitit stuff is broken and I don't exactly know why tab doesn't work, right? But, you know, like there's always, Emacs is always fun, right? There's so many cool things you could do with it. 4:03 Markov keyboard project, moving to Finland, right-handed Dvorak, split keyboard; Jeff Raskin; I am not a koala Shae: I noticed, I actually hadn't seen your preview page and I noticed that you found my Markov keyboard. Sacha: When you say Emacs is fun, I'm reminded of all of your fun, crazy keyboard experiments. It's like, what? I have a feeling you like to tinker with things. Shae: Yeah, so I think actually the influences as to how I got to where I am are pretty interesting. So the person that I ended up moving to Finland to for dating her, we started a company, we did projects, and I was the programmer. We had this pretty big project. I guess it was like 350,000 euros. And I mean, that was going to be over four years and we had to kind of complete the whole thing, and I was the programmer and we'd had the lowest bid... I had an IBM model M, you know, the super clicky with like all the... And about three years into it, my arm started really hurting a lot. But I was the only programmer. And nobody else knew all the code. And we had to ship it, because that's how we got paid. And so I ended up pushing through. And at the end of it, my arm just didn't work anymore. So for about a year and three months, what I did was I actually taught myself to type right hand. ...Dvorak, because I was already using two-hand Dvorak, and so I kept programming, but I just... One of the things was... like, I like programming, I like using computers, I don't want to wear out my arms again, I don't want to blow them out, so I ended up switching to split keyboards, and I will show you. This is very much the kind of thing that I like to use, and that is like this. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/mpv-shot0060.jpg)Shae: This is an Ergodox Infinity, but there's a lot of other keyboard flavors like this. And one of the things that I particularly like about this... So around the same time I met Jeff Raskin, who wrote the Inhumane Interface. And so for this particular thing, this is like Control and Alt and Hyper and Super and Shift. And this means that under one thumb, I have a lot more modifier keys than you get off of a standard. And it also means... A lot of my problems started with Emacs pinky, the dreaded, the infamous... I think that one of my... I made a keyboard layout called "I am not koala." You may not know this, but koalas have two thumbs. They have one on each side. And that's cool, but I don't have two thumbs, and I realized that when I was trying to grab something, I didn't put my pinky on it. That would be silly, right? I want to put my thumb around it. And so I decided I would move all of my chording keys under my thumbs. And that's kind of how I... 6:43 Purpose-specific function keys Shae: And another thing I did was when I was really only able to use one hand, was I made my function keys mostly purpose-specific. And that was from Jeff Raskin's writings in The Humane Interface. So I guess I'm a programmer who really likes writing code, doesn't want to wear out my arms, and likes to do fun keyboard things, yeah. Sacha: Definitely. You're in it for the long term. You don't want to use up all of your arm capacity now and not be able to keep programming in the future. And now there's hardware to make that easier. So I'm glad. Split keyboards with extra thumb keys seem to be very popular in the Emacs community. I'm now tempted to find space in my desk in order to make that happen. 7:30 Trackballs, scroll (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/ec22-shae-erisson-00-07-37-067.jpg)Shae: Another thing I ended up switching to was I started using trackballs. Oh yeah, yeah. I tend to go completely overboard when trying out new things, so I bought 20 different models of trackballs and ended up settling on this one. The nice thing about this one is that this is how you scroll, and it has four buttons. Sacha: That is really cool. I like using ThinkPads, so I've been just living off the tiny little mouse in the middle of the keyboard. But back in the day, I also used a trackball. If I can get to the point where I want to take my hands off the keyboard again in order to do mouse things, that would probably be the direction I would go. 8:14 1" trackpad rings Shae: I had an experiment in that area, which is where I purchased a one-inch touchpad, and I strapped it to my finger. And it was a PS2, and it had a USB converter plugged into it. And the idea was I could keep typing, and then I could move the mouse around without taking my hands off the keyboard. And now they actually have touchpad rings. They came out six months or a year ago. It's relatively recent. But the idea is no change in context. Sacha: I've only seen the scroll rings, but now there's a touchpad version. That is interesting. Shae: Yeah, I think that's pretty cool stuff. Hardware is actually improving things. 8:54 Pair programming: ttyshare, shwim Shae: Oh, another thing, one of the things you talked about with Prot was how do you learn other people's stuff? And one of the things that I use for pairing, so I have one coworker, and it's a strange, interesting job. I like it a lot. And I met this coworker at a previous job, and one of the things, let's see if I can find it. So we used to, at the previous job, we used this thing called ttyshare. Have you heard of it? ttyshare. It's great. You can run it in a terminal and then you can effectively share your terminal with someone else. And so you have multiplayer terminals and that's neat. It was kind of a pain to set up. You had to make sure that you weren't NATed, you know, like you had to have effectively... someone had to have a public IP. You had to do a couple of other things. And as part of my job, I'm now, I guess, part maintainer for Magic Wormhole, the software. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/mpv-shot0059.jpg)Shae: And so one of the things that my coworker wrote was this nifty thing called ShWiM. And it's basically "shell with me." And it's a wrapper around TTY share so that with one single command, you can share a terminal. And the way that we use this is... We both run Emacs as a server, and then we use emacsclient in the terminal to connect. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/mpv-shot0058.jpg)Shae: I don't know if you've ever done this, but I can have a terminal right next to this, and if I run emacsclient in a window, then I'm sharing the same thing. This is a graphical chat with Sacha, in the terminal or in the UI, and both of them are updated. Sacha: That's fantastic. I remember people were using tmate for something similar before where you could share that. But yeah, it's just making it seamless, making it frictionless. And on the other side, I have also just been using wormhole to send large files back and forth between Karthik and John Wiegley because we have this other Emacs chat thing where we're going to post it eventually, once I finish figuring out how to redact all the personal information and Org files. But yeah, it's great for being able to send things without having to worry about, oh, you know, what's my public IP? Can I tunnel all the different things to get past whatever firewalls there are? So if this also works for terminal things plus Emacs client, that sounds really, really exciting. Shae: We've tried some other experiments. One of the things we tried to do was, and the only downside is like, what if my terminal has a different size, then you have to kind of shrink and match. And so we tried to honestly directly bridge to Emacs clients. And because I don't know if you're aware that there's effectively a local socket for the Emacs client that you can have multiple things connect to. But it turns out there's some sort of like system so I couldn't like reach across the network and directly use my co-workers Emacs session and he couldn't use mine. Weird things happened when we tried to do this cross host. As far as I can tell the Emacs client only works in the same host. Sacha: That's interesting. Lately, I've also been experimenting with CRDT, which has that Emacs-less plant as well. So that's been nice. But yeah, of course, a lot of people will be kind of stuck with the first challenge of finding someone that they can pair in Emacs with. Shae: I understand. And I think I'm honestly very happy that my one single coworker at this job is also a big Emacs user. And so we exchanged cool ideas and worked on stuff. And I'm very happy about that. Sacha: Were they already an Emacs person before they joined? Or did you pick the coworker because they were an Emacs person? Shae: They picked me. They were pretty much the person who started this thing. And they picked me because they'd worked with me at the previous job. Although I did have an experience like that. I had this massive Emacs config file, like 20,000 lines, and half of it was comments because it had accrued over 20 years. 13:13 Recurse Center, "What is that keyboard? What is that editor?!", Emacs bankruptcy and starter kits Shae: And in 2019, when I first went to the Recurse Center, well, my first batch, I just was extremely extroverted and social. But my second immediate following batch, which is not the common pattern, I was like, okay, my goal is to write a bunch of Haskell, get some Haskell jobs, And so I went to the quiet room on the quiet floor. But then someone else came in, Marianne, my favorite programming friend. And she was like, what is that keyboard you're using? And I was like, ah, this is an Ergodox thing. And then she's like, what is this editor you're using? And I was like, oh, that's Emacs. And I was kind of a grumpy, like, I'm trying to get stuff done. But she was persistent. She was like, show me this thing. And so I was like, I'll show you Emacs. And she was like, this is great. And I was like. This thing? OK, cool. And I was like, I don't think you want my config. You'll probably want a starter kit. And she was like, well, what are starter kits? And I was like, well, I've heard about Spacemacs. I've heard about Doom. And I would try one of those. So she tried Spacemacs. And I guess this next part happened over several months. She tried Spacemacs. And then she was like, I like it, but it's slow. So I'm switching to Doom Emacs. And I would pair with her. And I was like, wow, look at all these cool things that the starter kits can do. I ended up flushing my entire 20-year-old config and kind of starting over and stealing a lot of great ideas from the starter kits. And Marianne is very ambitious, independent, hardworking, very focused. I'm not very focused. But I've learned a lot of things from her and watching her kind of... I haven't done C in Emacs in a long time so it's great fun to watch her learn these new things and then I learned stuff too and yeah it's good to have collaborative people to work with. Sacha: So it sounds like if people would like to encourage more people to talk to them about Emacs, feel free to use your strange keyboards out in public. Shae: I like that. That's good. That is good. Yeah I think that's reasonable. Sacha: Yeah, and I've just recently started digging into the starter kits too, because I realized I don't know much about them. It is really interesting going through them and discovering all these Emacs 31 options that you can enable to simplify your config or improve your workflow and all that stuff. So there's a lot of good stuff in starter kits, even for people who are not newcomers. Shae: I agree. And I think there's nothing wrong with just learning a bunch of new things, trying them out, and also throwing them away if you don't like them. Sacha: Now that you've declared Emacs bankruptcy and rebuilt your Emacs on top of other people's starter kits, what has made it into your config? What have you kept from those 20 years of tinkering with Emacs that you really wanted to stick around? 16:06 hippie-expand Shae: I think the only thing that has absolutely stuck around is my use of hippie-expand, which is, I believe, a very old... an ancient tool from a different time. Most of the other stuff is kind of gone. Gone to the wayside. But I really like, I honestly really like hippie-expand. And I know that like, I have rarely heard of other people who use hippie-expand. But you use it? I think you just muted yourself. Sacha: I also vote for hippie-expand. It's a nice way to try different functions and just say, I just want all these different possible completions to go in there. Shae: Yeah. The thing for me that really sold me on hippie-expand is that most of the time when I am... When I'm doing something, I want to say, like, I can already see that word, just pick that one. And so I'll type the first characters and hit, like, meta forward slash, and ta-da, it's usually there. But then sometimes I do really want, like, some Elisp or some other stuff. And so I actually spent a lot of time tuning this the first time. 17:14 yasnippet Shae: I actually only changed it for the first time recently because I was reading a how to write Rust well inside Emacs and they said oh well you want to use yasnippet and so I you know the funny thing is that yasnippet I believe is the thing that got me into Emacs like in 1999 I met this Finnish person Erno Kuusela in Oulu, Finland. Really cool guy. I was like, wow, how do you do this? As soon as you open a file, it's got a substructure and a skeleton. And when you type part of a function or something, it just populates it. And he was like, I'm using this snippet command in Emacs. That's why I was like, what's Emacs? It was very exciting. And at the time, I was using Vim. And Vim was not as, I don't want to say, automatable. Sacha: Yeah, now with Neovim and Lua, people are writing more extensions for it. But before, you had to know a lot of magic in order to customize Vim. Shae: Right, right. I agree. Let's see, what else do I do? I run my own email server, and I, of course, read my email in Emacs. In GNU, no less. Which is, I know, an NNTP reader, but it's still also a great... I used to use twiddle compile and I think that stopped working like six years ago, so I need to get rid of this comment, but there's still a lot of kind of cruft from earlier times. 18:52 Function keys Shae: Remember how I said that I use function keys to have like purpose specific stuff? This was especially true because, I mean, I had my left arm strapped to my chest for like a year and three months before I even started regaining any flexibility, and that meant that... I'm amazed that you could just map them directly to single commands instead of giving in to the temptation to make them prefixes for longer keystrokes. I didn't really have the choice because I had only one arm that worked. It was just a lot harder to do any chording at the time. I still have a lot of these. F3 I use a lot, which is like, oh, what am I working on right now? That is org-clock-goto. A lot of times, I want to have a terminal that's in Emacs, so that's vterm, 20:02 Org Mode (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/ec22-shae-erisson-00-20-17-133.jpg)Shae: And I actually really do use the calendar all the time. This is like just switch to whatever it is. Of course, my email is here. You know what, let's see... So this... I don't know, have you seen this before? Have you seen this thing called STARTED in an Org mode file? Sacha: I use a STARTED state, yes. Shae: Well, I got it from you! So if I look at like, my Org Mode configuration, a lot of this STARTED stuff I have from you, I don't know when, but you were the person who introduced me to it. Sacha: It's the reminder that I did start working on this. I tend to get distracted by intermediate tasks, so it's nice to be able to say, try to finish these ones first before you move on to the next thing, maybe? Shae: I agree. I have the same thing, yeah. And I keep meaning, because this is... I know that you can put Org Mode configuration into the first TODO item. I would really like to move it into the elisp and I just haven't gotten around to it. And it's been 10 years. I mean, maybe I should just do it. 21:14 Show Org agenda when idle (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/ec22-shae-erisson-00-21-23-933.jpg)Shae: One of the things I did that I found fun... I really have written almost zero Elisp, but I did actually puzzle my way through this a year ago. Since so much of my life is in Org Mode, I learned how to make timers. This is very close to what you get directly out of how to do timers in Emacs. After some amount of time, I want my Org agenda to pop up because I want to say like, oh, what is the stuff I'm supposed to be doing? And what am I forgetting? What has been scheduled? And what is on my to-do list? And I also like to look at what is the stuff I've been working on lately? And I really like that a lot. 21:58 Programmers want flow. When programming, light turns red (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/ec22-shae-erisson-00-22-16-067.jpg)Shae: Another thing that I realized is that I had a blog post that was wildly popular. Where did I put it? And it was all about Emacs. I don't know if you saw the... Here we go. It was... Ah, here it is. So here it is in... This is very much an Emacs... Sacha: Oh, yeah, I remember that one. I put it in Emacs News. I thought it was great. Shae: All right, cool. Sacha: I would like the kiddo to sometimes be able to acknowledge this, but this is not happening. Still, yes. Shae: Right, right. Yeah, and so this was really fun because, like... I had a friend who was in development and there was like millions of dollars spent on how do you detect whether a programmer is in flow and it came down to if they're typing they're probably in flow so and that was it because they tried to look at EGs and doing all kinds of other stuff but it was like if they're typing don't interrupt them. And I don't know, because I do so much in Emacs, I'm not sure how accurate this was. But basically, that's where I learned to do timers the first time. Or maybe... I don't remember which one I did first. And the idea then was as soon as basically my average typing into Emacs has gone up a certain amount, then it will actually switch to busy. And it works just fine. It was a lot of fun to write. Sacha: So yeah, interesting use of getting the activity. I've seen other fun implementations of this. I think there's a c-c-c-combo package that makes some fun animation appear if you're typing really quickly. Shae: Oh, oh, yeah. I'm guessing because I think Atom, the Atom editor had that for a while. I guess that's where it came from. Sacha: So yeah, because you can instrument Emacs and play around with it, you can certainly do all sorts of things based on that information. Okay, so you've got it, you've got it set up so that when you come back to your computer, it'll show you the stuff that you've been working on. And when you're working on the things, you can tell it to tell the rest of the world not to bug you. Gotcha. Shae: That's right. [Sacha: What other fun stuff do you have in there? 24:25 ef-themes and modus-themes, season Shae: I discovered that I love the EF themes. I love the Modus themes. They make me very happy. They're just unreasonably pleasant. As someone who has tried every single Emacs theme ever, they're just my favorite themes. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/ec22-shae-erisson-00-24-41-000.jpg)Shae: And so, at the moment, it's summer... Where did my summer go? How can this be? There we go. How come I'm in spring? Wait, isn't spring over? Hasn't summer just started? You know what I was thinking would be fun would be take the time of day, and you know that the EF themes has spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and I'm not sure if there are dark versions of each of those, but I thought, like I know that Modus themes will do this like check for the local time of when it turns dark, and then it will go from the light theme to the dark theme as soon as the sun hits, and I was like, well, what if I do that for seasons, you know, wouldn't that be cool? Sacha: There's this subtle sense of change as you go through the year. But of course you also have this thing there where you just randomize it. Shae: Well, I like that. Sometimes it's like I'm just kind of like, ah, I'm bored. I'm just bored of what I'm looking at. And so I will just change my thing. And it's just time for something. I don't know. It seems to work. It's like it gives me a little brain break from what I was staring at. And I did not know I was going to reset the effects scale, but that's fine. Interesting. What else do I have in here? 25:56 htmlize (does this still work on Wayland?) Shae: Oh, Emacs HTMLize. I'm a little sad. I switched to Wayland. And if I remember correctly, HTMLize only works with, or maybe HTMLize still works, and it's the SVG one that doesn't work. Emacs SVG is a thing that if you're running with an X11 backend, you can turn your current screen directly into an SVG, which is really cute. It does not work in Wayland. I think HTMLize does still work. What other things do I have in here? I don't know. I guess a lot of it lately has been trying to make Rust things work smoothly. I've been trying to do some... I wonder does... Oh, cool. That was not what I expected. 26:37 lsp-ui-imenu, jumping through rust code (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/ec22-shae-erisson-00-26-41-100.jpg)Shae: I just started doing this thing with imenu. imenu integrates nicely with LSP. Sacha: That is a very pretty sidebar thing, and I need to learn how to do that. Shae: So because I have all these extra modifiers, my s-i is lsp-ui-imenu. And the reason that what I mostly use that for is when I have like a bunch of Rust code and I want to quickly jump through the structure of it. Basically that integrates with LSP, finds all the definitions, and I can quickly jump through it. I used to use lsp-treemacs for that, but lsp-treemacs puts things in its own order, not quite the same order I want, although treemacs is quite nice. I think that the thing to do is that you and I at some time maybe the next time if we do this again we should set up with a Shwim connection and you and I can both share our Emacs and then you can show me cool things that you do and I can show you cool things that I do and then we can start filing over some of the things. How about that? Sacha: That sounds fantastic. I know we'd wanted to experiment with pair programming a long time ago so that sounds like a seamless way to do it. And therefore I will go and figure out how to install shim and get it working. I will probably need your help to actually test it. I don't know, I think I can rustle up. Maybe it'll work off my phone. You haven't tried that. But lspui, okay, so I've just been using straight up imenu, like on Neanderthal, but lsp-ui has this fancy grouping of things and colors and stuff, so I definitely want to check that out. Shae: I'm a fan, yeah. I don't know. Do I have anything else exciting that goes with this in here? 28:25 laptop with 126GB of RAM Shae: I will say that at the moment, the system I'm working on, I like buying unreasonably powerful laptops. And so, like, this system has 128 gigs of RAM and 24 cores. My previous laptop has 192 gigs of RAM. Long story short, I end up in a lot of cases where I want to use more memory. I've got all these cores. Can you do something with them? Perhaps you've already seen things like LSP doctor, which will say, have you tried this thing? Have you done this other thing? LSP has really changed Sacha: I have not. Sorry, would you like to show me this LSP doctor thing? Because I have not ever seen it. Shae: Yeah. Do you use language servers much for your development? Sacha: I am only just getting used to having a relatively modern 2018 instead of 2010 laptop. And so I have the red squigglies and various things, but I don't know what to do with them yet. Shae: Well, I mean, I'm doing a lot of this. So I have... 29:46 LSP coolness, Haskell, treesitter Shae: Originally for me it was like I spent a lot of time with the Haskell language server because I was doing so much Haskell and it was a super powerful thing. In fact, somebody decided to hammer in half of a proof assistant into the Haskell language server and that was magic. You could do incredible stuff with that because you could just grab all of your local variables and transform the whole shape of your function and you could just write little snippets and just have it work. And that was amazing. It wasn't quite... One of the goals that I believe is... For future development of all programming editors, I believe that something like Emacs macros, but instead for abstract syntax trees, I believe this is an essential ingredient that we do not yet have. And I think that TreeSitter is the first step towards there. We now have one of the hats, right? Which is where we can take... TreeSitter is, you know, if you've used it... It is like you write some effectively C code to produce a really fast parser. Or is it like JavaScript that then compiles to C code? I forget exactly how it works. But the nice thing about TreeSitter is, I don't know if you remember, I'm sure you do remember, that if you were writing Python code and you used a triple-quoted string, you had to then add a comment with another quote because regular expressions is how Emacs was doing all the syntax highlighting. And honestly, that was kind of crap. And then there were projects like the Semantic Bovinator that made a full parsing suite in Elisp, which to me is half brilliant and half insane. And then there was TreeSitter, which kind of took over the world because it was... I think that the language server and TreeSitter are the first two of these editor generic pieces, and I suspect there will be more. I think that something where you can modify the abstract syntax tree and then put back to the source is one of those potential paths forward. I hope so. Sacha: Yeah, that would be great if you could just do the manipulations and then roundtrip it back into source code. Just regenerate the changed part of your code. That sounds fantastic. So it sounds like you were able to do some kind of manipulation with the Haskell use case that you were describing. Any chance you can show us like the awesomeness? Shae: Sadly, that sadly does not work anymore. 31:58 Combobulate Shae: But you know, if you're looking for something in that area, have you heard of a Emacs library called Combobulate? Sacha: I have heard of it. I haven't dug into it. Shae: So it uses TreeSitter for source code manipulation by, and it's a lot closer to the way that like, you know, in Org Mode, you can like hold meta and arrow to kind of move things around. It uses TreeSitter to let you both move around in the context as well as actually alter the shape. And to me, this is the first step towards this tool that I want, which is where I can write a keyboard macro and have it edit an abstract syntax tree and then spit the results back into the buffer. Yeah. Sacha: All right. 32:46 What else are you using your 126 gigabytes of RAM for? Sacha: What else are you using your 126 gigabytes of RAM for? Shae: Let's see. Honestly, I'm going to tell you that Rust Analyzer can take a lot of memory. And a Rust compilation can take a lot of cores. And I'm okay with that because I actually, I do like, and I will say that this laptop is actually from this year. So it's a brand new, like, top of the line. But then like, how would I, because I've got like, which I think is a bunch of matrix multiplication hardware. How do I use that from Emacs? I don't know. I'm sure I can find something, you know. 33:25 TalonVoice Sacha: Maybe voice computing? Shae: Oh, that's an idea. Yeah, one of my friends, she's using Talon. Have you heard of Talon? Sacha: Yeah, I've heard of Talon. There are a couple of videos about people using Talon to code by voice, usually involving memorizing kind of a different alphabet for very quickly accessing different shortcuts. But it sounds really cool, and you sound like you've got the hardware to do something amazing with it. Shae: That's true. Well, you know, Talon actually lets you do something very similar to Combobulate, where you can navigate the AST of your source code. You can kind of move around very quickly. I don't know, like, are we like at the end of our? No, no, we're halfway through, right? Sacha: We're halfway through. I have about 28 minutes before the kiddo runs out and starts demanding lunch. Shae: Okay, well, I feel like I've been driving the structure of our just kind of like dumping random things. Did you have any questions or anything you wanted to cover? Sacha: This is all amazing. I come in with no preconceived notions. I'm just like, okay, shapr does cool things with Emacs. Let's hear about it. Let's go, let's go. Shae: That works for me. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it's been focused on Rust development lately. Rust and Jujutsu. 34:45 NixOS, following Steve Purcell about 5 years behind Shae: I've been doing a lot of Nix. I'm running NixOS. I don't know if you're familiar, but that's been great fun. It's funny, I feel like I've been following Steve Purcell around from a technical perspective. I'm always about five years behind Steve. 35:03 envrc Shae: I was like, oh, you know, NixOS is kind of a pain with Emacs. And just like this, what was it, NixOS? I forget. Anyway, Steve was like, oh, well, have you tried my library, envrc? And I was like, what's that? And he was like, well, now each buffer can have its own envrc. And I was like, it's perfect. That's exactly what I need. Because previously, every time I switched buffers, it would then go load all of the local everything in Nix. And sometimes that could take a long time, especially if I'm doing Haskell, that could take 10 seconds, and I really don't want that sort of lag. And so Steve Purcell's brilliant library, envrc, says, you know what? Every single buffer can just keep such a thing, and then you can only relit it when you need to. And that's pretty awesome. Sacha: That sounds cool, and I should check that out too. 35:52 time-tracking Sacha: @JacksonScholberg has a question. He says, "I was curious about what you were tracking your time working on, how you track it." Is it just Org Clock? So this is how you keep track of the things you're working on and what got interrupted by the new thing that you just added to the stack and so forth? Shae: Right. In fact, I have this thing. Honestly, when I sit down on my computer, Just clock in. You'll notice in the bottom right here, we have chat with Sacha, right? And so like, I just kind of clock in stuff. And like, I'm not always, I really kind of need to reorganize my Org mode files because I've been naming them per host because I previously had like a work Org mode and I had a home Org mode. now that my home hardware is also my work hardware I guess and so like I still have my previous laptops things where I'm keeping my events I really need to reorganize things but I mean yeah I schedule things I oh you know I've got a weird thing to show you 37:01 taxes with Org Mode, remote lookup (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/ec22-shae-erisson-00-37-09-900.jpg)Shae: I decided that it would be great fun to do my taxes. Sacha: You are showing me your taxes, do I need to like black out this whole thing? Shae: Well, this is actually just an example from the docs. So I could actually share my taxes on it because I mostly don't care. But I think in fact you can figure out exactly how much money I'm making by looking at the open whatever. So the thing about this is that I decided to file all of my tax forms directly into Org Mode spreadsheets and then do remote lookups. So basically each spreadsheet was one particular form. And then once I'd gotten to the bottom, like I need this result, like what's my estimated income? And then I would use the lookup, kind of this cross spreadsheet lookup. And that's how I did my taxes for last year. And then my de facto mother-in-law, she's an accountant, and she didn't exactly do this thing, but it was pretty close. She was like, you've got all your taxes in the spreadsheet. I was like, yeah. And then she looked at it and she was like, what is that? And I was like, anyway. So I got to kind of file everything back out into TurboTax, but that was a fun thing to build. Sacha: Yeah, I have something like that too. So for example, whenever I do my tax paperwork, I just have to have like, you know, the step by step checklist. Okay, this is where I need to go to get this number. This is where I can put it in. And then eventually it spits out a table that says, okay, put this in box 11, put this in box 13, so that I don't have to do the steps by hand. Because even before the, you know, for me, I use like simple stacks or whatever, it's web based. But before you get to the point where you can put the numbers in the form, you gotta go to this website, calculate this thing, and Org just makes all of that so much easier. Shae: I agree. Yeah. Sacha: And this remote lookup thing is something I'm always looking up because Org tables are so powerful, but also I need more examples in my life to remember how to use them. Shae: Well, I think it took me four hours the first time to get it all figured out. But I can send you an example without showing it here. I can send you an example because I figured out, I think I've hammered the remote lookup down very thoroughly. Sacha: And once you've got it right, you can just keep filling that in or copy and paste it. You have an example of the syntax and that's already all you need. Shae: Right. I did run across some limitations of the evaluation method of Org mode spreadsheets. But maybe I've been using them a little too hard, if that makes any sense. Sacha: Oh, what kind of limitation? Shae: Honestly, I think I finally found a way to say every single... Because it was... So really the way that spreadsheets work is they're much more like Dataflow. And that is just that you end up with, like, either you work from the endpoint, which is like much more Haskell style evaluation, which is where you're like, I need to start here. What depends on this? But in the case where you have a whole bunch of different Org Mode spreadsheets, I think I ended up with this little text style hack where I just ran it a bunch of times. So it's like evaluate, evaluate, evaluate. Because remote lookups I ran, you know, I don't remember. And I think I took notes, but I don't remember. That's one of the great things about Org Mode is that I swear it's my, like, half of my brain is in my Org Mode notes. And whenever I had, I'm like, oh, what was that thing? I'm like, well, fortunately, with my terrible short-term memory, I took copious notes because otherwise I would never be able to get back to it. 40:55 finding notes with C-s Sacha: What is your favorite way of finding those notes? Shae: I actually use a lot of C-s just because I kind of have some idea of where they are in my tree structure and I'll also say I use a lot of my Org capture templates and they're not super complicated. I have like a to-do, I have a journal, I have ideas and like random ideas will float into my head like you saw Markov keyboard right it is like the weirdest art piece you've seen all day right and Markup keyboard shows up on the front page of Hacker News once a year or so. And people are like, programmers have gone too far. This cannot possibly be usable by humans or something. And I'm like, well, I don't know. I think it was art. And so a lot of times those things will drop into my head, something like that, where I'm trying to do something else. And so I will quickly write down the idea and then just gotten it out of my head enough that I can continue with what I was doing. And so I have a long list of strange ideas. A recent one was like, you've probably had your teeth worked on once or twice. And you know that the dentist always had to move the light around. And I'm like, but we have really good eye tracking. Wouldn't it make sense to figure out where the dentist or the car mechanic is what they're looking at? And then have the light move around behind them to figure out how to actually light up the place they're looking at, right? We've got vision tracking. Why don't we do this? But I don't really, yeah. I decided maybe I don't want to work on that one right now. Sacha: It sounds like an involved project. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you're capturing, you're stuffing a lot of these ideas into an inbox. 42:35 Org Mode, managing inbox Sacha: A lot of people are probably in the same boat where they've got these inboxes full of ideas. How do you deal? Shae: I archive stuff when I'm done with it. Sacha: Oh yeah? Shae: Yeah, so a lot of times, and I find this very valuable, is like if I look at... Do I have it? Oops, that was not what I meant to do. Sacha: Alright, so you basically just do aggressive speed commands, archive, archive, archive, or look at the agenda and just mark a whole bunch of things and say, that's it, that's gone. It was written down and then it can go. Shae: Yeah, well, when I'm really done with something, when the thing is finished, then I will just archive it. I mean, do you use Archive much? Sacha: I do. I have a function that goes through my inbox file and just archives anything that was marked as done. Shae: Oh, nice! Sacha: Because that way it clears it up, right? So I'll refile things where I'm like, okay, it's done, but it has important information. I want to put it somewhere else. But if it's just a transitory task that I'm using to remind myself, tomorrow I have to do this, go find the water bottle when it's done, I don't need to know about it in the future. So it's left in my inbox because I checked it off, and then periodically I'll say, clean up inbox. Not only will it remove all of the done things, but if I leave a tag In the title of the task or if the task matches certain regular expressions, it will refile it to the appropriate place in my kind of more permanent thing. So I can say, okay, all of my Emacs related tasks will get automatically refiled to my Emacs category without my having to do that manually. Shae: So you're using tagging because I kept trying to do tagging and never quite did it. Sacha: I use tagging sometimes when I remember it, but this is also why I use the The regular expression match against the title. I'm using Orgzly on Android to capture the thing on my phone. I might want to say this is a consulting task. File it in the right place so it doesn't get lost in my inbox. Shae: Wow. When is your interview so I can learn from your tricks? Sacha: This is now. Here we go! You can ask questions. The nice thing about conversations is that we jostle different ideas, and we are like, oh yeah, maybe I should write a blog post about that, because I take it for granted. So now apparently I have to write a blog post about my cleaning up process. My inbox is very long. The other thing, speaking of dealing with really long lists that I picked up from John Wiegley was I also sometimes remember to check this list of random items. So in my agenda, there's also like this, you know, random selection of things that I have not gotten around to thinking about further, but it's there just in case serendipity or boredom make me do something. Shae: you know that's... I've thought about having... because you know, I've got the pop-up this little timer that pops up my agenda, but I've thought about maybe adding a section I don't know if I could add a section here but it would be something that says like at the bottom here's two or three random to-do's that have been open for a while just like for garbage collection. Because I know that in Jujutsu, I've got a cool little query that says, if you have any change sets that are more than two weeks old and are not in a permanent branch state, maybe you should do something about them. It's just called to do. It'd be kind of nice to have that for Org Mode as well. Sacha: Yeah, it's just, you know, and our brains do these strange things with randomness, right? They're like, oh, I want to see what's new now. Shae: Right, right, yeah. Oh, I have a question. You have this thing where you had... 46:28 Timestamps Shae: I saw you taking notes with Prot, and you had this timestamp. Sacha: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm using it now. Okay, okay. So I have it bound two ways now. I have it as a dabbrev, so dynamic abbreviation, and I also have it as a yasnippet because sometimes I'm using it with either SPC or tab to complete it. And I don't really want to think, I just want to get the timestamp in and then move on. And so abbrevs can run functions to evaluate it. You can insert the timestamp that way. Or yesnippet, of course, can evaluate the thing. And now I have those. It's basically just a wall-clock time so that I can go back and plop in the chapters as time offsets, which are automatically calculated from the YouTube data on when the stream started. So I don't have to manually calculate my chapters. But it's super useful to have these times everywhere. And in this case, during a conversation, I want to be able to say, hey, we talked about something interesting. And then be able to go back to that point in the video later on. Shae: So you're matching? Oh, oh, wow. Sacha: So my shortcut for yasnippet is "ot" because I never type "ot" elsewhere, and it's close enough. I use Dvorak, so my O is on home row, and T is close by. Also, on the other hand... There you go. Shae: Did I already show you that this is actually Dvorak? Sacha: Oh, there you go. Now I can see the keycaps. Yeah, earlier it was kind of blurry, but now, yes, yes. So yes, that is my shortcut for inserting the timestamp. I previously added seconds as well, but then I realized that my kind might be false precision. So I just, you know, just use a minute at the moment and then I go back and adjust the timestamps a little bit later. But yeah, you can use abbreviations for all sorts of things, including times and dates and stuff. Shae: Have you ever tried Org timestamp? Sacha: Yeah, Org timer. So Org timer gives you a relative timestamp, right? You can say Org timer. Oh, okay. So, sorry. Are you talking about the C-u C-c ! or something of that sort? So that's actually what I initially was doing, but then it was too many keystroke word modifiers to remember. And then I had to press RET to select the, you know, thing. So now I just have an abbreviation insert the Org mode formatted timestamp for me. And then I have this code that searches for Org timestamp regular expression and then does the calculation and conversion and stuff. 49:12 Org timers (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/ec22-shae-erisson-00-53-52-300.jpg)Sacha: So Org timer is a separate thing. It's useful for meetings and things like that. You would say, okay, your Org timer starts at the beginning of the meeting and then you can have a list and it automatically, like if you alt shift enter or something like that in the list, it'll automatically like insert the right timer, relative timer to it. There you go. So there's an org-timer-start. But the reason I didn't go that approach was because then you A. have to remember to actually start the timer and B. then you have to synchronize your time with video time. Which might not have started at the same time. So now I'm just like, okay, wall clock for everything. And then I can do the transformation with whatever I like. And since I'm editing my subtitles in Emacs, I can say, hey, this file started at this time, according to YouTube. And then just, you know, map all of the wall clocks to the appropriate subtitle times. Shae: Wow. That's really cool. Sacha: Anyway, so timers, relative, absolute, and using abbreviations is great. Which I think actually is a thing that I picked up from Karl. Karl Voit because he also likes to use... He has an abbreviation, not at the Emacs level, but he has an abbreviation on his system level, like with his window manager, so he can use this timestamp trick anywhere, including in Etherpad or wherever else where you want to insert the date and time. That's V-o-i-t, by the way. But yeah, so times are a great way to just leave yourself a pointer to that moment so you can go back to it later. Shae: Now I'm curious, how well does that integrate with this sort of thing? Because I really like looking back at my history agenda. Sacha: If you have it insert an inactive timestamp, I think it should still show up there. I think it will be a little like those. Shae: Yeah, it looks like the... Well, it looks like these two are showing up. Sacha: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that's a basic thing that I would have inserted by my either abbrev or... So it's not even dabbrev. It's just regular abbrev in Emacs. Shae: What's the difference? Sacha: dabbrev is like hippie... Okay, let me just double check here. I feel like dabbrev is sort of hippie expand-ish. It looks in your buffer or possibly other buffers. And I think hippie-expand and dabbrev, they kind of work together. It's an option to have them work together. Okay, so hippie-expand is... Oh, so I see. Hippie-expand is the more advanced version of dabbrev. dabbrev was Dynamic Expand, and Hippie Expand says, yes, that, but try a whole bunch of other things first. But my timestamp thing is actually just done by a regular abbrev, and I will find the thing in my config for "ot". Oh, yeah. I will put it in my chat. Shae: My spelling, most people say my emails are spelled really well, but it's only because I have ispell set up. Sacha: Yeah, ispell is great. I am learning French and therefore... Shae: Oh, c'est très bien. Je parle un peu de français aussi. Sacha: Oh, oui. I'm keeping a journal in French on my blog and I have the Tatoeba Project with all the example sentences and I have a consult interface to look up stuff in them so I can just borrow other people's words and try to make it sound more natural. Plus of course the usual searching for words in dictionaries and stuff. Anyway, in the chat, I put in my global abbrev table definition for insert format time string. In case you want to steal that, it's right there. Shae: I will definitely save that into my notes here. 53:53 Org Mode snippets Shae: Another thing I use a lot is I use Org Mode snippets. I will tell you that the first time, I guess if I look back at... This is another thing that I have done a lot of in the past, which is where... I love the fact that Org Mode snippets are just executable. I can just run them. I guess two jobs, three jobs ago, there was a case where, because I would keep the results around and look at them, there was a case where, I guess a couple of months before, something got shipped to a customer, and I noticed our database schema had changed and I prevented a tremendous amount of upset and emergency by being like this doesn't look great. I got one from two weeks ago, and it does not match. Something's wrong here. Everybody's like, I don't think so, Shae. And I'm, like, no no no, we do have a problem, we've got to fix this. And they were, like, oh crap! And then I was like, yeah, solved a problem! Sacha: Yeah, I basically try to do as much in a snippet instead of in, you know, in a scratch buffer or whatever, just because having that record, the fact that I did it, and also any notes that I had leading up to it and the output of it, it's just so helpful. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/ec22-shae-erisson-00-55-39-300.jpg)Shae: Oh, I've got a cool thing that I'm doing for work. And that is that our readme file is not only a word file, but we also have the demonstration of our actual thing is done by using like dependent snippets. And so that means that like if you want that, perhaps this is something everyone already knows, I don't know, but we basically are using the results of earlier commands in later places. And the other nice thing about that is that then when we want to check, we have to effectively dock tests, right? When we want to check and see if our software works the way it does in the readme, we evaluate the final Org Mode snippet, which then calls it forward, calls it forward, and then if something goes up or not. Well, I guess I need to fix something. And so it was pretty exciting to put Org Mode niftyness into our, into my Word reading file, you know? Sacha: Nice, nice. And you did mention your other coworker is on board with the whole Emacs thing. So that's one of the things that people are often like, I want to use Org Mode and I want to use it for like the documentation or the testing or whatever, but they got to get everyone else on board with the thing. Otherwise it's Jupyter Notebooks or whatever else, right? Shae: Right. Okay, so I have a joke for you that I came up with a long time ago, and that is, do you know the only way, there's only one way that Sauron could have organized the invasion of Middle-earth, and do you know what he used? Sacha: What? Shae: Orc Mode. It's a terrible joke, isn't it? Sacha: That's okay. I'm sure someone in the comments will come up with an even worse pun. Shae: I'm excited! It's going to be great! Sacha: Never underestimate the punniness of the Emacs community. Shae: I completely agree. I don't know. Do I have anything else exciting in here? 57:15 Compilation finish function: handle success (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/ec22-shae-erisson-00-57-48-300.jpg)Shae: I actually really like this one. I used to run all of my tests in compile. F12, I have F12 bound to compile. And one of the things I wanted was, I wanted something where it was, if the compile is successful, don't show me the results, because everything's good. And so since I'm doing stuff in Rust, when I run all the tests, it leaves the buffer up, and I need to get around to actually doing stuff like this for Rustic mode as well, where when the tests pass, just go away, because it's all good. And when the tests don't pass, show me where to... I need to look at the problem. And I got this from Enberg and Emacs, I don't know, 20 years ago. Maybe it was less than 20 years ago, but it probably wasn't. So yeah, there's so much good stuff. Yeah, there's just so much good stuff. And I also like to, oh, look, here we go. You can see that this is long gone, by the way. It's not there anymore. Sacha: I have a proper, you know, it's sachachua.com/dotemacs. A lot easier to remember. But yeah, and I think that's, yeah, yeah, I remember that now. defadvice is also obsolete. The new hotness is advice-add or something like that. Shae: Oh, really? I'm going to make another TODO item for there. Sacha: I was digging through my notes trying to find, do you share your config anywhere? Shae: No, but you know, at this point if I share it on YouTube, I might as well just throw it up somewhere. Why not? It's not very exciting. Like if you look at someone like Ross Baker who has magic, like wow, is there some magic coming in from Ross Baker? I'm so excited to see more stuff from him. There's just like, I guess I feel like compared to almost everybody else I know, I feel like a power user. Because I'm like, you know, I wish I could do this thing. A lot of times someone I know is like, well, I did that thing and here's a library. And I'm like, yeah, I'll have to do it. And I just, I guess I feel like I'm a power user. And on the good side, I guess I kind of, I really haven't written that much Elisp ever, like I was saying in the comments during your interview with Prot. And I kind of like to, it's just I guess it's never quite gotten to the top of my stack. And I did decide it was time for me to send money to Parade for at least for themes, if not for like, please teach me some Elisp so I can actually, because you know, it's not that Elisp is hard. It's more like, how do I kind of, what are the things I interact with? What are the words? What's the vocabulary of working with Emacs? I don't actually really know. As a user, sure, I can do cool stuff. I can do Lisp macros. I've done Scheme and Lisp some of the past, but not inside Emacs. Sacha: Alright, so let me clarify. After more than 20 years of using Emacs, did you say you feel like a power user or do not feel like a power user? Shae: I definitely feel like a power user, but I don't feel like someone who does much of anything with Elisp. I don't really feel like someone who has much of a clue in the internals. And that's not entirely true. I have some of the ideas. But for the most part, I haven't actually needed to know that much about the internals. And sure, I've dug into things like how do you efficiently work with large buffers in your ??, like the ropes data structure and stuff like that. That was more for fun. Although it is something that Emacs does and does extremely well. But I'd kind of like to... There's a lot of things I'd kind of like to change and I don't really have enough of the understanding of the kind of how I would write the Elisp to do it. Here's a good example. When I hit F3, it takes me to the one I'm currently clocked into. Unless I haven't clocked in to something since I started Emacs. And honestly, I would like to use something like org-ql, the Org query language, to go find if I've just started Emacs, and Org does not know about something, you know, I just want you to go search for it. I have so many cores and so much memory, just go find it. Sacha: That sounds like an excellent reason to go learn Emacs so that you can have it... If you're not currently clocked in, go find the most recent clocked in task and go there, or maybe present you with a list of things and then go from there. I would love to hear about your Emacs Lisp learning journey because that's one of the big things that moves people from, you know, power users, yes, but users, to using Emacs as a lightweight editor toolkit for something that's custom fit to exactly what their workflow is. And on that note, I'm going to try to wrap up gracefully before the kiddo, you know, just like drags me out here. Thank you so much for doing this. I look forward to more conversations. I'm going to post the transcript and other things like that pretty quickly, I think, because I have this nice workflow now that lets me take screenshots and everything, but there's so much here that I want to unpack. But I hear the kiddo, bye! #+begin_export 11ty <a name="end-ec22-transcript"></a></details> #+end_exportbvt Chat (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#emacs-chat-22-shae-erisson-chat) JacksonScholberg: Emacs is fun JacksonScholberg: Apple's touchpad is another option JacksonScholberg: Trackpad JacksonScholberg: Lol JacksonScholberg: I was curious about what you are tracking your time working on JacksonScholberg: How you track it. JacksonScholberg: You clock in and out to what you are working on. I like that idea. Bezaar.musicc: That's great! PuercoPop: the buffer api (properties) is the hardest part for me charliemcmackin4859: I think you still have a timer going, btw Find more Emacs Chats or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat (https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat) View Org source for this post (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/index.org) You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com (mailto:sacha@sachachua.com?subject=Comment%20on%20https%3A%2F%2Fsachachua.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F05%2Fmay-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson%2F&body=Name%20you%20want%20to%20be%20credited%20by%20(if%20any)%3A%20%0AMessage%3A%20%0ACan%20I%20share%20your%20comment%20so%20other%20people%20can%20learn%20from%20it%3F%20Yes%2FNo%0A).
4 May 2026
Emacs Chat 21: Amin Bandali
Chapters (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#current-notes-for-next-time-emacs-chat-21-amin-bandali-rough-notes-during-our-chat) Transcript (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#current-notes-for-next-time-emacs-chat-21-amin-bandali-transcript) Chat (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#current-notes-for-next-time-emacs-chat-21-amin-bandali-chat) [2026-05-08 Fri]: Updated with Amin's changes. [2026-05-07 Thu]: Added file enclosure so that it can load as a proper podcast. I chatted with Amin Bandali about Emacs, configuration, EXWM, keybindings, audio, and life. View it via the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/ec21-amin-bandali), watch/comment on YouTube (https://youtube.com/live/ZiTQt8q1Ybc), read the transcript online (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#ID-ec21-transcript), download the transcript (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/ec21-amin-bandali.vtt), or e-mail me (mailto:sacha@sachachua.com) your thoughts! Links: Emacs Chat with Sacha Chua - bandali (https://kelar.org/~bandali/gnu/emacs/emacs-chat-202605.html) - Amin's blog post about this talk Amin Bandali (https://kelar.org/~bandali/): a computing scientist, archivist, and activist for user freedom bandali's GNU Emacs configuration (https://kelar.org/~bandali/gnu/emacs/dotemacs.html) .emacs.d - configs - My configuration for GNU Emacs and other programs (https://git.kelar.org/~bandali/configs/tree/.emacs.d) The People of Emacs - bandali (https://kelar.org/~bandali/gnu/emacs/people.html) emacs-exwm/exwm: Emacs X Window Manager · GitHub (https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm) Chapters (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#current-notes-for-next-time-emacs-chat-21-amin-bandali-rough-notes-during-our-chat) 0:00 Introduction: Amin Bandali, software developer and free software activist 1:05 Aspects of life: notetaking, editing, multiple 3:00 Configuration: keeping things simple 4:58 user-lisp-directory, site-lisp if you're using an older Emacs 6:32 Organizing configuration into modules 7:45 early-init 9:06 ring-bell-function 9:40 performance optimizations 10:25 user-lisp 11:14 ignoring byte compilation warnings 11:55 init-file-debug = –debug-init 12:53 Core 13:53 no longer using bandali-configure; scoping errors, timing execution 17:02 Why not use use-package 18:37 Defining multiple keybindings 19:45 doric-oak uses emphasis instead of colours 20:49 global font scaling instead of the local ones 21:37 display-fill-column-indicator 22:53 emacsclient for EDITOR and VISUAL 23:37 fundamental-mode-hook 24:23 indicate-buffer-boundaries 26:36 enabling and disabling commands 27:37 package-review-policy 28:52 getting the Info files from the Emacs source directory 29:45 recentf, adding directories 31:38 Scrolling 32:28 auto revert 33:14 Repeat mode 34:51 EXWM 38:03 Audio setup 39:10 keymaps for launching different applications 39:49 bandali-call-interactively-insert 42:26 workspaces 43:46 ZSA Voyager split keyboard, super x as a single key 46:26 Keybindings 48:05 Media buttons 49:43 exwm-input-simulation-keys! 51:39 exwm: managing floating windows 53:11 exwm: application-specific local simulation keys 54:04 binding C-q to exwm-input-send-next-key 54:28 Renaming buffers 55:36 dunst for notifications 56:54 exwm xsettings and responding to screen configuration changes 58:59 Slowly getting back into Org mode 59:58 chat notes 1:00:52 Mode line 1:01:49 display-buffer-alist 1:02:23 TRAMP slowness, maybe disabling VC detection? 1:03:39 eat 1:05:07 TRAMP completion 1:06:54 ffs: form feed slides, ^L 1:09:34 Speaker notes Transcript (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#current-notes-for-next-time-emacs-chat-21-amin-bandali-transcript) Skip to end (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#end-ec21-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. Amin'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 Lisp 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0014.jpg)Amin: 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. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0015.jpg)Amin: 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. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0016.jpg)Amin: 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0017.jpg)Sacha: 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 cons 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 bump that up. And then after Emacs has finished initializing, in the after-init-hook, I just restore the defaults. 10:25 user-lisp (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0018.jpg)Amin: 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 compatibility 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 byte 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0019.jpg)Amin: 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 dotemacs, 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0020.jpg)Amin: 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 as 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0021.jpg)Amin: 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 Eshel Yaron's esy/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. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0022.jpg)Amin: Yeah, and then I have a neat little function here like bandali-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 Gnus, 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 start, 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0023.jpg)Amin: 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.el, which is all about… The appearance, I guess, of Emacs. 19:45 doric-oak uses emphasis instead of colours (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0024.jpg)Amin: 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 colours, 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 colour 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0025.jpg)Sacha: 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 versions 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 behaviours 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0026.jpg)Amin: 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 emacsclient 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0027.jpg)Amin: 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 width of four characters. 24:23 indicate-buffer-boundaries (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0008.jpg)Amin: Visually indicate buffer boundaries. This is a little bit hard to see right now, but here at the bottom left (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0009.jpg)Amin: you see a little down arrow (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0012.jpg)Amin: and then the little top arrow. And… Let's see if I can. Sacha: Oh! (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0010.jpg)Amin: 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. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0013.jpg)Amin: 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0028.jpg)Amin: And then here, I just enable 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 enable 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0029.jpg)Amin: 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'd 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0030.jpg)Amin: 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 --prefix when you're ./configure-ing 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0031.jpg)Amin: 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0033.jpg)Amin: And then here I configure mouse and scrolling behaviour. 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 behaviour 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0034.jpg)Amin: 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0035.jpg)Amin: 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0036.jpg)Amin: 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 kind of slows down the EXWM startup. And I had many such key bindings. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0037.jpg)Amin: 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. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0039.jpg)Amin: 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 [profile] 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0040.jpg)Amin: 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0041.jpg)Amin: 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 5. 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0042.jpg)Amin: 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 https://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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0043.jpg)Sacha: 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0044.jpg)Amin: 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! (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0045.jpg)Amin: 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 C-w input simulation key. 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0046.jpg)Sacha: 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0047.jpg)Amin: 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0049.jpg)Amin: 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 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. EXWM. Gotta try it. Amin: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, let's see. 55:36 dunst for notifications (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0050.jpg)Amin: Here I launch Dunst if the executable is installed for getting notifications in EXWM. 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 bandali--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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0051.jpg)Amin: 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 backend 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 backend 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0052.jpg)Amin: 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's 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 export 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 https://git.kelar.org (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0053.jpg)Amin: 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0054.jpg)Amin: 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. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0055.jpg)Amin: 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 with c, 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. (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/mpv-shot0056.jpg)Amin: 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 this year 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 (https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml#current-notes-for-next-time-emacs-chat-21-amin-bandali-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/ (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 (https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat) View Org source for this post (https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/index.org) You can comment on Mastodon (https://social.sachachua.com/@sacha/statuses/01KQSRZ5PF37X0VDHJMMFZPNWT) or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com (mailto:sacha@sachachua.com?subject=Comment%20on%20https%3A%2F%2Fsachachua.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F05%2Femacs-chat-with-amin-bandali%2F&body=Name%20you%20want%20to%20be%20credited%20by%20(if%20any)%3A%20%0AMessage%3A%20%0ACan%20I%20share%20your%20comment%20so%20other%20people%20can%20learn%20from%20it%3F%20Yes%2FNo%0A).

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