Sacha Chua

Saw this posted on emacs-news [1] asking for some feedback. A thought I had about using dired as front-end to everything is that once you get more than 20 buffers open its unwieldy to find things. Working on several projects at once using the standard C-x b navigation or even Helm bindings seems to take too long. That's why I still use a window manager that has workspaces with their own key (rebound alt-gr) and several copies of emacs and term emulators open. Does anybody have positive things to say about something like "buffer groups" for emacs? Projectile or iBuffer. They're mentioned here [2] but alas I never had much joy with them. [1] https://sachachua.com/ [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9972523/emacs-buffer-groups-tabs

Sacha Chua is one of the best-known women in the Emacs world. She ran a podcast about Emacs for a while, which might be relevant: https://sachachua.com/blog/emacs-chat/

You can also disable issues entirely on a project, if it's slightly larger than just one script. This, plus a disclaimer on the readme like "This was made solely for my personal use and I cannot provide support!" seems like an okay way to go about this. I've written hacky one-offs before that other people used as a jumping-off point for something more serious, which is pretty cool to see. I'm always in favor of releasing your code for that reason, you never know if someone else will find it useful! https://sachachua.com/blog/2020/07/why-i-love-free-software/

Simon Peyton-Jones expands on the GP's 1st point – that you don't afterwards write up your 'research' (i.e. anything you are thinking about/learning/doing etc), but before, during, after - the writing guides, informs, directs what you learn, every step of the way: How to Write a Great Research Paper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK51E3gHENc Most of that applies to all kinds of non-fiction writing I think. A lot of it's common-sense principles that sound obvious, but most people don't actually follow, so their writing isn't great. If you loved that, you'll also like his How To Give a Great Research Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT_-owjKIbA Also.. Sacha Chua's wonderful No-Excuses Guide to Blogging is wise and inspiring. https://sachachua.com/sharing/pdfs/2014-02-14%20A%20No-Excuses%20Guide…

It turned out that going with Org Mode was an excellent idea! I wrote another post about the changes I made last night: https://sachachua.com/blog/2020/06/having-fun-kerning-using-org-mode-a… Basically, tables rock, especially when you can use rectangle commands to copy and paste kerning values between classes you have to split up, and generating a test webpage programmatically is fun too. :D

I've found the Emacs Wiki always solidly maintained: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SiteMap S. Chua's blog is the best "zine" I think: https://sachachua.com/blog/ To avoid "but vi/vim and the shell…" which is a sort of "mental flu" every Emacser has to go through at least once in his life, understand this: "the UI paradigm of Emacs" is also called a roguelike interface by ESR, vi's too: "In Chapter 11 we described the effect of the absence of standard arrow keys on early roguelike programs; vi was one of these. " http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch13s03.html

Not OP, but the Emacs manual is excellent[0] and there's Mastering Emacs[1] and Sacha Chua's blog[2]. Because it's lisp you can inspect just about everything. See an unfamiliar symbol? Put your cursor on it and press M-. 0: launch help from within Emacs 1: https://www.masteringemacs.org/ 2: https://sachachua.com/blog/emacs/

>And every emacs user will have their own set of extensions, carefully curated. You'll find a lot of common extensions amongst power users. If you browse Emacs blog posts often, you'll see the same names popping up. For an overall view, I recommend Sacha Chua's weekly Emacs news: https://sachachua.com/blog/2019/06/2019-06-03-emacs-news/ And BTW, a number of the extensions listed on this submission (Org mode, calc, dired, etc) come packaged with Emacs - although for Org mode I really would recommend installing a more up to date version. To keep your init.el sane, I strongly recommend you keep your init file as an org mode file and use org-babel-load-file to load it. My init file is probably 1500 lines long, but it's very well organized as an org mode file.

> Another thing is org-mode. [...] Can someone recommend a good "light" tutorial for it? What are you using it for? I would recommend starting using Org just for note taking, using its outline capabilities. It's simple and avoid being overwhelmed and buried in features. One tutorial for this is [1], but even then it has advanced parts you can ignore at first. There are many Org tutorials, at some point it's best to just pick one and dive in instead of looking for the best one and ending up paralyzed by choice (a problem sometimes with Org and Emacs...). Then once familiar with this you can extend your usage in various directions: add TODO and agenda for GTD, use it to export to nice web pages with a "read the doc" theme [2], etc. [1] https://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/outlining-your-notes-with-org/ [2] https://github.com/fniessen/org-html-themes

> Is this a good project to start with? Probably not. You'd be better off looking at an Emacs distribution to see what's available. Sacha Chua's Visual Guide to Emacs is excellent. http://sachachua.com/blog/series/a-visual-guide-to-emacs/ There's also an awesome list for it. https://github.com/emacs-tw/awesome-emacs I'd suggest looking at Magit or Org-Mode. These are often cited as "killer features"/"gateway drugs" for Emacs. > ... what's the equivalent of vim-plug ... I liked the discussion on straight.el's readme: https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el/blob/develop/README.md

If you're just starting, the Emacs tutorial is available from the front page, or C-h t (Control-h then t). Worth doing a few times. Sacha Chua has some great cheatsheets (http://sachachua.com/blog/category/geek/emacs/), including basic ones on orgmode.

Ran out of ink, did we? Leucchterm 1917 notebooks are awesome for logging / bullet notebooks - especially the dot grid ones. On the digital side, I was inspired to start using Org mode by following Sacha Chua's map approach: http://sachachua.com/blog/2014/01/tips-learning-org-mode-emacs/

http://www.sachachua.com is the blog of an avid Emacs user who promotes its use, and the plus is that there's a lot more interesting information there too as she documents her journey.

Here's a great resource for taking handwritten note taking to the next level with doodles/sketchnotes. Sketchnoting is pretty fun and does seem to help with learning. http://sachachua.com/blog/book-accelerate-your-learning-with-sketchnot…

I recommend the articles of Sacha Chua (on org-mode and anything else she writes about). Here are some examples: [1],[2],[3] More tutorials here: [4] 1 - http://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/outlining-your-notes-with-org/ 2 - http://sachachua.com/blog/2012/05/org-mode-and-habits/ 3 - http://sachachua.com/blog/2013/06/how-i-use-emacs-org-mode-for-my-week… 4 - http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/index.html

My personal favorite example: http://sachachua.com/blog/ She wrote org-mode for Emacs. Now she is at IBM Research.

I think there's a lot to learn from starting from scratch, and it's something I hope to do too. Gladly! I'll keep the list to what I've studied so far. Here goes: - If you ever want to explore, say, Doom (Spacemacs is likely too bloated for someone who gravitates to a vanilla config), chemacs[1] is a nifty, simple profile switcher - I think there's a lot of value in studying what they've done with their mnemonic keybinding systems (I love being able to narrow to an org-mode subtree and widen again with =, n= and =, N=, respectively, as but one of many examples) - Sasha Chua is a good source, as she's very knowledgeable and put out a drawn 1-pager[2] on starting Emacs - it's geared towards standard Emacs keybindings - Personally, I'm a huge fan of Evil-mode for Vim keybindings, as they're powerful and portable and I had basic familiarity with Vim before picking up Emacs - I haven't found a rough edge in Evil-mode yet - it seems very refined - Dired is worth getting a handle on early since any improvement in how you can navigate Emacs translates - Magit is pure magic, and I now have my full ~/org under version control with what feels like near-0 overhead - Seorenn makes mostly Spacemacs videos[3] and Zaiste Programming makes Doom videos[4], but I find them useful regardless of my config - you may just want to skip to the videos on packages that interest you - If you haven't yet, choosing either Helm or Ivy is huge - Personally, I'm happy with helm in Spacemacs and I was…

http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html gets posted almost every time there's an org-mode front-page link, and there's good reason for that. I've been working in org-mode since 2006-2007, and it's still the most complete, single-page view integration I've seen of the project into someone's life. Sacha Chau (http://sachachua.com/blog/) is also a fantastic resource for information on org-mode, just a bit more spread out across years of posts. So, yeah, with 10 years of org-mode experience behind me, I still don't feel like it's smooth yet. I never got the hang of clocking. The lack of stable integrations to the outside world are what kill me. Yes, there's been mobile apps from mobileorg to orgzly to new ones I don't know about, but none have ever really nailed the interface. Calendar syncing is iffy, and breaks often. I still use org-mode for notes, blogs, writing, etc, and my emacs config is org-babel'd, which is a fantastic literate programming environment. I'm even working on a small package to export org-mode to gitbook format (http://github.com/qdot/org-gitbook, don't get your hopes up yet as right now it's just 2 small functions, but it does work). org-trello integration (https://org-trello.github.io/) is getting me closer to what I want, but that still means bouncing org -> trello -> other services, which isn't exactly ergonomic. I would love if org-mode could be my full memex implementation, but there's parts that just aren't there quite yet. Since part of the package is…

So there ought to be a new generation of leadership in the Emacs maintainer community. Ironically, he is a Haskeller. I thought this was covered on HN before, because people were enthusiastic or concerned depending on how you look at it. http://sachachua.com/blog/2015/12/2015-12-10-emacs-chat-john-wiegley-m… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udNb4E4smbM To the consternation of many, I love Emacs. I even eschewed tmux for multi-term, trying to move to notmuch.el for Gmail-esque email, and even consider moving away from a dedicated PDF reader and consider doc-mode if not for its lagginess (it is doing impressive stuff). But how do I contribute to Emacs? I like the Old Guard, I do, but I think there is something to be said for a few orgs philosophy, not implementation, such as Fedora, Mozilla, and their attempts to onboard volunteer effort. They have good wiki material, they have the badge process to show hip ways to contribute. I too find the latter kind of off-putting, but my point is they try to signal to novices like me what to do and what of those things can be valued and by whom. I recently set up an account with Fedora and will try to work on the project not because I particularly fond of the distro (I prefer Debian, which I also want to start pitching in on), but as a culture I want to understand them and leverage their community handling tactics and use it later. They seem to know something, I want to know how they got there, why, and…

Here[0] is a demonstration of a good set-up in org-mode. This was written in org-mode and generated the html file. You can tangle the source code[1] and try it. This had greatly helped me to get started in organizing everything. One of the feature I like is time clocking[2] where in you time all everything that you do (including sleep![3]) and eventually review after a week/month/year, you can generate some analysis on what task took most of your time. org-drill[4] helped me a lot when there are things that I need to memorize. I used vim for one year before moving to emacs. Indeed, I can edit files faster in vim rather than emacs but I can get more stuffs than in emacs rather than vim because of org-mode. Therefore, I choose emacs for the reason that org-mode helps me organize everything. [0] http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html [1] http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.org [2] http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#Clocking [3] http://sachachua.com/blog/2015/11/weekly-review-week-ending-november-2…

This is very neat. I think this kind of time tracking can be very useful, especially for people in professions that are very self-directing, and provides a mix of short-term and long-term projects. I'm a PhD student and I've been playing around with setting up my own systems (http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/16/unobtrusive-time-tracker-visualiz… and http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/29/time-tracker-one-week-on-new-feat… A bunch of the things he noted resonate with me, like noting the difference between time spent in the office, and time spent actually working (even when you are not procrastinating, there's all kinds of little things taking your time). I've not been as rigorous about setting goals and then sticking to them, but I did set up a "traffic light" system, aiming to hit 4 hours work on my PhD every day ( a typical "long-term" goal which easily gets buried under short-term commitments and things you can "cross off a list"). I also have data that can let me show how long I work on things on average, at what time of the day etc, but I haven't dug into it yet... I see some great posts about quantified self people (like Sacha Chua http://sachachua.com/blog/2013/07/quantified-awesome-adding-calendar-h… but either they tend to use totally off-the-shelf programs like RescueTime, or they tend to write their own solutions... I'd love for the QS community to come up with some standards, for example a standard way of…

> As a non-emacs, non-lisp users, is this really worth trying to learn? I've been using org for about 2 years to take notes... I've taken several hundred pages worth of notes using it by now. I've been using it for about a month as my task / appointment manager, and I'm impressed by its flexibility. I was in the same spot when I started because there's a lot of things that Org is capable of. I used the following resources when I was learning Org. You might find them helpful: 1. Carsten Dominick (lead dev of Org-Mode) talks about Org at Google: http://orgmode.org/talks/index.html#sec-1 2. "Power users describe their setup" section on the worg tutorial list: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/index.html By this point, you'll have atleast some idea about how org can be used. If you decide to delve in further: 3. Sacha Chua's blog posts on Org-Mode: http://sachachua.com/blog/ 4. Org compact guide: http://orgmode.org/guide/index.html

http://sachachua.com/ ...swoon

I'm a vim user, using orgmode. I've noticed the blog of Sascha Chua. She posts Emacs News and in these posts there are some orgmode gems. But she is posting more on Emacs. Maybe interesting to look these posts up: https://sachachua.com/topic/

Welcome to Emacs! - I write about Emacs things fairly frequently: https://xenodium.com - I started making Emacs videos recently: https://www.youtube.com/xenodium - For aggregated Emacs blogs, check out https://planet.emacslife.com - For aggregated Emacs videos, https://emacs.tv - The Emacs subreddit can be handy too https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs - If on the fediverse, follow the #emacs hashtag - Sacha Chua's Emacs News are great https://sachachua.com/blog/category/emacs-news With respect to "modern", maybe these two posts could be of interest: - Visual tweaks: https://xenodium.com/my-emacs-eye-candy - macOS tricks: https://xenodium.com/awesome-emacs-on-macos Enjoy the ride!

Sacha Chua does God's work for the Emacs community with building the Emacsconf infrastructure and her Emacs newsletter. See her blog on how she set up auto captioning: https://sachachua.com/blog/2024/01/2024-01-28-yay-emacs-closed-caption…

Here's another one, apparently the author and maintainer of helm.el is a French mountain guide with no IT history. https://sachachua.com/blog/2018/09/interview-with-thierry-volpiatto/

Personally, I'm only using Gnus for two weeks now, so I'm just now learning a bit about the (adaptive) scoring capabilities. Take a look at how Emacs maintainer John W manages the barrage of information that he needs to filter and sort[1]. I'm trying to apply this to my email/mailing lists/RSS/diary/etc.... [1] https://sachachua.com/blog/2012/07/transcript-emacs-chat-john-wiegley/

Another blog with handwritten posts is [1]... This person also is an Emacs contributor, and writes the blog with a Supernote ([2]), not a Remarkable. [1]: https://sachachua.com/blog/2022/09/monthly-review-august-2022/ [2]: https://supernote.com/

You mean when a maintainer of Emacs setup the mirror? https://sachachua.com/blog/2015/12/2015-12-10-emacs-chat-john-wiegley-…