41: Learning Emacs

Morgan finally overcomes her fear of Emacs and we talk about Morgan and Christine's respective experiences learning it, and how you can pick it up too!

Our talks tomorrow at FOSDEM's Declarative and Minimalistic Computing room:

• Lisp but Beautiful; Lisp for Everyone
• Spritely Goblins Comes to Guile

Switching capslock and ctrl stuff: (it's a great idea even if you don't use Emacs; many keyboards used to have ctrl key where capslock now is, and much advanced program use benefits from keyboard shortcuts):

• Switching on GNU/Linux

• Switching on Windows 10 & 11

• Switching on OSX

• On Guix: (keyboard-layout "us" #:options '("caps:ctrl_modifier" "shift:both_capslock")) in your system configuration both makes capslock a ctrl and allows you to press both shift keys at once to enable capslock behavior (should you want such a thing)

• And actually there's a whole EmacsWiki page about it

Links:

• Emacs!

• Git and Magit

• Org-Mode

• Spacemacs

• Mousemacs

• Emacs Themes… find one that's right for you!

• The Emacs lisp reference manual

• emacsconf

• Org-mode and Org-Roam for Scholars and Researchers

• Sacha Chua, whose blog is full of awesome emacs and emacs news posts, and who also releases lots of great videos about Emacs!

• Emacs Rocks!

• Episode 14: Digital Humanities Workshops

• Episode 15: Scribble and the Open Document Format

• mu4e, ERC, crdt.el (video)… many more emacs tools mentioned, not all linked! Trying to be comprehensive would result in a trip to the M-x doctor for sure…

• wireworld-el, Christine's (minimalist) implementation of the wireworld cellular automata (cellular automata circuits!)

• And yes, it turns out you CAN annotate PDFs in emacs, using the pdf-tools package!