6 ms·

I won an award from the FSF for my contributions to Emacs

335 points by codingquark 5y ago

prash_ant 5y ago
Prot is one of those contributors who has made his contributions accessible in the form of videos, tutorials, blogs, and other documentation. As far as I know, he's not contributing to the Emacs internals and instead providing packages, he has given most of his code to be part of GNU. I came across his work on modus-themes and understood from his documentation that he's done a lot of research in making it compliant to accessibility standards of WCAG AAA. This theme is going to be bundled with the next stable release of Emacs 28 when it comes. One can truly see his journey in contributing to free software, including philosophy, documented in his videos. Congratulations Prot.
- jart 5y ago
  Here's a link to where you can see screenshots of his themes: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG2AAA-Conformance https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG2AAA-Conformance The code is stored at https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes For example: (defun modus-themes-wcag-formula (hex) "Get WCAG value of color value HEX. The value is defined in hexadecimal RGB notation, such as those in `modus-themes-operandi-colors' and `modus-themes-vivendi-colors'." (cl-loop for k in '(0.2126 0.7152 0.0722) for x in (color-name-to-rgb hex) sum (* k (if (<= x 0.03928) (/ x 12.92) (expt (/ (+ x 0.055) 1.055) 2.4))))) Sounds like a prize well deserved! Stuff like this has traditionally been a blind spot in Free software. Glad to hear we're getting a more beautiful and accessible Emacs.
  - veltas 5y ago
    Screenshots are here: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-pictures/ https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-pictures/
math-dev 5y ago
Congrats and well deserved
obilgic 5y ago
I think It's the facial hair.. jokes aside, I enjoy his videos a lot.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  Yeah, the dude looks exactly the archetypical way. I would imagine he codes Lisp, develops Emacs and has something to do with the FSF immediately after a single look at him :-)
ceva 5y ago
Award going to Prod :) good one m8, congradz! Prot i heard as Prod.
jhoechtl 5y ago
Is there any progress made on modernizing Emacs internals? Like * disentangling it from GTK to make Emacs a proper GUI citizen or * the shift from Emacs Lisp towards ... is it Guile?
- dvdkhlng 5y ago
  My not very well-informed take on the situation is: Yes, Emacs seems to make a lot of progress in many directions. Latest git master does have elisp native compilation support (via libgccjit). Various elisp semantics have been modernized (support for common-lisp style lexical closures). Still it is rather lightweight (compared with, say firefox), you can download upstream source and compile&install it in minutes rather than hours.
- rprospero 5y ago
  I'm not quite sure what you mean by disentangling it from GTK. I can tell you that a major selling point of the 29 release is that the GUI is more entangled with GTK. Specifically, by removing all X11 code and using only GTK, Wayland will have native support, instead of requiring an additional X server as a shim between the two.
- gpderetta 5y ago
  All attempts to use guile were never completed , and the resulting prototypes were always slower, mostly because of impedance mismatches between guile and elisp. As reported by the sibling comment, native-comp was merged and it makes the existing elisp code faster while being fully compatible. It was a major achievement, done in a relatively short time by a single contributor! It means that elisp is here to stay with all its quirk, but as we all know, worse is always better (which is ironic when comparing lisps :) ).
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "the resulting prototypes were always slower, mostly because of impedance mismatches between guile and elisp" That may be technically true, but I think the real problem is that there was only one guy working on the project. A lot more progress would probably have been made if there was a team of people working on it, but apparently it's just not important enough for most Emacs users. Some would like to see it happen, but not enough to actually contribute to the effort to make it so.
prionassembly 5y ago
Qapla'! (Are you somewhy trying to emulate rms's looks?)
forgotpwd16 5y ago
Prot on his channel has many videos showcasing Emacs' advanced usage. Recommend checking it out.
gitrog 5y ago
Prot is one of the most well spoken, humble, deliberate and wholesome people I've ever come across. Absolutely crazy to think that he came to Emacs and Lisp without any technical background and just started contributing. Cheers to you, Prot!
- BeetleB 5y ago
  > Absolutely crazy to think that he came to Emacs and Lisp without any technical background and just started contributing. The speed at which he picked it up with almost no background is phenomenal. He learned Linux/UNIX in 2016 and only began to use Emacs in 2019. Another fun fact: He main goals with these videos is to practice his English.
asciimov 5y ago
Prot videos are the best. He does a wonderful job of presenting a topic, covering the information thoroughly, and stays on topic. All without acting like a typical youtuber. He doesn't ask for likes or subscribes, doesn't have ads, doesn't have chat, he isn't a slave to patronage, and best of all he doesn't use that hyping style that many youtubers use today. I wish more technical youtubers would go back to presenting like Prot.
- krmboya 5y ago
  I do sympathize with them though if they decide to put in ads, endorsements, solicit for likes and subscribers because from what I hear putting out high quality videos requires a lot of investment that needs to be compensated in one way or another. YouTube itself incentivizes churning out new content frequently. Perhaps it's the infrastructure that's broken. Something like the approach that Brave browser implemented could make the above less necessary, where a viewer has a wallet with funds which get distributed to the various the producers proportionally to time spent on their content.
joeman1000 5y ago
Prot is a big inspiration to me. Congratulations to him.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hnrj95 5y ago
well deserved. prot is a fantastic person and his emacs packages are all stellar. can’t use any theme besides those in modus, for example

335 points by codingquark 5y ago

Prot is one of those contributors who has made his contributions accessible in the form of videos, tutorials, blogs, and other documentation. As far as I know, he's not contributing to the Emacs internals and instead providing packages, he has given most of his code to be part of GNU. I came across his work on modus-themes and understood from his documentation that he's done a lot of research in making it compliant to accessibility standards of WCAG AAA. This theme is going to be bundled with the next stable release of Emacs 28 when it comes. One can truly see his journey in contributing to free software, including philosophy, documented in his videos. Congratulations Prot.

jart 5y ago
Here's a link to where you can see screenshots of his themes: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG2AAA-Conformance https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG2AAA-Conformance The code is stored at https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes For example: (defun modus-themes-wcag-formula (hex) "Get WCAG value of color value HEX. The value is defined in hexadecimal RGB notation, such as those in `modus-themes-operandi-colors' and `modus-themes-vivendi-colors'." (cl-loop for k in '(0.2126 0.7152 0.0722) for x in (color-name-to-rgb hex) sum (* k (if (<= x 0.03928) (/ x 12.92) (expt (/ (+ x 0.055) 1.055) 2.4))))) Sounds like a prize well deserved! Stuff like this has traditionally been a blind spot in Free software. Glad to hear we're getting a more beautiful and accessible Emacs.
- veltas 5y ago
  Screenshots are here: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-pictures/ https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-pictures/

math-dev 5y ago

Congrats and well deserved

obilgic 5y ago

I think It's the facial hair.. jokes aside, I enjoy his videos a lot.

qwerty456127 5y ago
Yeah, the dude looks exactly the archetypical way. I would imagine he codes Lisp, develops Emacs and has something to do with the FSF immediately after a single look at him :-)

ceva 5y ago

Award going to Prod :) good one m8, congradz! Prot i heard as Prod.

jhoechtl 5y ago

Is there any progress made on modernizing Emacs internals? Like * disentangling it from GTK to make Emacs a proper GUI citizen or * the shift from Emacs Lisp towards ... is it Guile?

dvdkhlng 5y ago
My not very well-informed take on the situation is: Yes, Emacs seems to make a lot of progress in many directions. Latest git master does have elisp native compilation support (via libgccjit). Various elisp semantics have been modernized (support for common-lisp style lexical closures). Still it is rather lightweight (compared with, say firefox), you can download upstream source and compile&install it in minutes rather than hours.
rprospero 5y ago
I'm not quite sure what you mean by disentangling it from GTK. I can tell you that a major selling point of the 29 release is that the GUI is more entangled with GTK. Specifically, by removing all X11 code and using only GTK, Wayland will have native support, instead of requiring an additional X server as a shim between the two.
gpderetta 5y ago
All attempts to use guile were never completed , and the resulting prototypes were always slower, mostly because of impedance mismatches between guile and elisp. As reported by the sibling comment, native-comp was merged and it makes the existing elisp code faster while being fully compatible. It was a major achievement, done in a relatively short time by a single contributor! It means that elisp is here to stay with all its quirk, but as we all know, worse is always better (which is ironic when comparing lisps :) ).
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "the resulting prototypes were always slower, mostly because of impedance mismatches between guile and elisp" That may be technically true, but I think the real problem is that there was only one guy working on the project. A lot more progress would probably have been made if there was a team of people working on it, but apparently it's just not important enough for most Emacs users. Some would like to see it happen, but not enough to actually contribute to the effort to make it so.

prionassembly 5y ago

Qapla'! (Are you somewhy trying to emulate rms's looks?)

forgotpwd16 5y ago

Prot on his channel has many videos showcasing Emacs' advanced usage. Recommend checking it out.

gitrog 5y ago

Prot is one of the most well spoken, humble, deliberate and wholesome people I've ever come across. Absolutely crazy to think that he came to Emacs and Lisp without any technical background and just started contributing. Cheers to you, Prot!

BeetleB 5y ago
> Absolutely crazy to think that he came to Emacs and Lisp without any technical background and just started contributing. The speed at which he picked it up with almost no background is phenomenal. He learned Linux/UNIX in 2016 and only began to use Emacs in 2019. Another fun fact: He main goals with these videos is to practice his English.

asciimov 5y ago

Prot videos are the best. He does a wonderful job of presenting a topic, covering the information thoroughly, and stays on topic. All without acting like a typical youtuber. He doesn't ask for likes or subscribes, doesn't have ads, doesn't have chat, he isn't a slave to patronage, and best of all he doesn't use that hyping style that many youtubers use today. I wish more technical youtubers would go back to presenting like Prot.

krmboya 5y ago
I do sympathize with them though if they decide to put in ads, endorsements, solicit for likes and subscribers because from what I hear putting out high quality videos requires a lot of investment that needs to be compensated in one way or another. YouTube itself incentivizes churning out new content frequently. Perhaps it's the infrastructure that's broken. Something like the approach that Brave browser implemented could make the above less necessary, where a viewer has a wallet with funds which get distributed to the various the producers proportionally to time spent on their content.

joeman1000 5y ago

Prot is a big inspiration to me. Congratulations to him.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hnrj95 5y ago

well deserved. prot is a fantastic person and his emacs packages are all stellar. can’t use any theme besides those in modus, for example