13 ms·

EmacsConf 2024 Notes

340 points by JNRowe 2y ago

mark_l_watson 2y ago
I have followed Sacha for a long while, love her frequent Emacs updates. I am a rabid Common Lisp enthusiast, and I bought the Mastering Emacs book last year, I just need to pull the trigger and try doing a project in Emacs Lisp.
- tiberious726 2y ago
  Common lisp -> elisp is an incredibly frustration transition. Get ready to really think in terms of dynamic scoping. I did it the other way, and going back to elisp is /hard/.
  - bigdict 2y ago
    I thought lexical scoping is standard now?
    - tiberious726 2y ago
      No: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Variable-Scoping.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Va... In practice, everyone writing new projects uses it, but when you choose to interact with existing code...
beanjuiceII 2y ago
Sacha is awesome!!!
eigenspace 2y ago
I was hoping to see something about EAF[1] this year, as I think the big thing emacs is still missing is a good way to drive interactive graphics, but EAF is still super janky and underdocumented. It'd be good to see this (or something better!) make progress. [1]: https://github.com/emacs-eaf/emacs-application-framework https://github.com/emacs-eaf/emacs-application-framework
duozerk 2y ago
As someone who exclusively uses emacs for all their editing, some nice topics there; though a bit miffed it's all video only. Although this, from the page linked, was pretty fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc
- sctb 2y ago
  On the main page for this year there are all kinds of media available, audio, video, slides, transcripts, Q&A: https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/.
  - duozerk 2y ago
    My bad, thank you !
uludag 2y ago
> EmacsConf feels like a nice, cozy get-together where people share the cool things they've been working on and thinking about. Emacsconf was indeed executed great this year, and nice and cozy were my feelings too. It's interesting to compare and contrast the ambience between Emacsconf and that of the other editors' like neovim conf and the release "parties" of Visual Studio Code and Jetbrains.
- Handprint4469 2y ago
  What was different about it compared to the neovim conf?
  - sachac 2y ago
    I dipped into NeovimConf since I like learning from other conferences and other editors. People's workflow videos are always cool. The Emacs community merrily assimilates lots of great ideas from Neovim, and it's great to see ideas flow the other way sometimes. I tuned in last year too, and I particularly liked how they had a number of NeovimConf talks covering other editors like Helix so that people in the NeovimConf community could pick up inspiration. I like the way TJ and ThePrimeagen keep the conversation going through streams throughout the year. Someday the kiddo will let me have more focused talking time so I can try to make more videos and have more conversations. :) There was an interesting discussion on Reddit after NeovimConf 2024 (https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/s/TSFc3cVGGV https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/s/TSFc3cVGGV) People were happy about the talks. Some seemed a little frustrated by interruptions from ads, getting off schedule, and a chat that might sometimes get a little distracted by meme potential. EmacsConf is a lot smaller than NeovimConf in terms of viewers - twitchtracker says NeovimConf got 3640 (plus more on YouTube) and we got about 400. We're, like, an order of magnitude smaller. That might be why self-hosting via Icecast is manageable for us. We started automating scheduling a few years ago because I wanted to accept more talks than could comfortably fit in a day, and since I was figuring out that infrastructure close to the conference, I needed something that I could handle by myself without going crazy. Even though my co-organizers are now more familiar with the fallback scripts for manual control, they prefer the automatic schedule. And community is a gift beyond anything I can code. I remember watching the IRC logs scroll past and feeling deeply appreciative of how wonderful and thoughtful people are, even during some of the tougher sessions we've had in the past. Also we like doing captions and transcripts and putting up the videos as soon as possible. :) Text makes things easier to search and skim, especially from within Emacs. And videos, well, we've got them, we might as well have a little bit of code to publish them right away. I reached out to teej_dv and ThePrimeagen on X to see if I could learn from their NeovimConf notes or in case any of our notes might be helpful. TJ said they don't really write things down. Makes sense because they're more video people. I hope they'll consider doing a postmortem braindump and maybe even sharing that publicly. I think that would be really cool. For me, I lean heavily on automation, documentation, and incremental improvements partly because it's fun, partly because it helps me make the most of what little time I can squeeze in between interruptions, and partly because it ripples out and helps other people who often end up paying it forward. Emacs is very well-suited to this, of course. Every time we get to do EmacsConf, I learn even more and build up more tools along the way. I think Vim and Neovim have a way bigger userbase than Emacs does, and I'm glad to see Neovim talks sharing workflows beyond the usual software development things. I do think there's something wonderful about the multiplicity of things that people use Emacs for, and how we've got this culture of both figuring out how to tailor Emacs to yourself and sharing those ideas with other people. I'd love to see what happens as Neovim and other editors build that critical mass of user configuration and community sharing, when people can figure out something for themselves by cobbling together stuff from other people. I think it's kinda cool how people shift from one editor to another, even. If they bring ideas from Emacs to somewhere else, or they bring ideas from somewhere else back to Emacs, things get better. I'd love it if NeovimConf could also be a smoothly-running way to get stuff out of people's heads, connect people with other people, and inspire more awesomeness. I'd love it if people could do that sort of stuff with all sorts of other mini-conferences about their interests. Could be fun!
ajbt200128 2y ago
Amazing work again! EmacsConf was as fun as ever this year
krylon 2y ago
There was supposed to be one talk about an attempt to re-vitalize a Guile-powered Emacs. I am not sure if it's in there somewhere or not (but I haven't looked yet). I imagine Emacs gaining native compilation capability took some pressure off that. But the appeal of scripting Emacs in languages other than Elisp still has some appeal, I think. Scheme or Lua would very nice for that purpose. EDIT: There it is - https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/guile/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/guile/
- bjoli 2y ago
  I think just having a proper runtime for elisp would be great... I am a guile person, but even if the Emacs folks would only allow elisp on guile it would still be a win.
- mdaniel 2y ago
  > or Lua would very nice for that purpose. There have been a couple of front-page threads on Lua recently and their comments really show how polarizing of a language that one is
  - kragen 2y ago
    It has that in common with Lisp!
  - mahmoudimus 2y ago
    I feel very strongly against Lua. I use it for WoW add on development all the time - I make so many mistakes with the 1-based index when porting algorithms. It is very very painful.
    - iLemming 2y ago
      why not Fennel?
      - mahmoudimus 2y ago
        Wow I didn't know this existed. This is pretty cool. Will definitely play around with it.
lysace 2y ago
I wonder how many users Emacs has lost to VS Code over the past few years. I'm one of them. Feels sad. And also potentially shortsighted.
- uludag 2y ago
  The percentage of the pie is smaller, but the pie has grown so much larger that in absolute numbers, there may not be any decrease. > And also potentially shortsighted. Looking at the recent releases, it feels like the vscode enshittification has already begun...
- nickysielicki 2y ago
  If vscode could replicate the fuzzy-search -> filter -> collect-to-buffer flows that I'm used to with emacs, I'd be right there with you. I don't think there's an argument to be made that we're at risk of losing something. So much of editor progress in the past ~years is shared -- treesitter, lsp backends, linters and snippets, etc. It's hard for me to imagine how the editor ecosystem could collapse.
  - magical_spell 2y ago
    Could you elaborate on those flows? Sounds useful. Is it vanilla Emacs?
    - nickysielicki 2y ago
      It’s very hard to describe without a visual but the gist of it is that the combination of the following 3 packages make it possible dynamically create queries, refine the results to precisely what you want, and then either perform some action on them or just plop them into a buffer for later use. There’s some notion of a type of the result, which means that the actions and results can be richer than just plaintext. Ie: you can imagine a query over a list of commits, where it displays while you’re searching as only the commit shortrev and subject, but where you can viably define a filter on the commit date or commit author. You can then export that list to a temporary buffer, and pressing enter on any given commit will show you the full diff and the full commit message. Orderless means you’re not crafting regexes directly, but just some combination of words in any order or casing. Another example: grep in the current project for any function matching foo bar baz in any order followed by an open paren, restrict the search to only header files, export to a buffer, run search in replace in that temporary buffer, review the changes, then commit the modification to disk in every matched file with a single keystroke. https://github.com/minad/consult/ https://github.com/minad/consult/ https://github.com/oantolin/orderless/ https://github.com/oantolin/orderless/ https://github.com/oantolin/embark/ https://github.com/oantolin/embark/
zkry 2y ago
I really enjoyed the conference this year! It had a good mix of project updates, emacs internals, configuration, Emacs rewrites in different languages, org-mode applications, community, interesting packages, and things that went over my head.
amichail 2y ago
Do you think TeXmacs should be included in EmacsConf, even though it is based on neither Emacs nor TeX, but merely inspired by them?
- nxobject 2y ago
  From an entirely armchair commentator, I think so - the exchange of ideas and enthusiasm among Emacs-likes can only benefit both projects and Lisp-based editors in general. (The reason I’m very armchair is because use LyX when I want to write technical documents, which does leave out one of TeXmacs’s really important use cases.)
  - sachac 2y ago
    This year we got to have a cluster of talks that were about not-entirely-Emacs things, and last year we had one about Lem too (https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/emacsen/ https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/emacsen/). We've figured out multiple tracks, so we can handle cross-pollinating with other communities while still keeping lots of stuff for people who want to focus on Emacs. Proposals welcome! =)
Vekz 2y ago
I was really impressed with the online presentation of EmacsConf 2024. Everything captured and published in org-mode: Transcripts, Comments, QA, Video links. Was really nice to peruse.
emptybits 2y ago
Wondering if the Lem project is “accepted” (or worth a test drive) by the Emacs community. I’m a long time Emacs user, occasionally leaving but always returning. Lately, Lem has my attention. https://github.com/lem-project/lem https://github.com/lem-project/lem For those not familiar, Lem is very approximately an Emacs, natively written and extendable in Common Lisp, multiplatform, NCurses & SDL2, etc. LSP. And fast.
- sachac 2y ago
  I remember that last year's talk on Emacsen included Lem and it was well-received. https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/emacsen/ https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/emacsen/ I hope Lem continues to grow!
- stackghost 2y ago
  Lem is really great. I hope it keeps gaining mind share because it's superior to emacs in a lot of key ways.
  - tmtvl 2y ago
    Lem is a nice try, but the default theme is utterly disgusting and because it wasn't designed with themes in mind going with a sane theme is impossible (because some colours are hardcoded so they become impossible to see on a proper light background). The lack of an Emacs-like configuration UI and Emacs-like documentation is also unfortunate.
  - sourcepluck 2y ago
    What is better, from your experience? I'm a happy Emacs user, but think having more options is great, and I've delved into some Common Lisp and certainly am eager to learn more. So I'm thrilled to see Lem continue to be developed.
    - stackghost 2y ago
      Emacs is "better" only because it has more features at present, and is somewhat more mature. But emacs remains replete with bugs, the performance leaves a great deal to be desired, the UI locks up if you update your packages because the whole thing is single-threaded, and emacs lisp (the language) quite frankly sucks, a lot. Lem is not very mature and has a lot of sharp edges but already in this state I can see that it will eclipse emacs if it continues its current trajectory.
djaouen 2y ago
I can’t see myself leaving Emacs. Maybe for LunarVim, in an extreme case. But otherwise, no.
globular-toast 2y ago
Ah man, I'm gutted I didn't "attend" this. Been an Emacs user more than 15 years and people like Sacha were there at the beginning for me and a huge reason why I got into Emacs back then. I feel so lucky to have got into it back then. I see colleagues struggling with their tools which they can't fix or even tweak, but I can't imagine any of them putting in the time now to learn Emacs. It's truly the editor of a lifetime.
- imiric 2y ago
  > It's truly the editor of a lifetime. This is the main reason I use it as well. Emacs is far from perfect. It's slow, lacks some of the bells and whistles of other editors, and can be downright frustrating to use at times. But damnit, it's _mine_. It has allowed me to create the perfect editing and programming experience _for me_, and no other environment gives me that freedom and enjoyment. Vim and friends come close, and I continue to use it as my secondary editor (and couldn't function without vim-mode), but Emacs allows much deeper customization and Lisp is so elegant for this. As editors come and go, it's comforting to know that Emacs will always be there for me. Warts and all. <3
sourcepluck 2y ago
I loved browsing the emacsconf videos this year, really nicely presented, and such cool stuff happening. Still have lots to watch, but so far in particular the infrastructural and UI type stuff seemed amazing, there's loads happening! Favourites included: https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/casual/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/casual/ -- Charles Choi designing UIs for human beings rather than octopuses (this jibe is meant fondly, I am a happy octopus) https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/literate/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/literate/ -- Howard Abram, literate programming https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/gypsum/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/gypsum/ -- Emacs and emacs lisp clone in Guile https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/rust/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/rust/ -- Rune, an experimental Emacs core in Rust https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/julia/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/julia/ -- lovely talk about the synchronicity between Julia and Emacs https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/guile/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/guile/ -- Robin Templeton relaunches Guile-Emacs! https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/mcclim/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/mcclim/ -- eh, this talk accepted questions from lambdaMOO?
iambvk 2y ago
> The total hosting cost for the conference was USD 42.92 + tax and the BBB testing in the lead-up to the conference was USD 3.11 + tax, so a total of USD 46.03+tax. The web node and the livestreaming node are kept as 1GB nanodes the rest of the year (USD 5 x 2 servers + tax, so USD 110). Very manageable. How does this compared to all other conf costs?
- sachac 2y ago
  Oh, do you mean like the domain name registration? That's also pretty small. I think it was, like, 12 USD, but I don't have the exact cost handy at the moment. We've been experimenting with sending tokens of appreciation (evil plan: stickers/pins might get other people to talk to speakers about Emacs), but Corwin's treating that as a personal experiment and not including it in the conference budgeting. And of course, there's a lot of stuff that isn't counted in monetary costs, like the time that speakers put into their talks or the servers that people have shared with us. But yeah, it's surprising what you can do on a shoestring budget and with casual volunteers. Definitely worth considering if people have been thinking about running their own conference. :)
  - sachac 2y ago
    Final Linode invoice came in, so it's USD 62.54+tax for December, so a total of USD 175.65+tax for the hosting costs for the year. Worth it!
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  Though this does not contain the cost in invested time. Try setting up BBB with Docker. It is not easy, unless you have done it before and are somehow an expert. I tried and gave up. Month or years later people still post in issues I opened. Since a docker deployment is also not the official deployment, there is little help from maintainers, understandably. It is also a huge setup, with many running parts. Very cool though, that they managed to pull it off.
  - sachac 2y ago
    Oh yeah, I briefly tried to get BBB working in Docker and ran into lots of issues before deciding it was worth just paying for another server instance where I could run it all by itself. Time-wise, I did Emacs-related things for 36 hours in Sept, 40 hours in Oct, and 52 hours in Nov. That included about an hour a week for Emacs News. To be fair, it's really more like hobby/fun time... :)
huracan20094 2y ago
[flagged]

340 points by JNRowe 2y ago

I have followed Sacha for a long while, love her frequent Emacs updates. I am a rabid Common Lisp enthusiast, and I bought the Mastering Emacs book last year, I just need to pull the trigger and try doing a project in Emacs Lisp.

tiberious726 2y ago
Common lisp -> elisp is an incredibly frustration transition. Get ready to really think in terms of dynamic scoping. I did it the other way, and going back to elisp is /hard/.
- bigdict 2y ago
  I thought lexical scoping is standard now?
  - tiberious726 2y ago
    No: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Variable-Scoping.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Va... In practice, everyone writing new projects uses it, but when you choose to interact with existing code...

beanjuiceII 2y ago

Sacha is awesome!!!

eigenspace 2y ago

I was hoping to see something about EAF[1] this year, as I think the big thing emacs is still missing is a good way to drive interactive graphics, but EAF is still super janky and underdocumented. It'd be good to see this (or something better!) make progress. [1]: https://github.com/emacs-eaf/emacs-application-framework https://github.com/emacs-eaf/emacs-application-framework

duozerk 2y ago

As someone who exclusively uses emacs for all their editing, some nice topics there; though a bit miffed it's all video only. Although this, from the page linked, was pretty fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc

sctb 2y ago
On the main page for this year there are all kinds of media available, audio, video, slides, transcripts, Q&A: https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/.
- duozerk 2y ago
  My bad, thank you !

uludag 2y ago

> EmacsConf feels like a nice, cozy get-together where people share the cool things they've been working on and thinking about. Emacsconf was indeed executed great this year, and nice and cozy were my feelings too. It's interesting to compare and contrast the ambience between Emacsconf and that of the other editors' like neovim conf and the release "parties" of Visual Studio Code and Jetbrains.

Handprint4469 2y ago
What was different about it compared to the neovim conf?
- sachac 2y ago
  I dipped into NeovimConf since I like learning from other conferences and other editors. People's workflow videos are always cool. The Emacs community merrily assimilates lots of great ideas from Neovim, and it's great to see ideas flow the other way sometimes. I tuned in last year too, and I particularly liked how they had a number of NeovimConf talks covering other editors like Helix so that people in the NeovimConf community could pick up inspiration. I like the way TJ and ThePrimeagen keep the conversation going through streams throughout the year. Someday the kiddo will let me have more focused talking time so I can try to make more videos and have more conversations. :) There was an interesting discussion on Reddit after NeovimConf 2024 (https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/s/TSFc3cVGGV https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/s/TSFc3cVGGV) People were happy about the talks. Some seemed a little frustrated by interruptions from ads, getting off schedule, and a chat that might sometimes get a little distracted by meme potential. EmacsConf is a lot smaller than NeovimConf in terms of viewers - twitchtracker says NeovimConf got 3640 (plus more on YouTube) and we got about 400. We're, like, an order of magnitude smaller. That might be why self-hosting via Icecast is manageable for us. We started automating scheduling a few years ago because I wanted to accept more talks than could comfortably fit in a day, and since I was figuring out that infrastructure close to the conference, I needed something that I could handle by myself without going crazy. Even though my co-organizers are now more familiar with the fallback scripts for manual control, they prefer the automatic schedule. And community is a gift beyond anything I can code. I remember watching the IRC logs scroll past and feeling deeply appreciative of how wonderful and thoughtful people are, even during some of the tougher sessions we've had in the past. Also we like doing captions and transcripts and putting up the videos as soon as possible. :) Text makes things easier to search and skim, especially from within Emacs. And videos, well, we've got them, we might as well have a little bit of code to publish them right away. I reached out to teej_dv and ThePrimeagen on X to see if I could learn from their NeovimConf notes or in case any of our notes might be helpful. TJ said they don't really write things down. Makes sense because they're more video people. I hope they'll consider doing a postmortem braindump and maybe even sharing that publicly. I think that would be really cool. For me, I lean heavily on automation, documentation, and incremental improvements partly because it's fun, partly because it helps me make the most of what little time I can squeeze in between interruptions, and partly because it ripples out and helps other people who often end up paying it forward. Emacs is very well-suited to this, of course. Every time we get to do EmacsConf, I learn even more and build up more tools along the way. I think Vim and Neovim have a way bigger userbase than Emacs does, and I'm glad to see Neovim talks sharing workflows beyond the usual software development things. I do think there's something wonderful about the multiplicity of things that people use Emacs for, and how we've got this culture of both figuring out how to tailor Emacs to yourself and sharing those ideas with other people. I'd love to see what happens as Neovim and other editors build that critical mass of user configuration and community sharing, when people can figure out something for themselves by cobbling together stuff from other people. I think it's kinda cool how people shift from one editor to another, even. If they bring ideas from Emacs to somewhere else, or they bring ideas from somewhere else back to Emacs, things get better. I'd love it if NeovimConf could also be a smoothly-running way to get stuff out of people's heads, connect people with other people, and inspire more awesomeness. I'd love it if people could do that sort of stuff with all sorts of other mini-conferences about their interests. Could be fun!

ajbt200128 2y ago

Amazing work again! EmacsConf was as fun as ever this year

krylon 2y ago

There was supposed to be one talk about an attempt to re-vitalize a Guile-powered Emacs. I am not sure if it's in there somewhere or not (but I haven't looked yet). I imagine Emacs gaining native compilation capability took some pressure off that. But the appeal of scripting Emacs in languages other than Elisp still has some appeal, I think. Scheme or Lua would very nice for that purpose. EDIT: There it is - https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/guile/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/guile/

bjoli 2y ago
I think just having a proper runtime for elisp would be great... I am a guile person, but even if the Emacs folks would only allow elisp on guile it would still be a win.
mdaniel 2y ago
> or Lua would very nice for that purpose. There have been a couple of front-page threads on Lua recently and their comments really show how polarizing of a language that one is
- kragen 2y ago
  It has that in common with Lisp!
- mahmoudimus 2y ago
  I feel very strongly against Lua. I use it for WoW add on development all the time - I make so many mistakes with the 1-based index when porting algorithms. It is very very painful.
  - iLemming 2y ago
    why not Fennel?
    - mahmoudimus 2y ago
      Wow I didn't know this existed. This is pretty cool. Will definitely play around with it.

lysace 2y ago

I wonder how many users Emacs has lost to VS Code over the past few years. I'm one of them. Feels sad. And also potentially shortsighted.

uludag 2y ago
The percentage of the pie is smaller, but the pie has grown so much larger that in absolute numbers, there may not be any decrease. > And also potentially shortsighted. Looking at the recent releases, it feels like the vscode enshittification has already begun...
nickysielicki 2y ago
If vscode could replicate the fuzzy-search -> filter -> collect-to-buffer flows that I'm used to with emacs, I'd be right there with you. I don't think there's an argument to be made that we're at risk of losing something. So much of editor progress in the past ~years is shared -- treesitter, lsp backends, linters and snippets, etc. It's hard for me to imagine how the editor ecosystem could collapse.
- magical_spell 2y ago
  Could you elaborate on those flows? Sounds useful. Is it vanilla Emacs?
  - nickysielicki 2y ago
    It’s very hard to describe without a visual but the gist of it is that the combination of the following 3 packages make it possible dynamically create queries, refine the results to precisely what you want, and then either perform some action on them or just plop them into a buffer for later use. There’s some notion of a type of the result, which means that the actions and results can be richer than just plaintext. Ie: you can imagine a query over a list of commits, where it displays while you’re searching as only the commit shortrev and subject, but where you can viably define a filter on the commit date or commit author. You can then export that list to a temporary buffer, and pressing enter on any given commit will show you the full diff and the full commit message. Orderless means you’re not crafting regexes directly, but just some combination of words in any order or casing. Another example: grep in the current project for any function matching foo bar baz in any order followed by an open paren, restrict the search to only header files, export to a buffer, run search in replace in that temporary buffer, review the changes, then commit the modification to disk in every matched file with a single keystroke. https://github.com/minad/consult/ https://github.com/minad/consult/ https://github.com/oantolin/orderless/ https://github.com/oantolin/orderless/ https://github.com/oantolin/embark/ https://github.com/oantolin/embark/

zkry 2y ago

I really enjoyed the conference this year! It had a good mix of project updates, emacs internals, configuration, Emacs rewrites in different languages, org-mode applications, community, interesting packages, and things that went over my head.

amichail 2y ago

Do you think TeXmacs should be included in EmacsConf, even though it is based on neither Emacs nor TeX, but merely inspired by them?

nxobject 2y ago
From an entirely armchair commentator, I think so - the exchange of ideas and enthusiasm among Emacs-likes can only benefit both projects and Lisp-based editors in general. (The reason I’m very armchair is because use LyX when I want to write technical documents, which does leave out one of TeXmacs’s really important use cases.)
- sachac 2y ago
  This year we got to have a cluster of talks that were about not-entirely-Emacs things, and last year we had one about Lem too (https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/emacsen/ https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/emacsen/). We've figured out multiple tracks, so we can handle cross-pollinating with other communities while still keeping lots of stuff for people who want to focus on Emacs. Proposals welcome! =)

Vekz 2y ago

I was really impressed with the online presentation of EmacsConf 2024. Everything captured and published in org-mode: Transcripts, Comments, QA, Video links. Was really nice to peruse.

emptybits 2y ago

Wondering if the Lem project is “accepted” (or worth a test drive) by the Emacs community. I’m a long time Emacs user, occasionally leaving but always returning. Lately, Lem has my attention. https://github.com/lem-project/lem https://github.com/lem-project/lem For those not familiar, Lem is very approximately an Emacs, natively written and extendable in Common Lisp, multiplatform, NCurses & SDL2, etc. LSP. And fast.

sachac 2y ago
I remember that last year's talk on Emacsen included Lem and it was well-received. https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/emacsen/ https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/emacsen/ I hope Lem continues to grow!
stackghost 2y ago
Lem is really great. I hope it keeps gaining mind share because it's superior to emacs in a lot of key ways.
- tmtvl 2y ago
  Lem is a nice try, but the default theme is utterly disgusting and because it wasn't designed with themes in mind going with a sane theme is impossible (because some colours are hardcoded so they become impossible to see on a proper light background). The lack of an Emacs-like configuration UI and Emacs-like documentation is also unfortunate.
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  What is better, from your experience? I'm a happy Emacs user, but think having more options is great, and I've delved into some Common Lisp and certainly am eager to learn more. So I'm thrilled to see Lem continue to be developed.
  - stackghost 2y ago
    Emacs is "better" only because it has more features at present, and is somewhat more mature. But emacs remains replete with bugs, the performance leaves a great deal to be desired, the UI locks up if you update your packages because the whole thing is single-threaded, and emacs lisp (the language) quite frankly sucks, a lot. Lem is not very mature and has a lot of sharp edges but already in this state I can see that it will eclipse emacs if it continues its current trajectory.

djaouen 2y ago

I can’t see myself leaving Emacs. Maybe for LunarVim, in an extreme case. But otherwise, no.

globular-toast 2y ago

Ah man, I'm gutted I didn't "attend" this. Been an Emacs user more than 15 years and people like Sacha were there at the beginning for me and a huge reason why I got into Emacs back then. I feel so lucky to have got into it back then. I see colleagues struggling with their tools which they can't fix or even tweak, but I can't imagine any of them putting in the time now to learn Emacs. It's truly the editor of a lifetime.

imiric 2y ago
> It's truly the editor of a lifetime. This is the main reason I use it as well. Emacs is far from perfect. It's slow, lacks some of the bells and whistles of other editors, and can be downright frustrating to use at times. But damnit, it's _mine_. It has allowed me to create the perfect editing and programming experience _for me_, and no other environment gives me that freedom and enjoyment. Vim and friends come close, and I continue to use it as my secondary editor (and couldn't function without vim-mode), but Emacs allows much deeper customization and Lisp is so elegant for this. As editors come and go, it's comforting to know that Emacs will always be there for me. Warts and all. <3

sourcepluck 2y ago

I loved browsing the emacsconf videos this year, really nicely presented, and such cool stuff happening. Still have lots to watch, but so far in particular the infrastructural and UI type stuff seemed amazing, there's loads happening! Favourites included: https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/casual/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/casual/ -- Charles Choi designing UIs for human beings rather than octopuses (this jibe is meant fondly, I am a happy octopus) https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/literate/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/literate/ -- Howard Abram, literate programming https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/gypsum/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/gypsum/ -- Emacs and emacs lisp clone in Guile https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/rust/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/rust/ -- Rune, an experimental Emacs core in Rust https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/julia/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/julia/ -- lovely talk about the synchronicity between Julia and Emacs https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/guile/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/guile/ -- Robin Templeton relaunches Guile-Emacs! https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/mcclim/ https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/mcclim/ -- eh, this talk accepted questions from lambdaMOO?

iambvk 2y ago

> The total hosting cost for the conference was USD 42.92 + tax and the BBB testing in the lead-up to the conference was USD 3.11 + tax, so a total of USD 46.03+tax. The web node and the livestreaming node are kept as 1GB nanodes the rest of the year (USD 5 x 2 servers + tax, so USD 110). Very manageable. How does this compared to all other conf costs?

sachac 2y ago
Oh, do you mean like the domain name registration? That's also pretty small. I think it was, like, 12 USD, but I don't have the exact cost handy at the moment. We've been experimenting with sending tokens of appreciation (evil plan: stickers/pins might get other people to talk to speakers about Emacs), but Corwin's treating that as a personal experiment and not including it in the conference budgeting. And of course, there's a lot of stuff that isn't counted in monetary costs, like the time that speakers put into their talks or the servers that people have shared with us. But yeah, it's surprising what you can do on a shoestring budget and with casual volunteers. Definitely worth considering if people have been thinking about running their own conference. :)
- sachac 2y ago
  Final Linode invoice came in, so it's USD 62.54+tax for December, so a total of USD 175.65+tax for the hosting costs for the year. Worth it!
zelphirkalt 2y ago
Though this does not contain the cost in invested time. Try setting up BBB with Docker. It is not easy, unless you have done it before and are somehow an expert. I tried and gave up. Month or years later people still post in issues I opened. Since a docker deployment is also not the official deployment, there is little help from maintainers, understandably. It is also a huge setup, with many running parts. Very cool though, that they managed to pull it off.
- sachac 2y ago
  Oh yeah, I briefly tried to get BBB working in Docker and ran into lots of issues before deciding it was worth just paying for another server instance where I could run it all by itself. Time-wise, I did Emacs-related things for 36 hours in Sept, 40 hours in Oct, and 52 hours in Nov. That included about an hour a week for Emacs News. To be fair, it's really more like hobby/fun time... :)

huracan20094 2y ago

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