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---
title: "EmacsConf 2019"
date: 2019-11-03T15:40:09+05:30
lastmod: 2019-11-04T15:40:09+05:30
tags : [ "free-software", "emacs" ]
categories : [ "conferences" ]
layout: post
type:  "post"
highlight: false
---

![EmacsConf logo](/blog/emacsconf-logo.png)

I attended the [EmacsConf 2019](https://emacsconf.org/2019/ "EmacsConf 2019") on
2nd November. It was offered as a video stream that anyone can watch over the
internet, with audience conversations over IRC. The conference was powered
entirely by free software tools. RMS and some FSF members were also among the
audience.

More details about any of the talks mentioned here can be found in the
[notes](https://pads.ccc.de/fPYMhovcNN "notes").

## Updates

There was an Emacs community update and an Emacs development update. Both were
very interesting. The community is sure taking notice of Spacemacs. Maybe Doom
Emacs is not that popular yet. I am excited about the new built-in features of
Emacs 27 - tab bar and ligatures. I was surprised that Emacs being one of the
most popular free software projects still suffers from a lack of core
developers. Maybe there are a lot of people willing to write Elisp but not many
interested in contributing to the C core.

## The Hackable Text Editor

The core of emacs is written in C with Elisp offered as an extension language.
All of the Elisp source code that is running on your Emacs is available easily
through Emacs itself. Elisp is designed to be an easy-to-use minimalistic
language that non-programmers can use to create small improvements in their
workflow.

## Software Freedom

One of the speakers called Emacs the mother of all free software. When RMS
started the free software movement, one of the first tools he built was Emacs,
using which all other free software was developed, starting with glibc. A lot of
free software development is done on 40+ years old Emacs even to this day.

Though most of the talks were about people doing cool things with Emacs, I was
more emotionally touched by these two talks - "GNU Emacs as software freedom in
practice" by an FSF member Greg Farough and "How to record executable notes with
eev - and how to play them back" by Eduardo Ochs. These two talks emphasized
the freedom that Emacs gives to its users, whether they are programmers or not.
Both the speakers use Emacs the way it is meant to be used. They truly used
Elisp as an extension language. I highly recommend watching the talks after
they're posted. This got me thinking. Though I am primarily a programmer and use
Emacs for almost all text editing, I barely programmed anything in Emacs - the
programmable text editor. This is mostly because I think that my newbie elisp
scripts are not as good as the ones already available as Elisp packages, so I
refrain from writing elisp at all. I realized that this is not how Emacs is
meant to be used.

Emacs is all about taking the free software editor built by the community,
making it your own through customization and contributing your improvements back
to the community if you can.

## Future of Emacs

The most controversial talk and the one that generated the most conversation at
the conference was a talk titled "Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years" by
Perry E. Metzger. It was quite a ranty talk by an Emacs user of over 20+ years.
He mentioned that MacOS has better Emacs-everywhere keybindings as compared to
mainstream GNU/Linux distributions that come with Gnome and KDE. I have to agree
on this particular thing. But having used Emacs on MacOS myself, I had way too
many segfaults and bad GUI experience. This was a much worse user experience in
my opinion. My problems can be easily dismissed as user faults, well so can his.
One might simply say that he could've used StumpWM or something that has better
Emacs keybindings (I picked up StumpWM from B. Slade's talk at the same
conference). The speaker goes on to recommend gradually replacing parts of Emacs
with better languages that can stand the test of time, using a concept from
philosophy called the Ship of Theseus. The core of Emacs can be changed from C -
a dangerous language according to the speaker - to a relatively safer language
like Rust. Elisp is not such a great language either with all the functions
staying in the global scope. Maybe a better Lisp would do well as a replacement.
I have to agree on both. The speaker says that we should put in the effort to
design a programming language specificially for the use case of Emacs and not
settle for a general purpose language. Also, the new language should
interoperate with elisp since there's too much of it to replace without decades
of work (e.g. org-mode has 120k lines of elisp). The importance of concurrency
and parallelism in the new language is also stressed.

## Miscellaneous

Most of the talks were about how people were using Emacs in their daily life and
about the cool applications they built on top of Emacs.

As an
[Orgzly](https://njoseph.me/blog/posts/replacing-cloud-based-to-do-apps-with-orgzly-and-syncthing/
"Replacing cloud-based To-Do apps with Orgzly and Syncthing") user, I found a
self-hosted web-based solution called [Organice](https://organice.200ok.ch/
"Organice") interesting.

The craziest hack I saw is making an object-oriented spreadsheet program in
Elisp, putting sheet music in it and rendering the audio using a Scheme program.

Almost all presenters used org-mode to make their presentations, with some
people presenting it within Emacs and others using exported PDFs.

Just like the Quake-inspired terminals Guake and Yakuake, there's one called
[Equake](https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/equake) that launches a drop-down eshell.
You can also use the Racket shell called Rash, which is crazy powerful. Equake has
good integration with StumpWM.

I was aware of the existence of Yasnippet, but never really used it much. I am
more motivated to use this important productivity tool after watching the talk
"Don’t wait! Write your own (yas)snippet" by Tony Aldon.

### Accessibility

There was a talk by Parham Doustdar, a blind developer who uses Emacs as his
daily driver. There were some interesting insights on how neglecting
accessibility in applications seriously impacts the productivity of
vision-impaired users. Some features can be completely inaccessible. Though the
W3C is doing some work to improve accessibility in browsers, most HTML is
rendered by client-side JavaScript these days which makes life even more
difficult for blind users.

### Replacing Shell Scripts?

One of the talks was about trying to automate tasks using Elisp as a replacement
for shell scripts (Emacs as my Go To Script Language - Howard Abrams). The idea
is interesting but probably wouldn't entice a Perl hacker to try and use Elisp.
I have done this myself in the past but the speaker went a bit further in
building a framework for doing ad-hoc text processing and piping using Emacs.
The hard reality is that text processing using macros or Elisp is very slow as
compared to using a Python or Perl script.

### Language Server Protocol

I've always imagined non-IDE editors like Emacs to be ideal for programming in
scripting languages. I tried using Emacs for Scala or Java earlier, but always
end up switching back to IntelliJ. I think the new LSP implementation for Java
is a game-changer. Though I am not a big fan of Java, it is the open-source
language that competes with Microsoft C# and has a lot of Apache projects
written in it. Being able to use Emacs for Java programming with all the
features of an IDE is definitely a big win for free software. Kotlin doesn't
have LSP support yet. Maybe it's a conflict of interest for JetBrains.

The conference had an excellent live-coding demonstration of LSP by Torstein
Krause Johansen in his presentation titled "How Emacs became my awesome Java
editing environment".

### Evil mode

I was kinda disappointed that only one user used EViL mode. I expected that
there were at least one talk on Evil mode itself. There was one talk by Zaiste
about Doom Emacs but the title was too click-baity and showed no code. Maybe I
should do a talk focussed on evil-mode in the next EmacsConf.


## Diversity

The conference seemed to have a good racial mix of speakers. There was a blind
speaker too. I am happy to see some representation from non-programmers among
the speakers. The conference can do better in terms of gender diversity.

## Conclusion

The conference was totally worth losing a night's sleep over. I had to stay up
till 5 am due to timezone differences. I am now more motivated to write some
Elisp myself and customize Emacs to my specific needs.