emacsconf 2019: evil-mode disappointment

[blog.git] / content / posts / emacsconf-2019.md

diff --git a/content/posts/emacsconf-2019.md b/content/posts/emacsconf-2019.md
index 10531afcfa32757e89437d4ed27d284de9abd725..8bded44982457090ffaa9099e8f59cb39cdc94eb 100644 (file)
--- a/content/posts/emacsconf-2019.md
+++ b/content/posts/emacsconf-2019.md
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 ---
 title: "EmacsConf 2019"
 date: 2019-11-03T15:40:09+05:30
-lastmod: 2019-11-03T15:40:09+05:30
+lastmod: 2019-11-04T15:40:09+05:30
 tags : [ "free-software", "emacs" ]
 categories : [ "conferences" ]
 layout: post
@@ -88,17 +88,7 @@ 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.
 
-### 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.
-
-### Miscellaneous
+## 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.
@@ -117,8 +107,14 @@ 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. This has
-very good integration with StumpWM.
+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
@@ -127,3 +123,48 @@ 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.