---
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
entirely by free software tools. RMS and some FSF members were also among the
audience.
-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.
+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
+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.
of work (e.g. org-mode has 120k lines of elisp). The importance of concurrency
and parallelism in the new language is also stressed.
-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.
+## 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. This has
+very good integration with StumpWM.
+
+### 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".
+
+## 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.
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