Notices by Omar Antolín (oantolin@mathstodon.xyz)

@jbaty I've done that too!

@amszmidt Really? You think the claim that the vast majority of Mastodon posts with the hastag #Emacs are about GNU Emacs is "absolute nonsense"? You and I must not be seeing the same posts! :D That's exciting to me because I am curious to read more about non-Gnu Emacsen.

@amszmidt That's interesting. Can you share an example of Gnu Emacs going against the idea of Emacs? I would have no clue about this, since the only Emacs I know is Gnu Emacs.

@amszmidt Also you should probably take into account that empirically speaking the hastag #Emacs on Mastodon means GNU Emacs specifically (at least the vast, vast majority of the time).

@amszmidt Ah, OK. I apologize for misspeaking. I meant GNU Emacs everytime I said Emacs and have never used any other Emacs.

@amszmidt I agree with everything you said except for "Emacs is not a Lisp environment", since I can readily evaluate Emacs Lisp code and use it to modify the behavior of Emacs. The rest I agree with and believe it does not contradict anything I've said.

@amszmidt (1) The reddit user meant "Emacs" when he or she said "Lisp Machine", I understood this and answered accordingly.

(2) It does have something to do with having a Lisp Machine at your fingertips! While Emacs is definitely not a Lisp Machine it seems wrong to me to say it is completely unrelated ("nothing to do") to Lisp Machines. Certainly of all the software I have installed on my computer the only program for which the experience of using it is even remotely close to what I imagine the experience of using a Lisp Machine is Emacs, even if people who have used such a machine feel it is far. (And those people probably agree that, say, Firefox is even further).

(3) It is not just having Lisp! I didn't just program in Lisp, I used the integration with the environment I was working in (Emacs). This is not automatic. I've written programs in Lisp which are not interactive, and not easily extensible (you can say it was stupid of me to write such useless programs but I had my reasons at the time, like wanting to know the result of some computation). There is something special about Emacs beyond having Lisp.

On the #Emacs subreddit someone asked: "What exactly is the advantage of having a LISP machine at my fingertips?". I gave an example, which I reproduce here:

One time I organized a conference session. I had to select among submitted talks and schedule them. The conference had a website I could log into to see all the submitted abstracts, so I wrote some elisp code to download all the abstracts and create a nicely formatted #OrgMode file with all the information —Emacs comes with functions to make HTTP requests and with a full HTML parser!

Once I chose the talks to accept (which I tagged in the Org mode file), I wrote a quick bit of elisp to write emails to all the talk applicants notifying them of their acceptance or rejection. This code used Org's parsing functions to go through the talks, get the applicant information and to pick either the acceptance or rejection template as appropriate. The code didn't actually send the emails, it just created and pre-populated message-mode buffers so I could review and customize the messages before sending.

1/2

@runlevelrobot @slomosapien I mainly use Emacs for writing prose (emails, papers, course notes, homework assignments, todo lists, committee reports, recommendation letters, etc.) and I still get a ton of mileage out of keyboard macros. You certainly don't need to be using emacs for programming to find keyboard macros useful!

There are a couple of features of #orgmode links in #Emacs that I think are underappreciated:

1. They work in all buffers, not just org-mode buffers! Bind org-open-at-point-global to a globally accessible key binding and enjoy org-links everywhere. For example, I like putting info links in comments in Emacs Lisp files, like info:calc#Graphics. Remember too, that file links can include a search string, for example file:~/.emacs.d/init.el::eshell takes me right to my eshell configuration. Shell links, that execute commands, are pretty useful too, for example <shell:zip source *.c *.h>.

2. It's super easy to create new link types (if you know how to program). For example, here's a new type of link for keyboard macros:

(org-link-set-parameters "kbd"
:follow (lambda (macro arg)
(kmacro-call-macro arg t nil (kbd macro))))

With that definition you can write keyboard macros like <kbd:M-a M-f M-t> and execute them with org-open-at-point-global.

I got a weight off my chest: I turned down an invitation to a math conference in the US and cancelled another I had already accepted. I know I'm probably overreacting, but I was worried about being deported since I've read many news stories about this happening to people with valid visas —including Europeans, so I don't like my chances as a brown Mexican! And even though I know it was unlikely to happen to me (it probably only happens to a small fraction of visitors), I'm happy to stop the nagging worry in the back of my mind. It's a shame: both events would have been great and I would have seen many American friends I don't get to see often.

@monnier I think it means "if you are considering listening to audio from your phone's speaker, use headphones instead", not "if you are considering striking up a conversation with a stranger, use headphones instead".

@rms Could you please explain the pun? I'm a native Spanish speaker and don't get it. I'm Mexican and Spanish varies from country to country, so I asked on a Spanish-language Emacs group with people from many different Spanish-speaking countries but people didn't get it there either.

EDIT: Nevermind, I found your web page on Spanish puns (https://stallman.org/spanish-puns.html) that has the complete pun: "Conocí a una ninfa de roble. No era ni hermosa ni elegante, sino bellota." Clever!

@fsf "Assigning your copyright to the FSF helps defend the GPL and keep software free." Is this true in the sense that it has actually helped in the past or is it only true in the theoretical sense that it might help in the future? Note that I am not at all against copyright assignment to the FSF and indeed have already done it myself for some Emacs packages I contributed to the GNU ELPA repository! I just want to know, out of curiosity, if the theoretical benefits of copyright assignment have already been realized.

@amszmidt @fsf Good to know! Do you happen to know of any specific example?

@robpike I have a similar story but in Spanish. Years ago the URL for some university department's "Consejo Académico" (academic council) ended in "/cacademico", with the council part abbreviated to just "c". But I always read that as "caca de mico", which means monkey shit.