And I believe we are live.
Hi, Daniel, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
It's cold outside, but it's nice in here, yeah.
I can assure you it's very cold in my own place as well.
We do EmacsConf always in December and that's always when it's particularly cold where I live and I assume where you live as well.
So, don't worry, we'll try to keep you warm with interesting questions.
But first, thank you for taking the time out of your busy high school life to make a presentation about Emacs.
Do you have any thoughts about the process of recording something for a conference?
Because I assume it's one of the first ones you're ever doing.
I think it was not as difficult as I thought it would be.
I just recorded in my basement and prepared some notes beforehand.
I think it was definitely helpful to have Emacs as a tool for that, because I made my presentation with Beamer.
Right.
I mean, it's amazing to see so many of the tools because, you know, you've shown Emacs, but you've shown Beamer.
You've shown tools that are about twice as old as you are yourself, which is amazing when you think about it.
But I think many people in the audience can actually relate to your discovery of those tools because we
were pretty much, I mean a lot of us were your age when we started playing with those tools so it's like there's a little bit of nostalgia that we feel looking at your presentation because we are, we can see the excitement behind everything you've touched and that's great for us because it brings us back maybe 10 or 20 years in the past and for others perhaps 30 or 40 years so that's kind of amazing.
How about we start taking some questions?
So, just for timekeeping, we have until 20 of the current hours, which is 8 minutes and 30 seconds to cover as many questions as possible.
Now, if we might take the first one.
So, Corbyn, can you scroll down to the questions?
Yes.
I'll be reading you the questions just to make it a little easier for you, Daniel, to answer them.
I use Orgrim for notes and find it very useful.
Have you considered it?
Uh, yeah, that's actually where I started out for taking notes.
Um, that, that I moved to Ditto because I didn't use all of its features, um, for, or grow my men.
Uh, I also didn't, didn't really like the dependency on an external database.
Uh, it just like took a while for, um, stuff to index if I moved it between like, uh, using sync thing.
laptop and my desktop.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's definitely something, I mean, I co-maintain Orgrim, so I'm fully aware of this problem with it.
And yeah, SyncThink is not great to sync a database, a SQLite database that we use.
And, I mean, whichever solution you use, whatever works for you is good.
Orgrim was kind of thought in terms of scalability for people who had, you know, thousands of notes with thousands of links inside of them.
so perhaps it's not adapted to your note-taking style right now, but perhaps it's something to keep in mind, you know, it's many tools and you use them when you need to.
Colin, if we can switch the questions, I'm switching to the second one.
Do you use the getting things done methodology as part of your org workflow?
So there's an interesting thing about that.
I started with org first and then I heard about getting things done, so I didn't exactly
design my workflow with that in mind, but I sort of.
Like reinvented it, I would say, not really, but I do a lot of the similar things, but I don't have the different to do states like.
I don't know an example because I didn't really look into it that much, but it would be like next isn't the next thing you're going to do.
But I don't think I
where I just write what I need to do and then schedule it and then look at my agenda for the next thing.
Yeah, I mean, part of the beauty of using Emacs, Org Mode or using a methodology like Getting Things Done is that I think you need to find room in the method or the tool for you to organically do what you want.
And it's okay to not do everything in a Getting Things Done methodology.
Like, I know a lot of people take issue with the Tickler file, where you're supposed to put stuff to review in the future.
Like, for instance, if you don't want to work on this particular topic right now in your life, you decide, oh, I'd like to revisit this topic maybe in six months.
And then you have this Tickler file, which has entries and folders for each month of the year.
And when
six months comes and you find yourself at the beginning of the next month, you open the file and you see, oh there's the task I left off for later.
A lot of people don't like to do it this way, some people really like it, but part of the beauty of having tools which are very modular
like Emacs and Org Mode allows you to have, well, you just adjust the method for something that works.
And there's something to be garnered as well for applying these lessons to how you organize your life, not merely in front of a computer, but also how you manage your tasks elsewhere at school, iSchool or elsewhere.
All right, moving to the next question.
OrgSC and OrgDrill are Emacs org-mode-centric flashcard solutions.
Have you looked into them?
I think I looked into OrgDrill, but I wanted to use OrgKey because of... I wanted to use it on my phone, but then I realized I had to pay for the app, and then I didn't want to use it on my phone anymore.
but it's just something that I used before without work mode for a little bit.
And then I liked it, but yeah, it works pretty well with work mode.
So I didn't find a reason to switch to one of those because like I might be not at a computer one day and have to learn something.
Yeah, that's something that you call premature optimization.
And if you continue as a software engineer at university, you'll get to hear plenty of this.
But yes, Anki is also a tool that I've used a whole lot in my learning journeys, be it about languages, be it about literature, be it about
whatever really, and it's a very good tool and I recommend people to look into it, especially since they've released a new algorithm to manage learning a little differently than the old one.
If you're familiar with SuperMemo, I really invite you to look into the advancement in Enki in recent years.
Moving to another question, what do other students think about your approach and what are they doing instead, if anything?
And your teachers, what do they think?
So for other students they usually are just confused about what's going on when I show my computer because they know that I use Linux but they don't know what it is so they're just assuming everything on my computer is I'm either hacking or like doing some Linux thing and I don't really bother to explain it to them so that's kind
But for I love it.
See my see my prior videos.
That's that's wonderful.
Pardon me.
Pardon me for breaking in, Daniel.
But I just since I have, I want to say wonderful presentation.
I love your spirit, your tone and great thought there.
For my teachers, I think.
because if I write an essay or something, I usually paste it in Google Docs.
But recently, I got more confident, which is export to LaTeX.
And I did that for my physics labs.
And my teacher was pretty satisfied with the results for the math formatting.
So I think they don't really have a problem with it, where it's actually more convenient, maybe.
That's really great to hear and if you continue at university, which I'm almost sure that you will, your professors, you'll be pretty much using the same tools as they are, so you'll find yourself in a like-minded crowd of people once you get to university.
We are a little short on time because we need to move to the next talk in about one minute.
There are still some questions and Daniel, I would invite you to stay and maybe answer them in a room so that we can gather as many of your answers as possible.
But before we leave, I just want to give you the opportunity, if you have any last words, to share them with the crowd.
Well, for the students who may be watching this, I hope that you give Emacs a try.
And good luck if you decide to use something else because it's probably won't be as great.
It's very good to be so young and to already be convinced that Emacs is the best thing.
For some of us, it took us many decades to reach this conclusion, and I'm so happy to see young people.
I used to be a teacher, by the way, so I used to teach people your age, but I'm so happy to see people your age interested in Emacs because it makes me hopeful that in the future we'll have people carrying the flame and standing on the shoulders of
current people.
So thank you so much, Daniel.
We'll be seeing you soon.
We wish you good luck with your studies.
And for EmacsConf, we'll be moving to the next talk in five seconds.
See you soon.
And I want to reassure you, we'll post all the Q&A info when we do post this video.
Yes.
So Daniel, as I said, if you want to stick around a little more with Corwin to answer the questions, that's all fine.
I'll be moving to the next room to get ready for the next talks.
So thank you, Daniel.
And I'll see you later.
All right, the cops are gone.
Wait, no, I'm just kidding.
No, but if you'd like to walk through a few more of these questions, I'd be happy to record that.
You're not obligated to do that.
You could also, the pad's there.
You could just type out your answers or whatever you prefer to do.
I guess I can answer them still.
Cool.
So we're here, what was your biggest source of frustration, friction, confusion when getting started?
I honestly don't really remember.
It somehow just clicked one day and I figured it out.
All right, it takes us pretty naturally to the next one.
How did you come across Emacs?
What got you into it?
I could ask this question quite
similar to how I stumbled into Linux, where I was... I heard of it before, but I saw screenshots of it or something on Reddit, and I was like, oh, that looks pretty cool, maybe I'll look into that.
And then on YouTube, I would see videos about Doom Emacs, and then the Doomcasts video, I think that's what really got me into it.
Okay, I did my best to capture that.
So what's the situation with respect to the mobile use, if that's applicable?
And Orgly is, sorry, was it not Doomcast?
Is it System Crafter?
Sorry if I botched the note.
Oh yeah, System Crafters was also one of the things I used for getting into Emacs from scratch.
I'm sorry if my dog is barking.
the, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name, but Protositos, I think that's how you say it.
I always say Prot just to get me out of that problem for what it's worth.
I'm not sure that I can say it properly either.
Yeah, his videos were really great for getting started with each, each individual component of something like there's entire videos just about completion and about a tool called Embark.
And like, I would just watch those videos while
Like I would, I would learn a lot from that.
Awesome.
I love it.
Um, what about, uh, the, the mobile, uh, sorry, did I get that question out there already?
Oh, no.
Uh,
But for org files, I couldn't really get it to sync over without using a paid app.
And I didn't really look into it that much because I have a computer with me almost all the time.
Usually I carry around a notebook.
And if I really need to know something or remember it for later, I just write it down.
I've seen people get started with e-ink tablets, and they sync it with SyncThink because it's Android, but I don't use that, so I can't really attest to how good it is.
So has using Emacs led you to an expanded interest in programming and computer science?
Sorry if I could have got that out of the presentation.
I think Emacs is what got me started with the Lisp specifically.
Otherwise, I probably would have not really looked into it that much other than like maybe dabbling in Scheme from the Structures and Interpretations of Computer Programs book.
But I probably wouldn't have seen that if I hadn't discovered a max either so.
So maybe we'd jump from there, right, to, you mentioned exporting notes, essays, and so on, handing them on to other people.
How does interaction with others work in technical terms?
We mostly find workflows centered around like Microsoft products, and that makes sense to me.
I have a day job where I have to work with a bunch of Microsoft products, and I know the workflows for that.
So how do you manage your kind of EMAX-y
you know, workflows, um, you know, in terms of sharing with people.
Yeah.
So for sharing with like my teachers or something, I would, we use like Google at our school.
So for, I'm very fortunate that I don't have to deal with Microsoft other than with a very niche situations in which I can just use LibreOffice and then convert to Doc X or something.
I heard that chef.
That's, that's how all my vendors, uh, my vendors all roll their eyes when they were, Oh, you're a Microsoft shop.
Yep.
Heard.
Then they're all Google shops to an education.
Great point.
it for later if I wanted to look at it.
But for that, I don't really have too much problems.
Hopefully, I will find a way to figure it out when I get into university.
Awesome.
Okay, well, I know we did it once already, but since this will be the end of the video, let me just open the floor one more time for parting thoughts.
I'm not sure that I have any.
I mean, you said it pretty well, right?
I hope my peers see this.
I hope they realize other tools are kind of inferior from a get things done standpoint.
Sol, your talk?
heard that message in this Q&A.
I think you did a great job.
You don't have to say more, but just offering you the chance.
Thank you.
Well, thank you, Daniel.
And thanks to everybody watching this video during the conference or after it.
And appreciate and look forward to your talks in the future, Daniel.
Thank you.