Sacha Chua - category - emacs-chat-podcast

Chapters Transcript Chat [2026-05-08 Fri]: Updated with Amin's changes. [2026-05-07 Thu]: Added file enclosure so that it can load as a proper podcast. I chatted with Amin Bandali about Emacs, configuration, EXWM, keybindings, audio, and life. View it via the Internet Archive, watch/comment on YouTube, read the transcript online, download the transcript, or e-mail me your thoughts! Links: Emacs Chat with Sacha Chua - bandali - Amin's blog post about this talk Amin Bandali: a computing scientist, archivist, and activist for user freedom bandali's GNU Emacs configuration .emacs.d - configs - My configuration for GNU Emacs and other programs The People of Emacs - bandali emacs-exwm/exwm: Emacs X Window Manager · GitHub Chapters 0:11 Introduction: Amin Bandali, software developer and free software activist 1:06 Aspects of life: notetaking, editing, multiple 3:03 Configuration: keeping things simple 5:03 user-lisp-directory, site-lisp if you're using an older Emacs 6:35 Organizing configuration into modules 7:49 early-init 9:09 ring-bell-function 9:41 performance optimizations 10:27 user-lisp 11:16 ignoring byte compilation warnings 11:58 init-file-debug = –debug-init 12:56 Core 13:57 no longer using bandali-configure; scoping errors, timing execution 17:06 Why not use use-package 18:39 Defining multiple keybindings 19:48 doric-oak uses emphasis instead of colours 20:52 global font scaling instead of the local ones 21:39 display-fill-column-indicator 22:57 emacsclient for EDITOR and VISUAL 23:38 fundamental-mode-hook 24:25 indicate-buffer-boundaries 26:38 enabling and disabling commands 27:42 package-review-policy 28:58 getting the Info files from the Emacs source directory 29:46 recentf, adding directories 31:41 Scrolling 32:36 auto revert 33:16 Repeat mode 34:53 EXWM 38:05 Audio setup 39:15 keymaps for launching different applications 39:55 bandali-call-interactively-insert 42:29 workspaces 43:50 ZSA Voyager split keyboard, super x as a single key 46:28 Keybindings 48:08 Media buttons 49:45 exwm-input-simulation-keys! 51:43 exwm: managing floating windows 53:13 exwm: application-specific local simulation keys 54:09 binding C-q to exwm-input-send-next-key 54:31 Renaming buffers 55:38 dunst for notifications 56:55 exwm xsettings and responding to screen configuration changes 59:03 Slowly getting back into Org mode 1:00:01 chat notes 1:00:54 Mode line 1:01:50 display-buffer-alist 1:02:24 TRAMP slowness, maybe disabling VC detection? 1:03:42 eat 1:05:09 TRAMP completion 1:06:55 ffs: form feed slides, ^L 1:09:36 Speaker notes Transcript Skip to end Transcript 0:00 Introduction: Amin Bandali, software developer and free software activistSacha: Let me do the thing. Go live. Let's check in. Alright, hello. This is Emacs Chat 21 coming back after a decade of not doing it, so… And today I've got Amin Bandali who's a… Is it seven years now that we've been doing EmacsConf together? Amin: I think so. Since fall 2019. Yeah. Sacha: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But of course you also do a whole lot of other things. I was looking through your Emacs configuration and there's like translation and other stuff in there. So would you like to start off with a brief introduction of who you are and how and why you use Emacs? Amin: Yeah, sure. Yeah, first of all, hello, everyone. Sorry if I'm looking to the side. This is a new setup. My laptop, which has my webcam, is there, but my main display is here. So I might be looking to the side from time to time. But yeah, that aside, hello. 1:05 Aspects of life: notetaking, editing, multipleAmin: Yeah, I'm Amin Bandali. I've been, I think, using Emacs since 2014 or 15, so I guess more than a decade now. I'm a software engineer by day, or software developer, slash programmer, slash computing scientist. I'm also a free software activist. I volunteer on a lot of free software projects as well, which Sacha mentioned. I do things around GNU. I volunteer with FSF. I'm a Debian Developer, so I try to maintain some packages in Debian. I try to help run EmacsConf from time to time. Hopefully this year I will be much more present. But yeah, that's that. So I first got into using Emacs, I guess, as a programmer tool, like as a text editor. But I've since then kind of integrated it into a lot of other aspects of my life. And I do much more with it, as I'm sure a lot of us do. Yeah, so I use it for kind of note-taking, just any writing, editing purposes in multiple natural and programming languages. Reading and sending email for chatting via IRC. All of that good stuff. Sacha: This is the sort of thing that isn't immediately obvious from your configuration. I know you've got your Gnus setup in there and you've got your ERC setup in there, but sometimes when newcomers are trying to figure out, okay, there are all these packages, but how do I use them to get stuff done? That's one of the reasons why we want to do this Emacs chat, so that maybe you can show us some of the cool stuff. We are live, but if you accidentally show something personal, let me know and I can kill the stream within 10 seconds and I think then we can be like, okay, we'll just flush that out and then come back once we've hidden the top secret plans for taking over the world, that sort of thing. Sounds good. Where do we want to start? 3:00 Configuration: keeping things simpleAmin: I'm happy to do it however you like. I can either share my screen, pull up my configuration. Yeah, okay, so let's do that. Sacha: Yeah. If you share your screen sometimes, I think what we did ages ago was we just started walking through the configuration and then sometimes people say, oh yeah, that's really interesting. Let's go and demonstrate that so that people can get a sense of how this actually works. And there were some things in your configuration that I had no idea, like what is FFS? There's like no package. I couldn't find any information about it. But yeah, so your config, if you want to go ahead and share your screen while I Fill the air with hand-waving. Amin's config tends to be more on the minimalist side. I think you mostly rely on built-in things with a couple of external packages. You don't even use use-package at all. It's all run-at-idle-time to delay the startup of various things, and then it's all vanilla Emacs as you can get for loading and configuring things. Amin: Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Yeah, so before I continue, quick note, Sacha, if you can make me presenter because I don't have access to share my screen. Sacha: Oh, that would be important, yes. Hang on a second. Let me see. Okay, here we go. Make presenter. I might as well promote you to moderator while we're at it. There you go. You should now have magic powers. Amin: Thanks. Let's see. Sacha: It's a good thing we're practicing this before EmacsConf so I remember how all this stuff works. Amin: Yep, for sure. Okay, let's see. I think I got it now. Can you see my screen? Sacha: Yes, I can see your screen. Amin: Okay, excellent. Let's see. Okay. 4:58 user-lisp-directory, site-lisp if you're using an older EmacsAmin: Yeah, so as Sacha mentioned at the moment, my config is kind of very minimalist and kind of conservative by design, in part because I tend to work on a lot of different machines, whether it's for work or volunteering or whatever, and I prefer to use Emacs if I can. So I want my config to be fairly self-contained so I can easily either git clone or rsync it over. Yeah. To keep it simple, I was using package.el for a while for installing and managing my packages, which I don't keep in my configs repository. But then I decided to switch over to very manual package management with the awesome new feature user-lisp-directory of the next upcoming Emacs release, which basically you can give it a subdirectory in your ~/.emacs.d or ~/.config/emacs. And then it'll go through all the Emacs Lisp files recursively, byte compile them, native compile them, all that good stuff, and add them to the load-path. And for people who are using existing or older releases of Emacs, there's also site-lisp by Philip Kaludercic, which is kind of the… I guess first implementation of what later became User Lisp and built into Emacs. So you can make it conditional and fall back to site-lisp if you want to be able to use User Lisp on older Emacs but still have your configuration be usable. Yeah, anyway. 6:32 Organizing configuration into modulesAmin: So I've experimented with like a couple different ways of managing my configurations like single giant init file of like four or five thousand lines which I know is actually not very large by comparison to I think like someone like Sacha's configuration and also like You know, split into multiple different files, which has its own benefits. And I've kind of actually converged to the approach that Prot uses. If you actually take a look at my configuration file, you see I've drawn a lot of inspiration from Prot switches. Having a literate single file configuration, which then all of the Emacs Lisp source blocks get tangled to individual files. So I can maintain a single source of truth and edit it all in one place, but then also easily be able to share individual pieces to people if they want. So yeah, that's kind of the general approach. And I can dive right in. Sacha: Yeah, that's definitely the structure that I've also stolen from Prot. And I like the way that you're Your heading names are all long and descriptive, and you've got everything broken down in detail. So yeah, go ahead and walk us through it, please. Amin: Yeah, sure. Let's see. 7:45 early-init Amin: So that's a brief introduction, and then I have an early init section for doing the early init file. There's a couple of subheadings here. Actually, let me enlarge the font size a little bit to make it more legible. OK, great. I do a couple of things here like disabling package at startup because I don't use package as I mentioned. I manually install and update my packages as git submodules in my configurations repository. Amin: I set load-prefer-newer to t to make sure that I never load any stale code. For example, I might edit some Emacs Lisp file by hand and forget to byte compile or native compile it. And this tells Emacs to basically just use the version of these three variants that's the most recent. Yeah. Nothing super fancy here. Amin: I turn off a couple of things that I find a little bit distracting, like the menu bar or toolbar. Although I do say here that for people who are new to Emacs, they're actually super helpful. Sure, it's a little bit of visual clutter, but in the beginning, it's really, really helpful to help you orient yourself of what mode you're in, what tools do you have available in your disposal. And even someone who's been using Emacs for more than 10 years, I also use it sometimes when I'm like… just starting to use a new mode. So yeah, good stuff. 9:06 ring-bell-functionSacha: I was very amused by the comment on the… "I don't like getting jumpscared out of my chair." You turned off the bell. Amin: Yeah, because that actually used to happen when I first started using Emacs. Like when I would, I don't know, I don't even remember when it bells or rings, but Maybe if you like quit like with C-g or like try to backspace into like delete where there's no more characters to delete so it rings a bell and it's very like can be jarring so yeah I turn that off. 9:40 performance optimizations Sacha: Yeah, and then you've got a whole bunch of things where you set some variables to nil temporarily to make it faster, so that's in your startup in garbage collection. Amin: Exactly. Empirically, there is no hard and fast science behind this. I experimented over the years. I'm pretty sure I believe the default, for example, the garbage collection cons threshold is about eight megabytes. I tried increasing that a little bit to see how much If I increase it to what point will it make my startup faster? And I found this 30 megabytes or mibibytes to be kind of a sweet spot. So I bump that up. And then after Emacs has finished initializing, in the after-init-hook, I just restore the defaults. 10:25 user-lisp Amin: And then, yeah, this is the bit with the user-lisp-directory that I was talking about. Awesome stuff. So you can basically designate a directory. For example, in my configuration, it's just a lisp directory. And then on startup, Emacs will go through and byte-compile, native-compile if necessary, and then add all of that stuff to the load-path automatically. So you get that. Yeah, and then this is the bit about site-lisp that I was talking about. So if you want to use user-lisp, but you're still using older Emacs versions that you maintain, you need to maintain backward compatibility in your config. This is how you do it, for example. So you just yeah, add it to load-path, require it and then call prepare-user-lisp. That's about it. 11:14 ignoring byte compilation warningsSacha: I'm picking up that tip about using the ignore directories. I'm getting by with just ignoring all of the byte compilation output, but it would be nice to just say, you know, that stuff is test. I don't need to worry about it. Amin: Right, right. Thanks. Yeah, I was also doing that. I actually have it as a comment to suppress warning types, like byte compilation, but I was… I plan on working on some packages, whether my own or others, and it would still be helpful to get those warnings, so I keep them enabled. It's still a bit annoying. I still get some of them when I launch emacs but I don't restart or launch emacs as frequently so it's pretty bearable. 11:55 init-file-debug = --debug-init Amin: Yeah, and then I have the main init file. And there's not much in it. It's just the debug-on-error and debug-on-quit. So the debug-on-error thing, I set it to the value of init-file-debug. And if you look at that, the help for this variable, basically if you pass or launch Emacs with --debug-init, this variable will be true. So yeah. Sacha: I did not know that. Cool. Amin: Yeah, it's pretty helpful. I think, if I'm not mistaken, I took this from John Wiegley's dotemacs, but I can't remember for sure. It's been years. Yeah, it's pretty nice. And then here, I just set my name and email address. And very early I set a custom-file to keep all of that stuff separate from my .emacs. I don't want it mixing in. 12:53 Core Amin: And then pretty much the only other thing that's in my main init file is just to require and load these different modules or packages of my configuration. I have these as actual packages or as actual features. They provide themselves. And that's just something that I've found straightforward enough to do. I know, for example, Prot uses a dual approach. He has some of his configuration that's more readily usable, available as actual packages. And then the other ones, it's just Emacs Lisp code. It's not actual packages. But for me, I just keep it simple. Everything as packages and that's about that. Sacha: Fantastic. Let's dive into some of those configuration modules. Amin: Sure, let's see. Yeah, so this there's this like core thing which is kind of included gets included in all of my other files. 13:53 no longer using bandali-configure; scoping errors, timing execution Amin: I wrote a bandali-configure macro shamelessly based on prot-emacs-configure which is what Prot uses and it basically is a way of kind of similar to use-package for like wrapping a bunch of relevant like Emacs Lisp code all together. It has the benefit, if you use it, if there is an error in that block or in the body basically, then it won't crash everything. That body will just get ignored and we display an error. And that's also the main reason that Prot uses it. The one thing that I added extra to mine, which I took with inspiration from Eshel Yaron's esy/init-step, is to wrap it up in basically time the execution of each of these blocks, which can be pretty helpful to help you see, okay, which part of my configuration is particularly slow. Usage examples. I just have it here. You can either basically pass it like a symbol like thing or you can also pass in a string as the first argument. And this is what will be displayed when you display a list of the evaluation times for all of these blocks in your configuration. Amin: Yeah, and then I have a neat little function here like bandali-configure-report-times that will report these times, whether in the order that it's encountered them, or you can have it sort by fastest to slowest, slowest to fastest, blah blah blah. Sacha: You mentioned you're no longer using this. Is it because you wanted it to be easier to copy and paste your code? What got you to shift back to the regular vanilla type of configuration? Amin: Right, as neat as it is, I didn't find it super useful. For one thing, because I don't add or remove a ton of stuff to my Emacs configuration regularly, so if there is an error, it wouldn't cause an issue for the rest of my configuration. I didn't really find that very useful. And then my other potential concern is that the way I was structuring things, I would put all of the configuration, let's say for Gnus, in one of these blocks. But I wanted to be able to break that down into, for example, Org Mode sections more easily. So far, I just decided to not use it. I know I could technically break those down into smaller blocks, but I haven't done that yet. Sacha: Ihor says, this configure macro looks a lot like good old use-package, which you're not even using in the rest of your config. And I hear you about wanting to be able to split things into smaller blocks with more explanations in between them. So in my config, yeah, sure, I've got the use-package there to do the ensure and all that stuff. But I also have with-eval-after-load because I still want, you know, the links and the screenshots in between. 17:02 Why not use use-packageAmin: Right. Yeah, exactly. use-package is awesome. I have used that in the past, especially when I was using the straight.el package manager. It pairs nicely with it. But yeah, since then, I found it a little bit like too magical for my tastes, kind of along the lines of declaring an init file bankruptcy at some point I really wanted to understand every single line that I have in my Emacs configuration. And at the time, I didn't know a whole lot about macros or wasn't very well-versed with them. So I just ditched it in favor of simply using, as you mentioned, with-eval-after-load. And then that causes all that code to be basically delayed, not evaluated immediately, but when that package is loaded. And then as to when to pull that package in, depending on if I want it right from the get-go of my Emacs start, then I would require it. Otherwise, I add this, as you also mentioned earlier, this kind of timer thing where if Emacs is idle for, I don't know, 0.2 seconds or 0.4 seconds, then go ahead and require this package. Sacha: Ihor has a tip in the chat. Of course, Ihor has an Org way to do this. He uses use-package whatever config and then he has a noweb reference to the Babel blocks. Then he just says :tangle no on the source blocks so that they don't actually get repeated. Anyway, you can look at it later when you go through. I'll send you the comments or whatever. But show us how you're actually configuring things since you're not using this. 18:37 Defining multiple keybindings Amin: Then I just have another quick macro thingy here, bandali-define-keys, which wraps around Emacs's define-key. It affords me the convenience of defining multiple key bindings, and Prot's version of this (I think it's prot-emacs-keybind, or something like that) he imposes the limitation that the keys should be valid strings that can be passed to the kbd function, which is very fair and valid, but I wanted to not impose that, to keep the flexibility of using define-key directly. The consequences of that, as we can see, is we can pass in the old representation of key bindings, like the vector or whatever syntax, which Prot's doesn't support by choice, whereas mine does. Let's see. For example, let's look at the bandali-theme.el, which is all about… The appearance, I guess, of Emacs. 19:45 doric-oak uses emphasis instead of colours Amin: Yeah, so I just have a conditional block where, you know, if you're in a graphical environment, I'll just go ahead and load Prot's doric-themes, specifically doric-oak, which is what we're seeing right now. I'm using, it's very beautiful, it's very subtle, and it uses emphasis, bolding and stuff to draw your eye to something instead of using a million different colours, which I find pretty nice. Yeah, and then for example here I set up some fonts. I use this Sahel font for Persian and Arabic text. I set a colour emoji font here and this is like we get a kind of preview of what I do. It's like with-eval-after-load 'faces and then blah blah blah. Sacha: Ihor would like to point out that with-eval-after-load is also a macro that calls another macro. So I'm just going to mention it because it's there. These are your fonts. This is your theme. This is great because everyone always asks, what theme is this? What font is this? All right. 20:49 global font scaling instead of the local ones Sacha: I like your text scaling tweaks that you're just about to go into. You've changed the global mappings. Amin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I actually took this from Prot as well. And it makes a lot more sense. So by default, this, C-x C-+, -, blah, blah, blah, it only scales the text for the current buffer only. But in newer versions of Emacs, in Emacs 29, they also added commands to adjust this globally, including the mode line and all that stuff, which is usually what I want, for example, in this presentation or when I'm sharing my screen right now. It scales everything up globally. So yeah, I just swapped these to be the default, and then I add keybinds for the just local variants in case I need to use that. Yep. 21:37 display-fill-column-indicatorAmin: And then here I have display-fill-column-indicator. I don't know, maybe this is just me, but sometimes I'm kind of OCD about keeping my text lined up at exactly, for example, the 70 characters column. I care a lot about that, especially if I'm writing code or text that I want to also visually look nice. And I enable this. And let's see, I enable it for prog-mode. So yeah, I guess if I, for example, do this… This little thin line that we see here, that's the display filler column indicator. I used to have it globally enabled, but then I found that a bit too much, so I just enable it with a hook in the modes that I want. Sacha: Yeah, and the theme makes it very subtle. It's just there as a reminder, don't go beyond this line. You can if you really want to, but just try not to. Amin: Yeah, exactly. And then my essentials… This is where I configure a lot of key behaviours of Emacs, all built-in stuff for the most part, or things that are key to my workflows. For example, I always want to start with a *scratch​* buffer. 22:53 emacsclient for EDITOR and VISUAL Amin: Start the Emacs server if it's not running. And this is very useful, very helpful so that then you can call into an existing Emacs process with emacsclient and have it edit a file. I don't use it for anything fancy just yet. I believe Prot also mentioned in his video with you, Sacha, that he uses it for things like org-capture to spawn a new buffer in his existing Emacs session and things like that. You can do pretty cool things with it. But yeah, I just use it for being able to easily use my Emacs as EDITOR and VISUAL text editors. So yeah, this sets that up. 23:37 fundamental-mode-hook Amin: Adding a fundamental mode hook. Again, I took this from Prot. Sacha: I was surprised by that because I was like, oh, there isn't a fundamental-mode-hook? Okay, that makes sense now. Amin: Right, right. Yeah, there isn't a fundamental-mode-hook by design. But I still, in the past, have found that I wanted that. For example, for this display-fill-column-indicator, when I had it enabled everywhere, I was like, it would be nice if I could at least disable it for Fundamental mode. And at the time, I didn't have this. I added this just recently. So if I decide to go back to using something globally, but I don't want it in fundamental-mode, then I can disable it using this. Yeah, and then some standard stuff like I prefer spaces and a tab width of four characters. 24:23 indicate-buffer-boundaries Amin: Visually indicate buffer boundaries. This is a little bit hard to see right now, but here at the bottom left Amin: you see a little down arrow Amin: and then the little top arrow. And… Let's see if I can. Sacha: Oh! Amin: And also here, for example, when it all fits in the view. Sacha: Huh, that is cool. I was looking at that. What does it do? And so that tells you, you can still scroll up or you can still scroll down, and you don't have to look at the scroll bar to see where you are. It just says there's more there. Amin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it also helps distinguish when there's a newline character at the end of the file or not. So here in this buffer, there is. Amin: But if I delete that, you see this indicator here changed shape. But if I go back and add the new line again. So yeah, that's also been very helpful for me because I added configuration files and some of these pieces of software are sensitive to having a new line at the end of the file. So yeah, it's very helpful and useful for that. Sacha: I would not have guessed that from the very short line in your config that turns that on. It's one line, (setq-default indicate-buffer-boundaries 'left), and yet it adds this nice little nuance to the way that fringe looks. Amin: Right. Yeah, absolutely. Perhaps I should expand more on it at some point later to explain these things. But yeah, just this one line. Sacha: May I recommend screenshots? Amin: Yes, you may, for sure. Yeah, I will definitely do that as well, because I'm also a bit of a visual person. I like seeing screenshots and videos, so yeah I'll take that to heart and do that for my own configuration as well. Sacha: When I post this, I'll probably… I figured out how to have the transcripts and then screenshots embedded into my transcript. I'll generate it automatically from the subtitle file. Our EmacsConf transcripts are going to get so fancy next year. But you can pull those screenshots and drop them into your config. It'll be great. Amin: Nice. Yeah, for sure. Sounds good. 26:36 enabling and disabling commands Amin: And then here, I just enable some of these commands that are disabled by default. So yeah, it's useful, especially narrow-to-page, for example, or narrow-to-region. These are commands where Emacs disables them by default so that newcomers don't accidentally hit them and get very confused by what just happened. It doesn't disable them for good. It just basically prompts you for confirmation. Are you sure you want to run this command? I'm sure, at least about these commands. So I just enable them. And then something like, for example, overwrite-mode, which I never use and I don't want to accidentally enable. I just put it disabled so that if I do accidentally hit the keys, which might be, I don't know, something insert or whatever, then it will prompt me to make sure that I meant to do that. Sacha: That reminds me, I should probably turn that off for myself and then you get a whole new keyboard shortcut you can use too. Amin: Right, yeah. Let's see. 27:37 package-review-policy Amin: Yeah, I have just one line setting for package.el. In Emacs 31, we will be getting a package-review-policy which is very helpful. So if you do use package.el for installing packages from GNU ELPA, NonGNU ELPA, MELPA or whatever else, you can enable this, and then whenever you update your packages, you'll get a diff of what changed in this new revision of the package that you're downloading and you're about to enable. And you can presumably say yes or at least see what's going on, which I'd find helpful. Sacha: But you're not using packages, you mentioned, so you're just checking everything out and then you're just git pulling whenever you feel like it. Amin: Yeah, so right now I'm using git pulls and git submodules, very manual. I put this here because I think it's generally a very welcome change and awesome new feature that I want to spread the word about. So maybe someone who's looking at my config, they use package and that's perfectly fine. So this is just here to spread the word about it mainly, I guess. And if I start using package at some point myself in the future, then I will have this enabled. Let's see. 28:52 getting the Info files from the Emacs source directory Amin: Very quickly, here I extend Info-directory-list. I like to, at least on some of my machines, use Emacs that I built from source directly in the source repository of Emacs. Just after doing make, I don't run make install, even though it's very easy to do that. You can install to a custom location by providing --prefix when you're ./configure-ing Emacs. Sometimes I just find it more convenient for me to not do that and just run make and then exit and reopen Emacs. And for that kind of a setup, I just extend the Info-directory-list to include the info subdirectory of the Emacs source repository so that the built-in Emacs info manuals will be available to me. 29:45 recentf, adding directories Amin: And then I use recentf for tracking recent revisited files. I bind it to C-c f r e for me to get a pop-up completion for visiting a recent file, it has completion. So if I hit TAB here, for example, we can see some of these files or directories that I visited recently. Sacha: I see. And then you're adding the directory to it. So what does that let you do? Because I'm assuming you're already in there in the directory. But how does that change your recentf? Amin: Right. So I need to think to remember this, but I think the point of this was that if I open a project in VC or in Dired, then I would like that directory to also get added to my recentf files list, because I think by default, recentf only includes files, not directories. Sacha: You're in it, you start up Magit or whatever, and then you move on to something else, but you want to be able to easily go back to it. Amin: Yeah, for example, I like to keep my recently visited directories in recentf as well. Because that's one of the main ways I jump between projects and stuff, even though there is literally a built-in Emacs project mode, which I still use. The only thing that I have here is… I don't want to add my home directory to the recently visited list, so the only thing that this function does is to skip that if I'm opening the home directory. That's about it. 31:38 Scrolling Amin: And then here I configure mouse and scrolling behaviour. So I want Emacs to scroll very gently, one line at a time. I think the default is that when you reach the end of the page, it'll jump half a page down and then recenter. I don't remember default behaviour because I don't use it very much, but yeah, this basically makes it very predictable. For example, when I reach the edge of the page here and I press C-n, it'll only scroll one line at a time, instead of jumping and then doing something like this. Sacha: Oh yeah, mine does! Mine doesn't do that, so it does that jumping thing. I see what you mean here. Interesting. Amin: Yeah, so you can tweak that with scroll-conservatively and then scroll-preserve-screen-position, I believe. 32:28 auto revert Amin: Yeah, and then I use autorevert, which is pretty helpful. So this will have Emacs watch, for example, files that are open in your buffers. And if they change on disk, Emacs will automatically refresh the buffer so that you get the latest version. The cool thing is you can press undo in one of these files that's been autoreverted so that you get the revision that was there right before the change. So I've used that sometimes as well. Sacha: Yeah, and sometimes autofollow also is nice for log files and things like that. But yeah, autoreverting is great. Amin: Yeah, for sure. 33:14 Repeat mode Amin: repeat-mode is something that I've only recently started using, especially with my Emacs EXWM setup, using Emacs as my window manager. For example, if I hit C-x o, we see here in the echo area where it says repeat with o or capital O. So I can now only press o instead of saying C-x o, C-x o to do that multiple times. Keymaps that have support for this basically indicate that they want to be repeatable can declare that. And then once you invoke one of the keys in those keymaps, then you can repeat it with just that single character. And for example, for my setup, I have that with my EXWM workspace switching keys. So I can easily go to the next and previous workspaces, many of them at a time by just pressing p and n instead of doing the shortcut multiple times. Sacha: And actually, if you don't mind jumping ahead, the EXWM part of your config is fairly complex, and I think not a lot of people have a lot of experience seeing EXWM in action. And I don't know whether you're comfortable sharing you switching around to different workspaces, but if that is something that you can do, how are you doing all this awesomeness? I'm still too scared to use EXWM myself. Stability. But that's a me problem, not an EXWM problem. 34:51 EXWM Amin: Yeah, EXWM was pretty awesome. I used it back in 2018, '19 for a while, and then I kind of moved on to Sway and Wayland. But I don't know. It's something that I feel like once you try it, you want to keep going back to it. So recently, this past month or so, I decided to give it an earnest try and try to actually address any pain points that I've noticed. So it's much more usable for me now, and I'm sticking with it for now. I'm not a Wayland hater, but I'm just saying, at least for now, I'm using EXWM. And I'm happy to talk about it. Sacha: OK, what do you love about your setup for that one? Amin: EXWM? Sacha: Yeah, yeah. Like, you're doing a lot of rename buffers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amin: Right. Yeah, let me think. There's a couple of things. So, for the longest time, my Emacs EXWM configuration used super key as a prefix, which is the Windows [key] or the one with the logo, basically, to switch workspaces, launch applications and such. And at least the way that EXWM is right now, it doesn't… Like the way you have to add those global key bindings kind of slows down the EXWM startup. And I had many such key bindings. Amin: So one thing that I did kind of recently is to define a prefix map here, like bandali-prefix-exwm-map. So I bind all of the keys and commands that I want here, and then this helps me really minimize what I'm telling EXWM, which is here. For example, this is how you set global keys with EXWM, and I just point it to my prefix map. C-c x and then any of those letters and functions that we saw. That's kind of annoying. I still use the super key here, but I have it s-x and s-,. On the left-hand side of my keyboard, x is right next to super, so I can hit it in one go with one motion almost as a single key with these two fingers. On the right side of my keyboard, I don't have a super key, but I have a control key that I remapped to super. On the right side, I do s-, with these two fingers. It's still very convenient for me to invoke those commands. And pairing this up with repeat-mode, as we can see just here, actually, then I can hit s-, and then p, n, or h, j, k, l many times to switch workspaces or shift focus to different windows and stuff without having to hit that kind of annoying s-x or s-, repeatedly. Yeah. Sacha: That sounds really cool. I should look into that. Sorry, quick aside. 38:03 Audio setupSacha: @blaiseutube would like to compliment you on your awesome audio setup. It sounds like you're in the room with him. Apparently, I sound like I'm on speakerphone, but your audio setup is top-notch, apparently. But that looks like a Blue Yeti, so I have to find out what's going on. What microphone are you using? Amin: It is indeed a Blue Yeti. Sacha: Yeah, yeah. So I just have to ask him for okay, what kind of boom mic? Anyway, we'll do that all offline because it's not Emacs related. Amin: Yeah, it's just the Blue Yeti. Yeah, I turned down the gain. I used to have gain higher, but then it picks up more noise from around the room or around the house. So I turned down the gain a lot and then I get close to the mic so that it only captures my voice. Okay. Sacha: I'm gonna need the boom. Otherwise, I'm squished into that corner. All right. So you were doing repeat-map before I said oh, let's talk about EXWM because you've got cool stuff there. Amin: Yeah, and I can continue talking about the EXWM. There's a lot here. 39:10 keymaps for launching different applicationsAmin: I have, let's see, s-, SPC. I bind it to async-shell-command to use as my simple, little, dmenu-thing for launching applications. Amin: Some of these things, like browsers, I still do them frequently enough, and I use different browser profiles. So I just define a new keymap so I can basically one-shot launch Chromium or Firefox in a specific browser [profile] or an incognito window and such. So yeah, I just do s-x b and then, for example, c to launch Chromium and all that stuff. So I found this pretty convenient. 39:49 bandali-call-interactively-insert Amin: Speaking of key bindings, before I get down this, let's see if I can find… C-c h. I think this is just before my EXWM setup. I'm pretty proud of this. I love this. It really goes to show how awesome Emacs is and extensible it is. Let's see. So as we know, these various help commands and describe commands are under C-h prefix. But some of them are not bound, for example, find-library or describe-face. Some of these I use pretty frequently. I was really having trouble coming up with descriptive-enough keybindings or short-enough keybindings for all of them. I put some of them here, for example, like C-c f l for find-library. But I can't do that for all of them. What I did was just do C-c h a or C-c h d. What this will do is basically, if I show that, It basically opens up M-x, fills in describe-, and then I can just type, for example, face, and that's it. So it basically opens up the minibuffer for me, pre-fills it with the string that I want, and I can type what is it that I'm looking for. And I found this to be better than trying to bind a million different keyboard things for describe this and that, apropos this and that, find this and that. So yeah and the way that we do that is to just use a minibuffer-with-setup-hook, and you just have a little lambda to insert the string that you give it, and then you invoke it. Sacha: Yeah, this is pretty cool. When I saw that in your config, I was like, I'm going to steal that. Pre-filling the minibuffer but still letting you do stuff with it, it's such a powerful thing, not just for completing the command itself, but even for when you're using the command, but you want to do something with the input before. You don't want to do it all the way, send it in and submit right away. You want to actually do something with it after you insert it. So great tip. Amin: Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, it's pretty useful. It's pretty nice. Yeah. And then back to the Emacs or EXWM stuff. So before I had, I used to yeah, sorry, go ahead. Sacha: Sorry. I forgot whether I was muted or unmuted. Amin: Okay, no worries. 42:26 workspaces Amin: For the longest time, I had 10 default EXWM workspaces on startup, and that can slow things down a little bit. So I found that okay, I don't really use all 10 workspaces always. So I set it to 5. So I get five workspaces initially. But I still bind keys here. Like if we go down. Let's see. Here. So here, I define those keys for all the way from, let's say, from 0 to 9 for all 10. And then if I try to switch to a workspace that doesn't exist, then EXWM will just go ahead and create it for me. Yeah, so I found that pretty cool. You can create workspaces on the fly. Yeah. Sacha: Yeah, and I saw that it moves your current window there, too. So that's just like, OK. Let's move it to workspace number two or whatever. Very cool. Amin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have keys or convenience keys for moving some window to some workspace. Yeah, it's nice. Let's see. Let's see. Yeah. So these are just made key bindings. I use hjkl here for switching windows. 43:46 ZSA Voyager split keyboard, super x as a single key Amin: I also have a ZSA Voyager split ergonomic keyboard. I can basically customize it infinitely. For example, I don't really have a super key on the first layer. What I have is a key that will do the s-x thingy, basically, my prefix. So that's the last missing piece is that if I'm at home and if I have this keyboard with me, then I just hit one key and then that's it. I'm in my prefix. But even if not, on the laptop, the s-x or the super comma are still easy enough for me to hit it with one hand. Sacha: Now I'm jealous and I definitely want to assign my prefixes to their own keys. Very tempting. I've started using the numpad because my laptop has one. I only use the numpad rarely, but we all need more keys. Amin: Yeah, ergonomic keyboards are pretty nice, especially these ones. For example, the ZSA ones where you can put QMK on it, the QMK firmware. You can define keys in a C file. I can actually show that. Let's see… QMK Firmware, Keyboards, ZSA, Voyager, Bandali, and then keymap.c. Sacha: Is this in your repository somewhere? Amin: Right. It's in a different repository, but it's still on https://git.kelar.org next to my configs repository. You can find this as well, but if I go smaller… Yeah, you can define keys here and have different layers, like the base layer. And then you can define a key to switch between different layers and put some of the keys there anyway. So yeah, it's a whole rabbit hole in and of itself. Prot also uses a split ergonomic keyboard. It really does help if you're typing for long periods of time. I actually had these for a while, and I wasn't using them too much, but I started slowly getting some pain in my wrists and here. So I was like, okay, I have the keyboard, might as well put it to good use, and I've started using it. 46:26 Keybindings Sacha: Okay, so most of your keyboard shortcuts come off that kind of s-x or C-c something, and then you have a long prefix sequence, and you just remember everything or you use your… pre-fill some of it and then fill in the rest of the command. Amin: Pretty much all my window management related keys are on this s-x prefix that I'm showing here. And then I have a few other ones which I think I showed earlier. Is it this one? Anyway, I bind a few general keys outside of the s-x thing, like C-c e i. For example, I have C-c e e for eval-last-sexp. I do that a lot, so it's easy to hit that. Making frames or deleting frames. Sacha: I love how Emacs uptime is something you use frequently enough that you have a keyboard shortcut for it. Amin: Yeah, of course. I mean, I'm sometimes curious to see how long has my Emacs session been running. To continue with the EXWM stuff, let's see. This is just some keybindings I define here. It's all Emacs Lisp, right? It's amazing. You can mapc over whatever sequence and create keybindings like that. Only with Emacs we can do things like that. I just love it. Let's see. 48:05 Media buttons Amin: I still keep these three other keys for raising and lowering the volume and toggling mute off of that prefix and just directly on my keyboard, hitting it directly in the exwm-input-global-keys because I do that very, very frequently. But I also have scripts that I can invoke. I should do keycast. So yeah, I can invoke the prefix with semicolon. I can set my volume here, adjust it here, type in what volume I want, or with the single quote, I can enter a value for the screen brightness. I like these things to be exact depending on the lighting in the room. I have preferred brightness values of 50 or 12 or 10 that I manually adjust. I guess it's a poor man's version of having something with a light sensor that can pick up and adjust automatically. I do it manually. Yeah. Sorry, you just muted yourself again. Sacha: You're just probably this close to writing the Emacs Lisp that takes your webcam image and then adjusts your light. But I think Prot was also saying he likes to do the lighting changes manually as well because warmer colors versus cooler colors and all of that stuff. Anyway, so you have all these buttons that EXWM listens to and it can launch various things for. That's a lot of things. Amin: Yeah, those are pretty cool. 49:43 exwm-input-simulation-keys! Amin: EXWM has this lovely feature called input simulation keys where You can basically use it to bring Emacs key bindings to other applications like Firefox or whatever. And yeah, it's mind blowing when you try it for the first time. for example, I bind C-b to just hit the left arrow on the keyboard. And it does that. So I can define all of these commands that I'm using or used to using in Emacs. So I can get them in Firefox or other applications as well. Realistically, it's mostly Firefox. It's the only other program that I spend any reasonable amount of time outside of Emacs. Sacha: Let me point out this very important one that you have there. Under selection/cut/copy/paste, I see a C-w input simulation key. So this is for all the people who have accidentally closed their browser tab while trying to copy text. This is how you solve that problem. Use EXWM and use EXWM input simulation keys and you don't have to accidentally close your browser tabs again. @blaiseutube asks, hey, what about time since last save? Or do you have some kind of autosave magic? you know, in reference to the uptime thing, right? You have this thing that shows you… Amin: I don't think I have anything for autosave, but I have this habit of… I save everything pretty regularly. Yeah, so I've never really needed that feature, but I'm sure Emacs has something where you can, at the very least, just very dumb, simple implementation of has it been idle for one minute, then just do a save buffer. You can roll your own. But I don't have anything. Sacha: All right. I'm getting really tempted now to try out EXWM, even if it's just for those global keyboard remapping things. 51:39 exwm: managing floating windows Sacha: How is it for windows that you've got to have floating? I feel like it's very good at handling tiling things, but how is it for sometimes the apps kind of really want the floating window? Amin: Right, yeah, so you can toggle any window to be floating or not, and you can also - actually, we're just looking at it here. EXWM manage configurations, to match on the instance name or the class name of a window that you can get from xprop, to automatically make that tiling. For example, if I do my prefix and then capital T, it launches a floating terminal for me here. And if I go back to where I set it up, I just launch Xterm with the -name argument. This is where it can set the instance. And I just put any string you can want, like floating, for example. And then here in my configuration, I just check that if the instance name is floating, then I'll go ahead and float the window. Simple as that. Sacha: All right. This is starting to look exceedingly tempting. Lol, I save everything regularly, so he's one of those people who compulsively hit C-x C-s. Amin: Yeah, I do that a lot. I don't know. It's just me. But, yeah. Yeah. And then, I don't know. EXWM is awesome. 53:11 exwm: application-specific local simulation keys Amin: You can also put local simulation keys, application-specific simulation keys, depending on, the application, terminals, for example, or, Zathura. This is a PDF viewer. To have application-specific custom key bindings, how cool is that? For example, if I'm in Xterm or something like the Mate terminal, hitting C-c C-c twice basically, it'll just send the C-c key to the terminal. Because one thing with EXWM is that you can set it to capture a couple of Emacs prefixes, like C-x or C-c. So the application by default doesn't see it because Emacs captures it. But this is one of those mechanisms by which you can send a key through. Let's see. 54:04 binding C-q to exwm-input-send-next-keyAmin: The other thing is, you can set it like EXWM inputs send next key. So the default is C-c C-q, but I just bind it to C-q, and I, for example, can do C-q C-t to send C-t to the underlying application. So that's the other thing. Yeah, and then let's see. 54:28 Renaming buffers Amin: So this thingy here, I enable EXWM and I add this rename hook and all it does is basically to add the window titles to the buffer that I can see on the mode line. But as long as it's within a certain reasonable length, like for example, I have 25 characters. If it's longer than that, it will just put dot dot dot (...). So yeah, that's all the purpose of that. Let's see, for example, if I launch Xterm, it appears there. The perfect example is actually here on the right-hand side. On the mode line, we see Firefox ESR Emacs Chat. It's a bit long, so it just puts the dot dot dot there. So that's all that does. Sacha: Yeah, now being able to use Emacs to manage the tiling of these things instead of my having to fiddle with alt-dragging things to snap nicely into buffers. Yes, very cool stuff. EXWM. Gotta try it. Amin: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, let's see. 55:36 dunst for notifications Amin: Here I launch Dunst if the executable is installed for getting notifications in EXWM. I think there's at least one or two Emacs specific packages that implement a simple notification daemon or backend so that Emacs itself can handle that. But I found Dunst good enough for my use cases coming from i3, Sway, like tiling window manager background. I just reuse that. So yeah, I just start a process, keep a handle of it in this bandali--dunst-process variable here. And this thing I discovered recently, it's cool. using set-process-query-on-exit-flag, you can basically have Emacs not ask you if you want to exit Emacs if that process is still running. It'll just kill it without confirming with you. So just a little convenience. Sacha: That is also cool. Just a heads up, I have about 15 minutes before the kiddo runs out because she'll be done with school then. Even just the EXWM part and other things that you've shown us in the config have been super awesome. But are there other things in the next 15 minutes that you would love to show people so that they can see how it works in practice? 56:54 exwm xsettings and responding to screen configuration changes Amin: One thing I'll just mention, EXWM, one more thing, and then I'll go check. I think this is kind of recent: EXWM xsettings, and this allows you to dynamically at runtime change some of these things that you would normally set in an X resources file, like fonts. These kinds of settings were especially commonplace back when Wayland wasn't a thing or wasn't very popular. You would set some of these font settings there. With EXWM xsettings, you can do this dynamically, and what's awesome about that is it also lets you hook into, for example, if your screen configuration changes, if you plug in a monitor or unplug it, then you can run whatever xrandr command to set it up and also adjust those settings. The main thing I use it for is to change the DPI setting. The thing with X11 or Xorg is, unfortunately, there's no per-monitor DPI. There's one global DPI. But I found that on my high-DPI laptop screen, if I set the resolution to 1920x1080 instead of the full resolution, then the default DPI of 96 works just fine with my external monitor as well. All this little hook does, by calling into this function, is: if I'm plugging in my external monitor, lower the resolution and lower the DPI, and if I unplug it, go back to the high thing. I just love this. Sacha: That's great. We're definitely not going to demonstrate that because plugging in and unplugging monitors is not a good thing for screen sharing, but that sounds really cool. When things change, you can actually get your system to adapt to the changes for you. Amin: Yeah, it's lovely. Let's see. There's so much more to talk about. 58:59 Slowly getting back into Org modeAmin: I'm slowly getting back into Org Mode again. For the longest time, I didn't use it and I just used Markdown for my website as well. But I found that it's kind of limited. For example, I was using a Markdown implementation that was written in C and I can't easily customize it. Whereas with Org, I can hook into or create my custom HTML backend that's a derivative of ox-html, even if I don't necessarily like the defaults or the settings for ox-html. I just recently started writing a new backend called bhtml for Bandali HTML. It's just a boilerplate. I don't have much there yet, but that's the idea. Sacha: I love how you can hook into all of these different aspects of Emacs and get it to do exactly what you want. Amin: Yeah, so that's cool. Let's see. 59:58 chat notes Amin: I have written some things about the prompt for this meeting. Yeah, so I talked about that stuff briefly. Minibuffer setup. Things that I love about my setup is that it's kind of portable, simple. People can easily copy things from it if they want. It's kind of self-contained. And that was kind of a big thing a while back when I wanted to use my configurations on a couple of work machines. And these don't have direct outbound internet access. So I couldn't do things like installing packages with ELPA because that's done over HTTP. So yeah, I use submodules now. I recently began documenting my setup, very much inspired by Prot and Sacha and others. 1:00:52 Mode lineAmin: The things that I'm looking forward to tweaking next is the mode line. This is basically the default mode line of Emacs. A couple versions ago, they added a setting for compacting the mode line, which improves a lot of the extraneous whitespace in it, which is great. It's still… There's too much information. If you use multiple windows or even especially if you use EXWM all of those things like the date or like the battery get repeated in all of the windows, so I'm looking forward to doing my mode line in such a way that for example, it shows most of those things. And Prot actually has an excellent video about that where he shows how you can create your own custom mode line. Sacha: I've also been tempted to start using the header line too because that's another thing that you can put information in. Amin: Right, yep, header-line is awesome. 1:01:49 display-buffer-alistSacha: Yeah, the display-buffer-alist is particularly powerful because you're combining it with EXWM, so it'd be interesting to see how you can manage windows and applications and stuff. Amin: Especially, just like how we saw in today's video call and also a call that I had with Prot recently. For example, if I open a describe-variable or something, it'll by default use the right area of the screen right now where our video is. So it reuses that. So I'm also looking forward to reading more about and configuring display-buffer-alist. 1:02:23 TRAMP slowness, maybe disabling VC detection?Amin: I'd like to figure out some TRAMP slowness. I recently tried using it again. It's awesome. You can seamlessly open files, SSH into other machines and edit files there. But I don't know. It's kind of slow. So I want to see aside from the latency, you know, the physical limit of the latency because of the distance. Is there anything slowing it down? I think I read in the Tramp FAQ that maybe trying to disable VC mode or VC detection for remote connections might help speed it up, or at least having it do only Git, for example, because by default, Emacs's VC has support for Mercurial, CVS, SVN, Git, RCS even. Sacha: Anything anyone has ever wanted to use in the last 40 years. Here we go. I saw in your chat config actually that you were doing something with the SSH configs and I'd never come across that. So I was like, oh, that's something I should look into later. Amin: I don't remember the specifics, but it's all out there. Feel free to look into it. 1:03:39 eatAmin: Especially with this EXWM setup, I still use Xterm sometimes and I have the Emacs EAT terminal, which is a terminal emulator written in Emacs Lisp. If I launch it right now, it's awesome. It actually is very powerful and it's a properly capable terminal emulator. It just can be a little bit slow. It is slower than xterm, but it's still a lot faster than whatever Emacs has built in. So this is pretty cool. But yeah, I don't want to use it a lot. And I kind of started testing, delegating more things or using more async-shell-command to just basically open this prompt and then do whatever I want. anyway. Sacha: I've also heard things about Ghost TTY. Anyway, so that's another thing to look into. Yes, so @Paniash47 says, "With Emacs 31, there's a new variable where you can hide the minor modes in the mode line." @pkal says it's mode-line-collapse-minor-modes. And @Paniash47 also says, "I personally use the Minions package by Tarsius, and it has some nice features in addition to the built-in features." So other people are tinkering around with their mode lines as well. Amin: Yeah, it's pretty cool. And then I don't know, I think maybe you touched on something a couple of minutes ago that I was going to go back to, but I forget. 1:05:07 TRAMP completionSacha: Tramp SSH completion out of your configs. I was like, there's a Tramp sconfig in here that I've never used. And that sounded interesting. Yeah, tramp-parse-sconfig. Amin: Ah, right, right, right. Yeah. Sacha: Which, of course, we're not going to let go because it's private stuff, but yeah. Amin: Right. Yeah, you're welcome to try this. I'm pretty sure, actually, I took this from the Tramp manual itself. And it's one of those things where it's set and forget, I don't remember. But yeah, it's here. There was something else that I also wanted to show, but I forget. Let me see if looking at the outlines will remind me or if I will see it. Sacha: And that's one of the things I love about literate configuration is, you know, just kind of look at the structure and skim it and try to find something with keywords and ordered lists and all that stuff. Amin: Right. Yup. Exactly. Sacha: Oh, and you know, people will have access to your full configuration because it is in your repository and you have that lovely HTML export for it as well. So if you, uh, if, if people want to follow up, they can go through that at length. At some point, you're going to add some more screenshots and possibly even video clips to it. so that's there you at https://git.kelar.org Amin: This is my configurations repository. If you go here to treeview .emacs.d, this is the org file. I also export all of those individual components into this lisp subdirectory. All that stuff is here. The QMK thingy that was mentioned. 1:06:54 ffs: form feed slides, ^L Amin: Oh, I wanted to mention FFS. Okay, I'll do that as well. Yeah, what's up with that? Sacha: I was trying to find information. It was like, there's no package. It's not what is this thing? Amin: It's FormFeed Slides and it's going to soon be a package. I was actually talking to Prot about it and I'm hoping to submit it for inclusion in GNU ELPA within, I don't know, the next couple of weeks. It's basically very similar to Prot's Logos package. Turns out we both had the same kind of idea at the exact same time in 2022, and we both used it for our LibrePlanet 2022 presentations. Of course, Prot being the diligent person that he is, he polished his work, documented it, put it on GNU ELPA. I still haven't gotten around to doing it yet, but better late than never. Yeah, let's see. I can maybe show a quick demonstration of that. So let's see. Let's see. Anyway, so if I go to my website sources and net-beyond-web. So I had the LibrePlanet talk a couple years ago. So what FFS is basically, it looks for a particular character in this case, or the default case, it's the page-delimiter, ^L, which you can insert by hitting C-q C-l. It basically then designates each of these areas as one slide. So, very, very simple slideshow that you don't even have to use Org or outline or any other major or minor mode. If I launch ffs, by default, it's in a mode where it binds a couple of convenience keys, like p and n, to go into the next and previous slide. You can hit e to edit a slide, similar to Org source, and then make your changes and all of that. And then you can start a presentation by hitting s. Amin: It has hooks for, for example, bumping up the font size or whatever, hiding the mode line. I can toggle the mode line by hitting m here. Let's see. I can also toggle the cursor with c, to make the cursor visible or not. So, yeah. And then I'm just hitting p and n. Sacha: Very simple, very minimalist. You have a file, you've got page markers, and that's all you got. Amin: Yeah, pretty much. And then… 1:09:34 Speaker notesAmin: The neat thing that it has that I also liked implementing at the time is it has a speaker notes feature. Amin: So you can designate a file as being the speaker notes where it has the same structure separators with ^L. But you can type your notes over here, whatever. And you can basically open these in two different windows or two different frames on separate displays. And then in whichever one of those you advance the slides, like p n n, it also does the other one. Sacha: That's brilliant. I was looking for a way to do that so I can pretend to know what I'm talking about when I have something on screen, but I can just read my notes or even just remember what points I wanted to make. So this is great. You have speaker notes. You've got the main screen. They can be in two different frames. You can have your frame that you're sharing and your frame that you're not sharing that has all of your cheat sheets. Excellent. And on that note, in about one minute, the kid is going to come running out and want to have snack and all that stuff. Thank you so much for walking through parts of your config. There is more. And so everyone who wants to find out more can go check out your setup. I have a great many things that I want to try out, starting from EXWM to little things like figuring out a boom mic setup because apparently your audio setup is making me very jealous. Yes, thank you for doing this. I'm going to post the transcript and the chapters. I have a chapter every minute. It's going to be a long time. But it was good. Lots of cool stuff. Thank you again. Amin: Sounds great. And yeah, you're very welcome. And thank you so much for having me as well, Sacha. I'm very delighted to be here, especially, I think, just by chance. I think I'm the first person who you're doing this with after the long hiatus. So that's an extra honor for me. But yeah, it's been fun. I could go on for hours. I'm sure we both could. This has been fun. Sacha: If we wanted to go on for hours, Prot has more flexible scheduling, so he can chat with people for two hours and stuff, and you already have conversations going on with him. But I unfortunately have a small mammal who's 10 years old and loves me very much, and likes to not let me concentrate for very long. But thank you everyone for joining. Thank you for the chat. And thank you also, stream, for all the interesting questions. I will send you all the information and update the post. And we'll see you all on Thursday. I've got another chat. All of a sudden, all these Emacs chats are going to happen. Thanks. Oh, and you said you're happy to be on the hook for doing another EmacsConf this year, right? Amin: Yes. You can hold me to that. There will be another EmacsConf this year and I will be active in it. Sacha: Alright then, I'm going to end that broadcast. Thanks everyone, bye! Amin: Thank you, bye bye! Chat sachactube: This is a test message sachactube: Getting ready for Emacs Chat 21 with Amin Bandali, https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-amin-bandali/ JacksonScholberg: Yo sachactube: Yo yo yo, we are live! IhorRadchenkoyantar92: … and the list can continue until the end of the stream? :) IhorRadchenkoyantar92: do you compile those packages? sachactube: Automatically compiled by prepare-user-lisp because of user-lisp-directory, I think IhorRadchenkoyantar92: makes sense IhorRadchenkoyantar92: this configure macro looks a lot like good old use-package IhorRadchenkoyantar92: I just do (use-package foo :config ) and then :tangle no in actual src block IhorRadchenkoyantar92: what is funny, with-eval-after-load is itself a macro sachactube: hahaha, it's much smaller though IhorRadchenkoyantar92: not smaller at all! Because there is recursion with-eval-after-load (macro) -> eval-after-load (also macro!) IhorRadchenkoyantar92: hmm. wrong IhorRadchenkoyantar92: ok. let me not do two things at the same time blaiseutube: yay, I made it! blaiseutube: screenshots and also asciicinema blaiseutube: asciinema ? blaiseutube: whatever sachactube: and gif-screencast blaiseutube: nice blaiseutube: Sacha, your mic volume is just a bit lower than his so it's a bit harder (for me) to hear you. sachactube: Hmm, let me try turning my dial, let's see if this next one is better blaiseutube: better, I think blaiseutube: it's also that Amin has an awesome microphone. The result sounds like Amin is in the room with me and we are both listening to you on speakerphone. it's not terrible blaiseutube: we're all friends her blaiseutube: here sachactube: I think we have the same mic, but he has an awesome setup, so I'm going to bug him for tips =D paniash47: Hello there! Nice to see this chat. :) blaiseutube: yes, low gain and close mic is good. Sacha if prefer to avoid a boom, you can use a microphone with a tight pattern and increase gain. LMK if you want to unleash my inner audio engineer. sachactube: oooh. my mic is right next to my laptop though, so I'm not sure I can get away from the typing noises sachactube: I'll just have to get cozy with y'all blaiseutube: mini buffet is an underrated superpower. I think Kakoune adopted that also blaiseutube: helpful for a11y and users with sequential processing/ ADHD issues blaiseutube: (I noticed that the comments are recorded so I'm trying to add value 🥴) paniash47: Split keyboards make sense with vanilla keybindings. I'd like to switch but moving from evil is difficult :( sachactube: much appreciated! blaiseutube: what about "time since last save" or do you have some auto save magic? blaiseutube: 🤯 blaiseutube: emacs all the things blaiseutube: LOL, "I save everything regularly" …so he's one of those people. paniash47: I think with emacs 31, there's a new variable where you can hide the minor modes in the modeline pkal_: mode-line-collapse-minor-modes paniash47: I personally use the minions package by tarsius (Magit author) and it has some nice features in addition to the built-in feature. paniash47: ghostel is the package :) blaiseutube: BRB Find more Emacs Chats or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat View Org source for this post You can comment on Mastodon or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.