Those of us who have been around long enough remember Sacha Chua’s Emacs Chat videos. The last one was a decade ago but now that Chua’s daughter is a bit older, she’s decided to resurrect them. The first new episode, Emacs Chat 21, is with Amin Bandali with whom she’s worked on EmacsConf for the last 7 years.
The format is always the same. Chua and her guest discuss the guest’s Emacs configuration and how they’ve solved various problems. There’s way too much material for a quick recapitulation—the video is an hour and 12 minutes long—but there’s a transcript at the link so you can go through it at your leisure if you find the video’s pace too rapid.
There were a couple of things that I found particularly interesting. The first is the upcoming user-lisp-directory. It allows you to specify a directory for your Lisp files and Emacs will automatically compile them and add them to the load-path for you. Bandali uses it as a replacement for the package system because he prefers to configure things manually.
The second interesting thing for me was his use of EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager), which goes a long way towards the dream of bringing everything into Emacs. I’ve long wanted to try it out but as its name suggests, it works with the X-Windows system only. The Irreal bunker has famously standardized on Macs so EXWM is unavailable to us. I’d still love to try it though.
There’s a lot of material in the chat so you’ll have to watch it—or at least skim the transcript—to get the whole picture. There are links to his configuration so you can steal anything that seems useful to you.
I’m really happy to see Chua resurrecting her Emacs Chats. I really enjoyed the previous ones and learned a lot from them and I’m sure that will be true of the new ones too.