Mike Zamansky has the latest video in his Using Emacs series up. This time he takes a break to give us his thoughts on learning Emacs and making the videos. He’s discovered—as every teacher who records his lectures for the first time does—that’s it much harder than standing up in front of a class or a group of colleagues in a lecture and giving the same presentation. That’s because you don’t get any feedback from the audience. You can’t tell if they’re understanding the material, bored, delighted, or something else because it’s just you and the computer.
The other point he makes is that when learning something, Emacs in particular, it’s often enough to know that something can be done even if you don’t know how to do it. He gives the example of using timers in Emacs. He saw that Sacha Chua had relative times in the transcripts of her Emacs Chats and from there it was (relatively) easy to discover how to add them to his own notes. I’ve found the same thing. Once I know that Emacs has a way of doing something, I can usually easily discover how to do it.
As I’ve said before, this is a great series and even if you’re an experienced Emacs user, you’ll probably learn a few new things from the videos. The video is 8 minutes, 39 seconds long so it should be easy to fit it into your schedule.