A collection of what worked well and what didn’t in classes that I took this semester. This is partially for me to record what things reduced friction for me as a student so that one day, should I become a professor, I’ll be able to run the lowest-friction class ever!
...I am an avid Emacs user. I’m using it right now to compose this post. I use it every single day for everything from work to school to personal notes. Most of my activity on GitHub comes from me tweaking little things in my configuration files. I now have an editor that perfectly fits my hands. Emacs is a big part of my life.
I’m afraid it’s dying.
...I went on an adventure today. I left behind the stable comforts of the terminal and compiled bleeding-edge Emacs that uses a native window system.
This is a big deal for me. As long as I can remember, I’ve used Emacs from within a terminal. I’ve decided to give the GUI’d Emacs a whirl.
I’m running macOS Catalina (10.15.5). Originally I tried using the pre-built packages via brew (brew cask install emacs) and those available at Emacs for Mac OS X. However, all these pre-built binaries crashed on Catalina. I guess it’s a problem with Catalina. 🙄
Yet again, I’ve tweaked my emacs configuration. The big change this time is switching to Ivy from Helm.
I’d like to say right off the bat that Helm is a great tool. I used it for several months and enjoyed it. Once thing that I love about helm is how discoverable it makes commands and functions. helm also got me into using bookmarks. I don’t keep many bookmarks; I tend to collect a few when working on a multi-file project long-term. The bookmark that I use most consistently is to my .emacs file; these days I’m fiddling constantly with my settings.