Emacs-fu

(1) What motivated the start of such behavior for others?

I was letting things slip and forgetting things I needed to remember; so it was more of a "hey, I need to be more organized" kind of thing, but it also came with the benefit of capturing EVERYTHING.

(2) How do you react to your idea log with respect to balancing focus between current projects / work, and speculative projects?

It's sad but true, you can do anything, but not everything. Most of what I capture are todos, maybe the occasional project or "big idea", but two things have forced me to realize I can't do everything. First, I was forgetting things again, because I'd capture them and never see them again (reviewing wouldn't help; there are simply too many to review them all). Second, to fix the first, I added a default deadline of "today" to my capture template. Then once I started going down my todo list, I would reschedule, only to come across some things again and reschedule again. After a while, I finally started forcing myself to either cancel or indefinitely defer things. I have a core set of "must dos", habits, chores and such, plus short term goals, but haven't quite gotten to the long term planning stage yet. For now, it's all logged, version controlled and archived in git, so I never truly "lose" anything, I just give up on doing everything and prioritize.

(3) How do others account for visuals such as sketches or interface ideas which are often easier to create with analog tools?

I'm mostly an…

How does one become an "Advanced Emacs User"?

I say this as I've been using Emacs pretty much every day for about 2-3 years, yet I can't help but feel I've only ventured a couple of miles into the journey.

I use Emacs not just for coding, but organising and note taking, file management, shell, git (just beginning to), irc, sometimes for browsing and occasionally twittering. I know (and love) registers, macros, jumping around with "the mark". However I feel as thought I have reached the so called "Plateau Effect" where I'm not advancing any further.

There are a bunch of good blogs out there about Emacs which I read occasionally as well as flicking through the wiki

* http://emacsblog.org/

* http://www.masteringemacs.org/

* http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/

* http://www.emacswiki.org/

But, I still feel as though I am no where near what can be called an "advanced user". I feel as though there is still so much more Emacs has to offer, but I just can't find it.

I guess my question is: where do I go from here? How does one become truly advanced?

Sorry for hijacking this thread, and thanks in advance for any pointers.

P.S. FWIW my emacs.d is on github: https://github.com/ibrow/.emacs.d

Edit: formatting

RMS doesn't strike me as a very cheerful person either, at least in email conversations, so it doesn't surprise me you're getting upvoted for this remark.

That said, it doesn't surprise me either that as a person known for sticking to his principles he'd take this situation very serious.

Also, I think I see what you mean by irony but calling it that would be more appropriate if Stallman himself would have made that particular commit or even if he would have been overseeing the project actively at the time the commit was made. But neither is the case: Chong Yidong committed it according to [1], and when the commit in question was made 2009-09-28 Stefan and Yidong had already taken over the maintainer role [2].

So really, not all too ironic from where I sit... hope this isn't spoiling a good joke :-)

[1] http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/lh/emacs/trunk/revision/97804

[2] http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2009/08/interview-with-chong-yidong-and-stefan.html

I was hoping someone would say that was possible. Thanks, I'll play around with the available yas-prompt-functions.

As for SRecode, that looks interesting but its documentation is impenetrable. Someone seriously needs to write a bunch of tutorials for that thing. Otherwise, I can't really tell if it can do what xptemplate is capable of or not.

I found some comments from SRecode's author suggesting that it's intended for different uses from yasnippet:

"Thus, the audience for yasnippet and SRecode is quite different.
Of course you could do yasnippet like things with SRecode if someone
took the time to improve the field-editing feature in SRecode, but
that has not been my focus."[1]

[1] - http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2010/09/interview-with-eric-ludlam-cedet.html

The emacs wiki is a good place to start:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryDotEmacs

> Unfortunately, emacs seems to be less mainstream right now

I don't know about the popularity of emacs vs. VI right now (I'd suspect that it's fairly close), but there is no shortage of current and active emacs info on the web. There's plenty of active .emacs files can be found on github for example.

Some other sources of info:

http://www.masteringemacs.org/

http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Emacs