The other day my friend and fellow CS Ed Blogger Alfred Thompson wrote about Better Comments, an extension for visual studio that displays comments that are marked up with special characters in order to highlight them. Here's a screenshot: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/omsharp/BetterComments/master/screenshots/ClassificationC.png So, the first thing I though was "I bet emacs could do that pretty easily" and down the rabbit hole I went. I had to figure out something about how emacs themes and font-locking (emacs for syntax highlighting) works and of course spent far too much time learning about Emacs, my favored tool, rather than getting actual work done, but I came up with this:

This video is all about using incremental search to navigate through your emacs buffers. You can use the default incremental searchb, bound to C-s for isearch-forward C-r to search backwards (reverse). They work really well as is but I prefer using Swiper. The video demos both and the Swiper home page has loads of details. Part of the Swiper package includes ivy and counsel which I use instead of ido.

I received an email from a friend the other day asking me about a particular robotics platform she recently saw. I've played with robotics on and off over the years ranging from building them from (not using) scratch using Atmel chips and programming them in assembly to using Arduino based platforms to using pre-built robot platforms. They're really cool and since they interact with the real world you can do all sorts of interesting and motivational things with students.

Sorry for the delay in getting this next video / post up. I spent the last part of last week at The Personal Democracy Forum 2016 which is really an exceptional conference. I posted a bit about it in my last post and plan to write some more on it, but for now, more Emacs. This video concerns using windows. By using buffers and windows and the basics you got from the tutorial, you shouldn't have to ever leave emacs.

I spent the last couple of days attending Personal Democracy Forum 2016, described on their landing site as: The world’s leading conference exploring and analyzing technology's impact on politics, government, and society. That's the reason why I haven't posted my latest Emacs video. PDF is a great conference and raised a huge number of important issues. I'll probably blog about a few over the next few weeks. One topic that I've already lamented about has been the way we as a society are allowing so much information to be silo-ed in platforms like Facebook.

Yesterday, I saw the New York Premiere of Navajo Math Circles, a documentary on a Math Circle put in place to support and enrich the currently under-served community in the Navajo educational system. At their core, Math Circles are math outreach and enrichment programs. I'm most familiar with the New York Math Circle. I'm friends with many of their teachers and organizers and my son took part in their summer program for a couple of years.

Many people think of Emacs as an editor. I like to think of it as an Elisp interpreter where you live code documents. In some ways, it's like those new fangled interactive programming environments where you type in code and the updates are reflected instantly. In this video, I try to explain the way I think about Emacs and why it's so cool. The only change we made to our configuration was adding:

Now that we're past the intro material, we'll start looking at emacs features one at a time. This will let you focus on using the one feature we're covering, fit it into your work flow, and really get comfortable with it. This time we'll dive into using Emacs effectively with buffers. Watch the video and then make a real effort to use buffers over the next few emacs sessions. Before you know it, they'll be a natural part of your work flow.

This video is a brief introduction to org-mode, a mode I use for all sorts of things. We'll dive into org-mode later in the series. Right now I just want you to see the basics since we'll be using org-mode for any notes that are written up during this series. Actually, all my blog posts are written in org-mode. Here are the important lines to add to your Emacs init.

I'm sure I've mentioned that I've been an Emacs wonk for decades. Since the mid-80's in fact. I've spent time using other editors, word processors, and development tools but always find my way back. I recommend that budding computer science students develop a good tool set and encourage them to explore Emacs but while it's pretty easy to load Emacs and find your way around, particularly if you use the mouse and menus there isn't a clear path to take you from beginner to using it as an efficient tool let alone customizing it.