I wouldn't believe how well it was run if I wasn't there. Sacha is a powerhouse, the amount of code she wrote in elisp to make this conference happen with the quality it did is just amazing.

Thanks Sacha!

Awwwww, thanks! =)

You know how it is... It's fun to write Emacs Lisp to automate things, smoothen my workflow, reduce the risk of mistakes. 15 minutes here, 5 minutes there... Micro-improvements add up!

What was different about it compared to the neovim conf?

People can't seem to find an exit.

Wow, that's actually hilarious!! :D

You don't "exit" Vim, tis not a stage - you quit it. And then go to Emacs because tis a killer, a vocation from which there's no quitting - it is for life.

It’s wild doing the following on a shared production machine. I’ve seen 30+ sessions unattended for days:

    ps aux | grep vi

People not knowing how to quit vim is a meme but at the same time is real as ever.

I've probably had 10+ myself just because I have multiple half-finished projects open.

Maybe my error was XEmacs instead, I only put up with it until IDEs finally became part of UNIX culture.

For non-emacs nerds who didn't get the joke - command for exiting Emacs is 'M-x kill-emacs', also, you don't "delete-word" in Emacs, command for it is 'kill-word', there's also 'kill-paragraph' and so on.

Now I wish there were a way to yank emacs after killing it.

Yanking Emacs back to life? What kind of digital paganism is that? The Church or Emacs dictates using the mighty Daemon to summon it back to life.

I respect you for that joke.

People like the organizer.

I dipped into NeovimConf since I like learning from other conferences and other editors. People's workflow videos are always cool. The Emacs community merrily assimilates lots of great ideas from Neovim, and it's great to see ideas flow the other way sometimes. I tuned in last year too, and I particularly liked how they had a number of NeovimConf talks covering other editors like Helix so that people in the NeovimConf community could pick up inspiration. I like the way TJ and ThePrimeagen keep the conversation going through streams throughout the year. Someday the kiddo will let me have more focused talking time so I can try to make more videos and have more conversations. :)

There was an interesting discussion on Reddit after NeovimConf 2024 (https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/s/TSFc3cVGGV) People were happy about the talks. Some seemed a little frustrated by interruptions from ads, getting off schedule, and a chat that might sometimes get a little distracted by meme potential. EmacsConf is a lot smaller than NeovimConf in terms of viewers - twitchtracker says NeovimConf got 3640 (plus more on YouTube) and we got about 400. We're, like, an order of magnitude smaller. That might be why self-hosting via Icecast is manageable for us. We started automating scheduling a few years ago because I wanted to accept more talks than could comfortably fit in a day, and since I was figuring out that infrastructure close to the conference, I needed something that I could handle by myself without going crazy. Even though my co-organizers are now more familiar with the fallback scripts for manual control, they prefer the automatic schedule. And community is a gift beyond anything I can code. I remember watching the IRC logs scroll past and feeling deeply appreciative of how wonderful and thoughtful people are, even during some of the tougher sessions we've had in the past.

Also we like doing captions and transcripts and putting up the videos as soon as possible. :) Text makes things easier to search and skim, especially from within Emacs. And videos, well, we've got them, we might as well have a little bit of code to publish them right away.

I reached out to teej_dv and ThePrimeagen on X to see if I could learn from their NeovimConf notes or in case any of our notes might be helpful. TJ said they don't really write things down. Makes sense because they're more video people. I hope they'll consider doing a postmortem braindump and maybe even sharing that publicly. I think that would be really cool.

For me, I lean heavily on automation, documentation, and incremental improvements partly because it's fun, partly because it helps me make the most of what little time I can squeeze in between interruptions, and partly because it ripples out and helps other people who often end up paying it forward. Emacs is very well-suited to this, of course. Every time we get to do EmacsConf, I learn even more and build up more tools along the way.

I think Vim and Neovim have a way bigger userbase than Emacs does, and I'm glad to see Neovim talks sharing workflows beyond the usual software development things. I do think there's something wonderful about the multiplicity of things that people use Emacs for, and how we've got this culture of both figuring out how to tailor Emacs to yourself and sharing those ideas with other people. I'd love to see what happens as Neovim and other editors build that critical mass of user configuration and community sharing, when people can figure out something for themselves by cobbling together stuff from other people. I think it's kinda cool how people shift from one editor to another, even. If they bring ideas from Emacs to somewhere else, or they bring ideas from somewhere else back to Emacs, things get better.

I'd love it if NeovimConf could also be a smoothly-running way to get stuff out of people's heads, connect people with other people, and inspire more awesomeness. I'd love it if people could do that sort of stuff with all sorts of other mini-conferences about their interests. Could be fun!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I too like to peruse the things that neovimmers are up to as they come up with some pretty neat ideas. There does feel like there is a productive synergy between Emacs and neo/vim.

I had no idea that there was a NeovimConf! It's kind of a shame that it's so low in the search rankings that searching directly for it seemed to turn up only hits for Neovim configuration files, so I hope that I may be forgiven for linking here: https://neovimconf.live .

honestly the community Emacs has really sets it apart, and it's a piece of software where the GPL makes sense and shines and this is super clear in the Emacs community.

It gives me hope for the longevity of the editor, and indeed, in the short ten years I've been a casual user it has only gotten better.

Long live the Emacs community

Emacs is good because the barrier to entry is so high. Anyone who sees elisp and doesn't run for the hills is the type of person who has interesting ideas.

That was the defining reason for me to switch from vim to emacs :) still have the date on my calendar and I celebrate my emacs-versary with M-x tetris :D

I still chuckle whenever someone tries to remake Emacs using Lua, completely missing the reason Emacs is so powerful is because it's written on a Lisp.

EDIT: looks like even in this thread people are suggesting to use Lua instead of elisp. smh

Kids that dismiss Lisp without even grasping the amazing power behind it, remind me the story of Yanomami languages of Amazonian tribes. Apparently, there's word for 'one' and for 'two', but there's no word for 'three', in their language, only a generic word that basically means 'a lot'.

Now imagine trying to explain to them the concept of subtracting a hundred from a billion and the most straightforward way to deal with that is a decimal numbering system. I think they'd kill you for blackmagicfuckery on the spot.

Well, if that comparison feels condescending, let's imagine ancient Romans - with all their sophisticated culture, economy and traditions. They wouldn't kill you, but still the idea of a number such a billion would probably terrify them. They'd probably be like: "dear sapientissime señore, we respect your wisdom, but we rather use... Lua"

Romans knew about thousand based multipliers with a mark over the letter.

Okay, please share your wisdom, tell me how would they express "1,000,000,000 - 100" using Latin numerals?

Oh, I found the answer on my own, with the help of LLM. For a billion you can use M̅M̅, which technically would mean a thousand thousand thousands, and to denote the calculation above you'd write - M̅M̅CM. But my point still remains relevant - this is the modern extended version of Roman numerals. In ancient Rome they typically never would go up to a billion.

Lua can be viewed as a pretty solid lisp dialect. You've got the compiler available at runtime, first class functions and coroutines, sensible language runtime. Type system is pretty much the same. It doesn't do the phase separated macros out of the box, but metalua does. Performance is rubbish and the syntax is a parse away from the s-expression ast but whatever, the semantics are right.

I mostly agree.

Probably Stallman would object that Lua doesn't have read (apart from eval) and print.

As for performance, LuaJIT performance is better than any Common Lisp or Elisp, and dramatically better than the first 35 years of Elisp, before native-code compilation.

Any common Lisp? SBCL is no turtle.

Compared to LuaJIT it is, unless you monomorphize and turn off safety checks, at which point you're basically programming in C with Lisp syntax.

There are plenty of powerful programmer editors, yes being mostly written in Lisp dialect makes it powerful, but also makes one lose too much time yak shaving instead of programming the actual task.

XEmacs, much better than Emacs back then, was my rescue for not having IDE culture back in my early UNIX days. We're talking back when Xenix and DG/UX would be known names to anyone working with UNIXes.

Nowadays, while Emacs key bindings and elisp might still be burned into my brain cells, I no longer reach out to it.