I'm Sacha Chua, and welcome to EmacsConf 2020.
To kick things off, here are ten cool things
that people have been working on
since the conference last year.
If you want to follow the links
or if you'd like to add something I've missed,
add them to the collaborative pad
if you're watching this live
or check out the EmacsConf wiki page for this talk.
The big news this year was the release of Emacs 27.1,
a little over two years after Emacs 26.
Mickey Petersen's notes on the release are a great way
to find out what's new,
and John Wiegley's development update tomorrow
will probably give more details.
What's coming up for Emacs 28 and beyond?
One of the branches that people are
excited about is gccemacs, which compiles
Emacs Lisp to native code so that it runs faster.
To learn more, check out the Bringing GNU Emacs to Native Code
presentation from the European Lisp Symposium.
There was a huge conversation about
modernizing Emacs on emacs-devel and other places.
Linux Weekly News has a good summary.
One of the interesting sub-threads on emacs-devel
was about using more variable-width fonts,
which would probably go a long way to
making Emacs look pretty fancy once people
sort out the alignment issues.
It looks like core Emacs will probably
change slowly in terms of functionality and documentation,
but starter kits and configuration give people
a great way to experiment.
Speaking of starter kits,
Doom Emacs seems to be growing in popularity.
It got a big boost thanks to DoomCasts and
DistroTube videos. So if you're curious,
go ahead and check those out.
And for general Emacs topics,
there have been a ton of other great videos
from Protesilaos Stavrou, Mike Zamansky, System Crafters,
and other folks. Good stuff.
Org continues to be a big reason
for people to get into Emacs.
This year, Zettelkasten-based workflows
became popular as people played around
with organizing ideas into small chunks
that are linked to each other.
org-roam is one of the packages for doing that
and there are three presentations about it this year.
There are also non-Org ways to do it,
such as zetteldeft, neuron-mode, and more.
People have been experimenting
with Org's appearance.
Check these screenshots out for some ideas.
Coding: Faster JSON processing
is going to make working with
code analysis tools better.
LSP-mode released version 7 and gained more contributors, too,
so there are probably exciting times ahead
for making Emacs even more of an
integrated development environment.
EAF: The Emacs Application Framework
has some pretty interesting demos of
embedded Qt programs in Emacs on Linux.
Matthew Zeng will give a presentation
on its architecture and walk through some demos,
so check that one out too if you want.
The big real-world change this year
was COVID-19, of course. It sucks. A lot.
One good thing that's come out of it
is that many Emacs meetups have moved online,
so it's easier to connect with people
no matter where you are in the world.
There's one hosted by EmacsATX on December 2
and it's about re-builder, leaf, and feather.
EmacsNYC's next meetup is on December 7
and it's about literate programming with Org Mode.
The Berlin remote meetup was
just a few days ago on November 25,
and EmacsSF and Asia-Pacific
probably have some coming up, too.
People generally announce the meetups
on reddit.com/r/emacs, so you can
look there for updates.
If you organize one of these,
please let me know so that
I can include it in Emacs News.
Lastly, there's an unofficial survey of the Emacs community.
It closes on November 30,
so if you'd like to participate,
you can fill out the form at emacssurvey.org
or send it in via e-mail.
So those were 10 quick highlights from this year.
If you're curious, check out the EmacsConf 2020 wiki page
for this talk so that you can follow the links.
If you'd like to get updates every week,
you can check out the Emacs News I put together.
Feel free to send me cool stuff to include.
Now on to the rest of EmacsConf!
Have fun, and thanks for joining us!