Emacs Screencasts: Customisation Part II | Hacker News Reader

Emacs Screencasts: Customisation Part II

emacsmovies.org

55 pointsdiptanu18 comments

http://emacsmovies.org/blog/2012/08/05/customisation_part_1/ Here's part one. I'm really glad there is a growing number of screencasts and movies about Emacs. You can find many more here: http://emacsrocks.com/

Also, there are more and more videos of Vim too. Emacs is my favorite text editor, followed by Vim. All this is great news :)

There's also http://emacsrocks.com/ for Emacs videos.

That's where I learned about ace-jump-mode and undo-tree-mode, both of which I cannot live without anymore :)

I actually found the content disappointing and don't see why to bother spending tutorial time on explaining them. A somewhat competent programmer will have figured out how to add mode-hooks after looking at his first one or two EmacsWiki pages. describe-variable (and all other describe functions) are covered by most introductions and should be learned before approaching any kind of Emacs customization. The rest is almost exclusively content where the only useful thing is to know that the functionality exists, but which is just to trivial to spend video time on what it does. Video tutorials are nice but I think you would be better of on focusing on the really tricky parts of Emacs and core concepts.

I emphatically disagree.

In creating tutorials, the key is exercising restraint.

This is especially important when dealing with Emacs, which is a classic case of an almost complete lack of restraint concerning the hierarchical organization of features. EmacsWiki is another great example of a huge tangled ball of knots.

Most experts forget exactly how impenetrable a new subject can seem to a beginner. I commend the tutor for not forgetting this!

I'm the chap that made the tutorials and I agree with both of you. I can't, for the life of me, study anything from a screencast. Most of the ones I've seen are either too superficial to be worth it or too detailed to be useful without being able to flip back and forth like it's possible to do with text.

I'm trying to balance out the two and spent quite a while trying to tease out stuff that's not too superficial but at the same time is not too deep for beginners to follow.

Like most of these things, it's going to be impossible to please everyone but if there is a sizeable fraction of people who find this useful, I think it's served its purpose.

As for me, thinking through the whole thing in advance, trying stuff out and preparing the material helps me clarify my own knowledge.

Nit: is there a reason for the download to be in mkv format? I mean, it's simple enough to repackage with ffmpeg (-i ./file.mkv -vcodec copy -acodec copy ./file.mp4), but not everybody is going to be able to do that?

Otherwise, thanks! I usually find screencasts to be way too low-bandwidth for technical information, but these are very good. Cheers!

Thanks for the encouragement.

When I started the tutorials, the archive didn't automatically create the .mp4 files. Either that or the processing was so way back in the queue that I thought it didn't. Someone complained about the webm files not playing under ios devices so I made the mkv ones which they were happy with. I put this along with the rest of my workflow rules and it's been there since https://gist.github.com/2466292

But you're right, now that the archive automatically generates the h.264 videos, I should probably drop the mkv files and just upload the webm ones.

Do the mp4s work fine under ios? I don't have any Apple devices to test this with.

Actually, iOS will only handle ISO media (MPEG-4, Quicktime, &c.) If you need a hand with this just ping me, it's my day job.

Can you drop me a line at noufal at emacsmovies.org. I would appreciate some advice. My transcoding-fu is mostly empirical and it would be good to get someone to review my decisions.

Video tutorials are very useful for learning emacs, but there is a ton of static in the background. Hard to listen to

Yeah. I'm sorry about the static. It was late when I did it and I didn't notice the problem before uploading it. I'll try to clean it up and upload a better version.

That's a lot of static in the background. :/

nano-critic: provide a small TOC of the tutorial (some people leverage org-mode/org-babel for this). I find it easier to follow if I know in advance what's in there.

Thanks. I've added https://github.com/nibrahim/emacsmovies.org/issues/5

Do you mean a TOC in the blog post or directly in the video for a few seconds? If the former, I did try to add a "list of things covered" in the post.

I meant in the video. I'm a special case, my laptop's too slow for flash video so I wget the .mkv thus didnt read the blog entry.

Do you think that a video with TOC/intro and content is a good idea ?

I could type it up and add give an "intro" before the screencast but I'm not sure it'd have much value. a TOC is mostly useful when you can use it for random access. The quick overview is better served by the blog post.

No audio in Safari 6

Which OS? Do none of the formats at http://www.archive.org/details/EmacsMovies have audio?

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