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Emacs and Eev, Or: How to Automate Almost Everything (twu.net)
131 points by swah on Aug 13, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments


Author here! Please don't try to read the "article", it is VERY obsolete! The standard (meta-)starting point is this URL: http://angg.twu.net/#eev


> September 11, 2001 - the inevitable happenned in an oh so glorious way

What's going on with the footer of your site?


mispelled "happened" smh


wrestled through a video presentaion. How I see it is the author found a way to generate a script that is both notes and commands-in-a-shell that you can execute step by step. e.g. "how to install <xyz>". That way it functions as a sort of knowledge repository, i guess. However, I have a hard time understanding the author as he has a very difficult way of presenting... Despite that, there must be something to learn here, i think. Keeping this on my to-read list.


After some digging around I've found this to be the entry point to the current version: http://angg.twu.net/#eev It's an active ELPA package: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EevMode It seems to be some kind of a high-level macro recorder.


Let me use this comment to apologize for some of the videos...

I am very bad at learning things from videos. I usually have to take notes of what are the positions in a video that contain things that I want to learn, and then watch those segments many, many times... I've tried to record videos that I would like to watch, and in most cases this means: videos with a lot of information, that can be watched with little attention, that have indexes to let people find quickly what are the parts that they want to watch again, and that have "textual companions"... practically all the videos have tutorials or webpages associated to them, and there the instructions are - hopefully - easy to follow.

The indexes are like this:

http://angg.twu.net/.emacs.videos.html#eev2019

There is a (fast-paced!) listing of the main "killer features" of eev in this part of my presentation at the EmacsConf2020:

(find-eev2020video "37:45" "3. Killer features")

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOAqBc42Gg8#t=37m45s

Most people (I will explain this soon!) _can_ learn all the main features of eev very quickly by just following the first sections of the main tutorial - this one:

http://angg.twu.net/eev-intros/find-eev-quick-intro.html

...but I have the impression that that tutorial only works well for people who think in a certain way - I call them "non-users", and I explained that term in a video called "Org for Non-Users". My page about that video is here:

http://angg.twu.net/2021-org-for-non-users.html

That video doesn't have subtitles and is 16:36 long, and very few people nowadays have the patience to watch something as long as that. So it's better to go to this page instead,

http://angg.twu.net/find-elisp-intro.html

and read the transcription of another video, that is called "Why eev has a weird elisp tutorial and how to use it".

So, to be honest, most "non-users" can learn all the main features of eev very quickly by just following the first sections of the main tutorial of eev, but unfortunately these "non-users" are very few!...

Roughly, the people who can use Org or Hyperbole without getting incredibly annoyed by the parts of the code that are hard to understand are "users", and these people usually hate eev. The "non-users" are the people who can't "use" Org and Hyperbole because they always try to tinker with the source, and both Org and Hyperbole have tons of low-level functions that are hard to understand. The "non-users" usually agree with the design decisions behind eev, and the "users" usually think that eev is totally wrong.


It's from 2007 with updates from 2011 and 2013 but it probably still works. It seems to use expect plus maybe other technologies. Definitely a long read, no time for that now.


The module of eev that used Expect to send lines to external programs was very hard to set up, and it has been replaced by this: http://angg.twu.net/eepitch.html


Judging by the lack of comments, I'm guessing that lots of people find this cool, but no one can figure it out from a 2-minute read. I know I'm in that camp - granted it is a Friday night in the US, and I'm not in front of my Emacs


I was put off by the first line: "This document is unfinished and VERY obsolete!"

Just giving me node/js anxieties on a weekend...don't need that.




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