Re: [emacs-humanities] Why Emacs-humanities?

[Paul W. Rankin]

Hello all,

I'm pleased to read so many introductions and stories about how people 
discovered and now use Emacs, especially for a myriad of things outside 
of the usual programming realm.

I'll proffer my own...

I first found Emacs back in 2010 when WikiLeaks dropped the Snowden 
news. At first I genuinely thought this was a hoax, and that there was 
no way a liberal democracy would do this. The US government was 
threatening Julian Assange, someone everyone considered at the time to 
be a journalist. There were protests in Sydney. PayPal had cut off their 
donations. People were fighting back with DDoS -- which were totally 
ineffectual but it really felt like something big was happening in the 
world via the internet, and I wanted to be in the "IRC channels" where 
it was going down.

I read that my Mac had a built-in program to allow me to enter this IRC 
hacker network... you just opened the terminal and typed "emacs".

Prior to then I'd thought of writing text on a computer as analogous to 
writing on a page in a typewriter; the program supplied a window to this 
page, and all of the work of it occurred on that page. The concept of a 
text editor that could connect or manipulate the text with something 
beyond that page was intriguing, e.g. writing an essay, with your 
bibliography maintained as a separate library, then fed into an 
unpronounceable program LaTeX to produce a very pretty PDF... The 
possibilities seemed endless.

To then learn that this Emacs program was not merely a portal into a 
hack-the-planet world but could also edit the very code that constituted 
itself, and that it contained a whole book on how to do this right there 
on the computer...[1] The possibilities really were endless.

I finished my BA in Philosophy getting slightly higher marks than I 
deserved thanks to the aesthetic input of Donald Knuth and Jonathan 
Hoefler. My .bib file of every book and article I read or pretended to 
read during my degree is still buried somewhere on my computer.

At the time I'd been writing screenplays using various non-free 
software, none of which I found to my satisfaction. I had stumbled upon 
a burgeoning plain-text markup format for screenplays called Screenplay 
Markdown (SPMD) by Stu Maschwitz [2], itself inspired by Oliver Taylor's 
screenbundle. (SPMD was later renamed Fountain when screenwriter John 
August came aboard.) I knew that with Emacs I could write a 
screenwriting program to leverage the Fountain format -- and I could 
write the program and use it within Emacs. I would get the best of both 
worlds! I printed out the Elisp info manual and took it (not my 
computer) to a café over a few days/weeks and "learnt to code." (If 
anyone ever looked at the early commits to fountain-mode you'd see 
necessity of the quotes.)

More credit is due to Oliver because when it came to adding an export 
format to fountain-mode, it was TextPlay's HTML output that really 
taught me HTML/CSS.[3]

My "writing computer" is now a Pinebook Pro running Alpine Linux. 
There's no graphical environment, just the console (with beautiful 
Terminus font) and Emacs. I derive much joy from setting up a machine 
that performs "just enough" and nothing more -- I can plan and write 
screenplays, keep my journal of super-secret thoughts and feelings 
encrypted, look up terms via dict.org, read mail, bother people on IRC, 
and compulsively check the time of sunset.


[1]: C-h i m elisp
[2]: https://prolost.com/blog/2011/8/9/screenplay-markdown.html
[3]: elisp-based exporting in fountain-mode has since been removed in 
favour of leveraging external shell commands, e.g. textplay --html

[As I previously threatened, I have changed the email I use with 
emacs-humanities. I was trying to keep my hobbies and professional life 
in/on separate domains, but this proved bothersome and unnecessary. I 
hope this doesn't cause anyone any bother.]

--
Paul W. Rankin
https://bydasein.com

The single best thing you can do for the world is to delete your social 
media accounts.