Those of you with terminal and plain text first workflows, how did you handle academia? I'm imagining a mix of git, pandoc, and vimwiki or org-mode.

Is there a good article on how to setup such a workflow? Any pitfalls?

#linux #freebsd #cli #terminal #vim #emacs #college #university #acadamia

@profoundlynerdy There are a few academics that I'm aware of (and no doubt more I'm not!) who use Emacs.

Off the top of my head...

@jameshowell
@rougier

EmacsConf has had various talks that are relevant

https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/reference
https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/students
https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/uni (from @jameshowell )
https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/teaching
https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/table

lots more talks of relevance too.

(I work in academia but as a research software engineer with no teaching nor paper authoring)

#emacs #academia

EmacsConf - 2025 - talks - Emacs as a fully-fledged reference manager

@profoundlynerdy How to set up such a workflow? I've been developing many workflows in #Emacs since the late 1980s. Take that as encouragement, not discouragement!

Any pitfalls? Some people don't share my love of Emacs, I suppose. 🤣

Thanks for the shoutout, @slackline! Besides @rougier, there's also @ericsfraga, @randyridenour, @zamansky, oh now I'm starting to feel anxious because I'm certain I am forgetting people @kjhealy sorry to the rest

@jameshowell @profoundlynerdy @slackline @rougier @ericsfraga @randyridenour @zamansky @kjhealy I'm happy to see that nobody thinks of me as an academic!

@oantolin It's so embarrassing.... It's because I am so intimidated by your status as an Emacs dev, I don't think of myself as the same category as you (I am serious)

@profoundlynerdy @slackline @rougier @ericsfraga @randyridenour @zamansky @kjhealy

@jameshowell That's very kind of you, and very unwarranted as well. @profoundlynerdy @slackline @rougier @ericsfraga @randyridenour @zamansky @kjhealy

@oantolin @jameshowell To me, both of you seem like elisp wizards and I'm hoping I'll get there someday. On a side note, I keep hearing great things about embark but just looking at the readme is quite intimidating to me.

@profoundlynerdy @slackline @rougier @ericsfraga @randyridenour @zamansky @kjhealy

@paniash
Yes, the readme is a reference manual. I should write some friendlier documentation. Probably just a paragraph that says something like: "Have you ever used a GUI application where a menu offering you actions pops up when you click with the mouse on a thing? The main command in embark, namely embark-act is a keyboard driven version of that. Bind it to a key of your choosing and use it everywhere, both in normal text buffers and in the minibuffer, to see what actions are available by default. When you want to know what other commands Embark has, or when you want to add new actions or types of text you can act on, read the reference manual."

I'm in the paradoxical situation of having written a version of something I'm sure 99% of people have used before, namely a mouse-click context menu, but somehow selling it so poorly that people find it foreign.
@jameshowell

@oantolin @jameshowell That would really help elisp peasants such as myself! BTW Prot has a nice demo of embark which I haven't had the time to watch, that could also help.
Fifteen ways to use Embark

Update (2024-10-02): Update for Emacs 29 Update (2024-09-08): Read this article in Japanese at Qiita or at Emacs-JP. Update (2021-10-16): While this list was intended as a demonstration of the kinds of things you can do with Embark, there has been some interest by readers in reproducing these demos exactly on their machines. So I have added a “Play by play” section under each demo listing the sequence of actions in the demo.

@paniash Your mentioning me in tbe same breath as @oantolin makes me blush. I write thing that I use, he writes things that everyone uses.

And did you know that he is also an academic? 🤣

@profoundlynerdy @slackline @rougier @ericsfraga @randyridenour @zamansky @kjhealy

@jameshowell @oantolin

I really like how there's a niche overlap of academia and emacs. Glad to be part of it!

@profoundlynerdy @slackline @rougier @ericsfraga @randyridenour @zamansky @kjhealy

@jameshowell @profoundlynerdy @slackline @rougier @ericsfraga @zamansky @kjhealy It’s hard to say anything about workflow without knowing what you need to do. How big the pitfalls are kind of depends on what field you’re in. The biggest problem for me is that humanities is mostly enslaved to MS Word. Fortunately, Org converts to docx easily, so there’s no problem with initial submissions to publishers. Edits and collaboration still force me to reluctantly open Word at times.

@randyridenour: "Edits and collaboration still force me to reluctantly open Word at times." It's like changing the cat litter

@profoundlynerdy @slackline @rougier @ericsfraga @zamansky @kjhealy

@randyridenour @jameshowell @profoundlynerdy @slackline @rougier @ericsfraga @zamansky @kjhealy According to how @monterosato described it, Stylo might be an interesting tool for you.
Stylo

Stylo, online text editor for scholars