Re: In search for an emacs hacker

["Vitus Schäfftlein" <v_scha12@uni-muenster.de>]

Emanuel, I need to admit that I have a hard time understanding your 
resentment against academics. I have never come across someone who 
thought in terms of "plebians" and "aristos", most of the ones I know 
would rather think in terms of bourgeoisie and proletariat (my 
background is philosophy, though). Anyway, what I mean by "academics" 
are PhD students, post docs, and (junior) professors of _any_ field. I 
strongly agree that academics don't have more important jobs, but that 
emacs is simply well-suited for their aims. My reasons do not concern 
the "superiority of academics", but my worries about the dependency of 
university

My main idea is that there is a common ground for any academic: 
literature research, reading pdfs, taking notes and writing/publishing 
papers (either about these PDFs or about something else). No matter if 
you are a physicist, social scientist, philosopher, computer scientiest, 
linguist or philosopher, you need to do these things. Now, my view is 
that these things are not connected closely enough in emacs in order to 
have a nice workflow. To drive home my point, here are some examples:

 1. org-roam-bibtex and pdf-tools are not connected. For example, there
    should be a function that takes selected text or annotations and
    prints it as a citation in an org-roam-capture buffer, using the
    information of the bibtex-entry connected to the pdf by
    org-roam-bibtex. For example, if you selected "foo" on PDF page 6,
    the author is A, the year is y, there should be a function which
    opens a capture-buffer, which contains this: "foo. (A, y,
    [link-to-pdf-at-page-6 named 'p. 6'])".
 2. pdf-tools lacks some important functionality. For example,
    differentiating between page labels and page numbers and
    selection-behavior as in Adobe Reader.
 3. org-noter is not really configurable since its main function is 200
    lines long and hard-coded.
 4. org-roam-ui does not allow to display only parts of all
    org-roam-notes (for examples filtered by directory or tags) and is,
    thus, not well to oversee.

Among many other things, this impedes workflow dramatically, and I would 
like to change this. Scimax is nice for statistics and all, but does not 
handle these problems. I hope this gives an idea of what I want to do. I 
don't really know how to code, but I do know what functionalities would 
be great for academics and how they should function exactly. If anyone 
is interested in working with me, please get in touch with me!

Best regards,

Vitus

P. S.: Another major issue is that syntax highlighting becomes makes 
emacs so slow if you have several org-ref-citations in one paragraph or 
LaTeX-document with many prettified symbols. I hope there there will be 
a tree-sitter package for org-mode and LaTeX soon...