Re: emacs IDE features

[Sacha Chua <sacha@sachachua.com>]

John Wiegley <johnw@newartisans.com> writes:

Hello, johnw, all!

> Someone who is willing to keep an eye on things like
> reddit.com/r/emacs, emacswiki.org, and other external resources, that
> really have nothing to do with emacs-devel at all. This would largely
> be a non-technical role: more a "community liaison" type of thing. Are
> the informational and educational needs of the community being mit?
> If I could pick anyone for this, it would be Sacha Chua. She has already been

I'd say jcs over at irreal.org does an even better job of pointing to
and summarizing cool stuff that people are sharing on Reddit and Planet
Emacsen. I'm totally happy to continue being an informal Emacs community
cheerleader, though.

It would be pretty cool to get something similar to Linux Weekly News
going, looking at new items coming in from:

- Emacs-related blog posts (on or off Planet Emacsen)
- Youtube, Vimeo, podcasts
- Meetups and other communities
- New packages
- Twitter
- Emacs StackExchange
- Newsgroups

The reddit.com/r/emacs folks do a good job at sharing interesting links
along those lines, actually.

I can see how far I get in terms of getting it up and running (and being
consistent with it, which could be the real challenge!) over on my blog.
It definitely makes sense as a web archive and/or a mailing list, and
maybe other people will want to pitch in too.

As for a summary of what people want: Daniel Gopar has mentioned the
need for more total-newbie-introduction tutorials and screencasts.
There's also the perpetual desire for Emacs 201-type information, or how
to go from the basic tutorial to actually setting things up for Emacs
awesomeness.

It feels like lots of people are sharing cool stuff in blog posts and
videos, which is definitely a step up from a few years ago. Of course,
people who are new don't know what to look for or where to go, and it
can be difficult to figure out a sequence for learning things or fill in
the gaps between pieces. We're missing the trails, the glue. EmacsWiki
used to be a little like that sort of a thing, and it still could become
that if people updated the resources that are on there. I might add that
to my list of little projects.

I'm guilty of this myself - I tend to focus more on weird idiosyncratic
hacks that make my life easier instead of making a concerted effort to
write coherent docs, although maybe I should play with that balance a
bit. I also try to nudge people to record screencasts (or conversations,
because those can sometimes be less intimidating) or write blog posts,
to get more stuff out there. I've been doing this in a rather haphazard
way, but I think we can figure out how to do this even better. =)

Sacha Chua