Re: In search for an emacs hacker

["Vitus Schäfftlein" <vitusschaefftlein@live.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 on capitalist structures.

My main idea is that there is a common ground for any academic: literature research, reading pdfs, taking notes and writing/publishing papers. 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-overseeable.

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...