Mastering Emacs Together

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2023-04-01 23:30:04

We have a Mastering Emacs Book Club that meets every weekend to read and discuss the book Mastering Emacs, 2022 edition written by Mickey Petersen. We go through a few pages of the book every time we meet, do some demos, and talk about the concepts we learn from the book. In the 36 meetings that we have had so far, we have spent approximately 26 hours together carefully reading every line of the book, trying out the lessons on an actual editor, and experimenting with the new concepts. In the last 3½ months, we have completed four chapters of the book. We are currently reading the fifth chapter. In this post, I'll share what the journey has been like so far and a few interesting things we have learnt.

I am the host of the book discussion group meetings. This is the second series of such meetings I have been hosting. The first one was about analytic number theory which concluded in October 2021 after 120 meetings that occurred in a span of seven months. After completing that series of meetings, I took a year-long break from hosting such meetings. After the break, I chose Emacs as the topic for the next series of meetings. The book Mastering Emacs by Mickey Petersen seemed like a great choice for these meetings.

The new series of meetings began in December 2022. We have been meeting over Jitsi during the weekends. Each meeting is approximately 40 minutes long. With my desktop shared via Jitsi, I demonstrate all the concepts we find in the book in my Emacs editor. On an average, we see about 7 participants in the meetings. Some participants are regulars who join the meetings every weekend, follow the lessons, share their comments, etc. It has been a fun experience so far.

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