EmacsConf 2024 Backstage (publ. 2024-11-13)

My videos

As mentioned, my two EmacsConf 2024 videos have already been uploaded, and now the captions are done. Here is the schedule and information for my talks:

Watering my (digital) plant with Emacs timers

Emacs as a Shell

P-search

A great thing about being a presenter is you get access to the other videos early, before the conference. One that I would highly recommend tuning into (or downloading later) is Zac's presentation on p-search:

p-search: a local search engine in Emacs

I downloaded p-search and have had a great experience with it so far. The code is available here.

p-search repository

It can be a little hard to understand how to use it if you haven't watched the video yet. The basic idea is that it searches files and/or buffers, which are called "Candidates", for search criteria you specify, which are called "Priors". The searching is done using common tools like grep, or based on things like file extension. Then it ranks the Candidates based on a probability algorithm, and gives you the results in order of relevance. It is kind of like what Web search engines do, but just searching and calculating on the fly, rather than trying to maintain a reverse index.

You can give higher or lower weight to your various Priors, if you think some search criteria has much or little importance to the general idea you are looking for. p-search can be much more useful than just running a grep search over a directory, because you don't have to be certain that all of your search criteria will actually match. You just keep adding priors or tuning them until you find what you are looking for.

Here are some screen shots:

p-search screenshot 0

p-search screenshot 1

PGmacs

I watched also Eric's talk on PGmacs

PGmacs: browsing and editing PostgreSQL databases from Emacs

It is some cool looking software, and mostly a interesting, well done presentation. I don't have any need to interact with SQL databases right at this moment, but I would certainly give PGmacs a try if I did.

My only complaint is that he went out of his way to work a dirty joke about President Trump into the presentation. It is only visible in his typing — you won't catch it from just the audio. Not sure what he was hoping to accomplish with that, but I imagine most of the liberals watching will get a good chuckle out of it. That was pretty much what the entire Harris campaigned boiled down to — emotional and vitriolic character attacks against Trump, devoid of substance.

Copyright

CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed