Page:Sacha Chua - Emacs Chat with Carsten Dominik.djvu/12

 Carsten: Because they are the ones that exactly do what I want and so on.

Sacha: There you go. The difference here is a lot of people have really big Emacs files. You package your GNU Emacs customizations as packages.

Carsten: That's a nice way of putting it. And send it out. Exactly.

Sacha: It just also happens, I guess, that the defaults are the way that you work.

Carsten: That's a very good point. If you write your own package, then you get to decide what's the default setting of all those variables. Of course, they are what I like. Even though I'm not in control currently of Org Mode. Right now it's Bastien's doing. He's doing a great job.

Sacha: Yes. It's always fantastic to see a package grow up, get other maintainers. Other people add their own spin to it. You keep getting the benefits without having to do as much hard work.

Carsten: Exactly. The mailing list for Org Mode, I think that there's currently at 60 or 70 mails a day. Something like this is really crazy.

Sacha: Yes. I check in every so often. There's a lot of volume, but there's also a lot of good configuration snippets, new features that show up, and like, “Oh, yes, I didn't know we did this.”

Carsten: We never split the mailing list into help and development or so. We just kept everything together. It's kind of fun.

What else do I use? Let me just think about it. I used to use Gnus as a news reader, but then unfortunately, I sort of stopped reading Usenet news because it was really too much. I have a couple of mailing lists which I subscribed to, and then that just gets filtered out in my email stuff. Really going on Usenet and reading the stuff, I sort of stopped that. It's just too much.

Sacha: I have it still set up with some of the Emacs news groups, but then I forget for long periods of time. Then I was like, “Okay, time to go back in there and start looking around.” But it's easy to forget.

Carsten: The other thing is, of course, Gmane, where you can so nicely search