Page:Sacha Chua - Emacs Chat with Carsten Dominik.djvu/8

 Sacha: So have you gotten all the rest of your students hooked on Emacs to use Calc?

Carsten: Well, yes, I know many of them use Emacs. I know that. There was one student who actually picked it up only in order to be able to do his unit calculations. And of course the other stuff in Emacs which I wrote myself was of course all related to doing science, to write scientific papers. As I already said, there's a couple of stuff which I did for writing LaTeX, in particular, for doing bibliographies and cross-referencing of LaTeX documents. That's one partt.

Then there's another thing that I took over maintenance of a package which interacted with basically a programming language which is used by many astronomers for data processing. It's called IDL. It's a proprietary language, unfortunately with extremely expensive license fees which you have to pay. This is unfortunate. That's why I'm still using a very old version of it.

But there's an Emacs mode which interacts with it, and which does syntax highlighting. You can run it from within Emacs. It just gets us one step closer to the ideal of never having to leave Emacs during the entire day.

Sacha: So there's Org, there's Calc, there's IDL. What other things let you stay in Emacs almost the entire day?

Carsten: Any kind of programming, and then using the debugger as a programming environment. I do that in Emacs. I do that. I'm not doing my mail in Emacs. I used to use VM for a while. I think a couple of years I used VM. But I stopped doing this because I'm doing most of my email now on a laptop on a train while I'm offline. I think for offline work–at least the last time I looked–for offline mail work, it wasn't really as good. I don't know if that works now with [inaudible] so it's possible. I stopped doing this. I have an Apple laptop so I use the Mail program there.

Yes, programming, writing, drafting papers, also drafting presentations. I don't make the full presentation but sort of the collection of the ideas. Outlines, I think really the ideal companion to thinking, and brainstorming, and throwing out your ideas. This is really a big part of my day.

Also, when I take notes–I'm no longer in lectures because I moved to the other side. I have give lectures now instead of listening the lectures. So that's