amazing to have all those tools.
Carsten: Yes. As I said, even if I have to go through a program and make a couple of replacements, I'd rather write a little function than doing it by hand.
Other stuff which I use… I use TRAMP to edit files on different computers. I find that extremely useful. I've always thought about taking up ERC, IRC basically, and use Emacs for this. But I never really have. I'm a little bit fearful that this will be too much of a time-waster.
Sacha: That's true. Once the Emacs channel sees you… Goodness, you'll get a lot of comments and questions. The Org Mode channel on Freenode is very active from time to time. Of course, the Emacs channel has a great community as well.
I have my Emacs set up now to connect to IRC in the background. Then if there's any activity or if people mention me, then it shows up in my mode line. Sometimes I'll flip through it if I'm procrastinating something else.
Carsten: It sounds like some set up which you should put into your next blog post.
Sacha: But actually, because Org can easily remind you what your current task is supposed to be, I found that it isn't too distracting.
Carsten: Okay.
Sacha: It's kind of occasionally hearing about interesting Emacs things that you wouldn't have come across yourself, because people are asking questions and answering them.
Carsten: Yes and sometimes you just need to procrastinate a little bit, and you can be helpful and give somebody else some advice. I think that can also be fun.
Sacha: Yes. But you have that in all those other places also where you bump into other Emacs geeks. You're active in the mailing list, in the newsgroups. Where else do you learn about Emacs?
Carsten: Well, I have an RSS feed in my unfortunately dying Google Reader which looks for this kind of stuff. I have to find a replacement. That's what I do. I