Eev: six videos with exercises about elisp hyperlinks (with subtitles)

Eev is a library for Emacs that lets us

"create executable logs of what we do in a format that is reasonably easy to read and to modify, and that lets us "play back" those logs step by step in any order".

"Executable logs", or "executable notes", are composed of two kinds of things:

• "Commands sent to shells and other shell-like programs". Most people understand this very quickly - see the section "Trying it" in my page about eepitch, and:
• "(Elisp) hyperlinks to everything interesting that we find". Some people understand quickly how to use elisp hyperlinks - see this - but learning how to create elisp hyperlinks is much harder.

In 2021 I gave a series of workshops on the techniques that I use to create elisp hyperlinks very quickly, and I prepared six videos for these workshops. After the workshops I watched the videos again, and hated them; I registered them as first-class videos, but with these :comment fields:

:comment   "Very bad! Don't watch it!"

In dec/2022 I added subtitles to all the six videos, and I saw that with subtitles they're quite good... the problem is that I sort of hate videos, but I was working on making my videos more accessible to people who hate videos (like me), and subtitling them solved the problem.

If you don't have eev then the only video that I recommend is the third one. Its title is:

Material on `M-3 M-e', or: what does it mean to "save links to everything that is interesting"?

You can watch it on youtube here, but I don't recommend doing that. It's much better to download a local copy with the two "wget"s below and use the "mpv" below to play it, using these keys to make mpv play some parts in high speed:

# See:  http://anggtwu.net/eev-videos.html
#       http://anggtwu.net/eev-videos.html#mpv-keys
# Play: (find-2021workshop3video "0:00")
# Info: (find-1stclassvideo-links "2021workshop3")
# Subs: (find-1stclassvideolsubs  "2021workshop3")

wget -nc http://anggtwu.net/eev-videos/2021-workshop-3.mp4
wget -N  http://anggtwu.net/eev-videos/2021-workshop-3.vtt
mpv --fs --osd-level=2 2021-workshop-3.mp4

You can also read the subtitles of the six videos here (click on the links at the right parentheses):

;; See: http://angg.twu.net/eev-find-angg.html
(find-angg "SUBTITLES/2021-workshop-1.lua")
(find-angg "SUBTITLES/2021-workshop-2.lua")
(find-angg "SUBTITLES/2021-workshop-3.lua")
(find-angg "SUBTITLES/2021-workshop-4.lua")
(find-angg "SUBTITLES/2021-workshop-5.lua")
(find-angg "SUBTITLES/2021-workshop-6.lua")

If you do have eev, then the quickest way to download or update all their subtitles is to copy the eepitch block below to a buffer and execute it:

• (eepitch-shell)
• (eepitch-kill)
• (eepitch-shell)
mkdir -p $S/http/angg.twu.net/eev-videos/
cd       $S/http/angg.twu.net/eev-videos/
wget -N   http://angg.twu.net/eev-videos/2021-workshop-1.vtt
wget -N   http://angg.twu.net/eev-videos/2021-workshop-2.vtt
wget -N   http://angg.twu.net/eev-videos/2021-workshop-3.vtt
wget -N   http://angg.twu.net/eev-videos/2021-workshop-4.vtt
wget -N   http://angg.twu.net/eev-videos/2021-workshop-5.vtt
wget -N   http://angg.twu.net/eev-videos/2021-workshop-6.vtt

Then there are many ways to play the videos and access their descriptions... for example, with `M-x find-1stclassvideos' or `M-x 1c'.

One of my presentations at the EmacsConf 2022 was about a "new way" to create elisp links to "here" that simply puts the hyperlink into the kill ring. This is similar to org-store-link and is very quick - see:

(find-kla-intro)
(find-kla-intro "2. The old way")
(find-kla-intro "3. The new way")
http://angg.twu.net/emacsconf2022-kla.html

...but it's not very powerful - it only creates links to files and to anchors in files, and it's hard to extend. My "old way" supports all these kinds of "here"s and refining, and it's very easy to extend... but it's hard to learn.

My suggestion is:

• Watch the video 5 to learn how to read some diagrams,
• Watch the video 3 to understand what "saving links to everything interesting" looks like,
• Do the exercises in the video 4 to learn how to create links to intros,
• Do the exercises in the video 6 to learn how to use ``find-extra-file-links',
• Do the exercises in the videos 1 and 2 (they're harder).

Note that most of the videos sort of correspond to (expanded) versions of sections of this intro,

(find-saving-links-intro)

That intro is still a bit messy. That's mainly because so few people are interested in eev that I judge that other parts of eev, and other tasks, have much higher priority than this. If you are interested in eev - either in general or in saving hyperlinks - please join the mailing list, get in touch, say hi, nudge me, etc etc, whatever...