HACKER Q&A
📣 jonnycomputer

Looking for Emacs org-mode tutorial videos by women


I was interested in recommending Emacs and org-mode to colleagues, but discovered that I could not find any tutorials or introduction-to videos made by, or narrated by women. In the interest of my colleagues not getting the impression that its just a tool for a certain well-established crowd of male nerds, particularly since most of my colleagues are women, I was hoping to get help finding resources that portrayed it more inclusively--in the interest of bringing more people in to use this fantastic tool.

Edit: I'm not interested in culture war crap. I'm interested in resource recommendations that might better appeal to a certain audience. Please, if your only point of replying is to complain that I asked the question, please refrain, because its off-topic.


  👤 NateEag Accepted Answer ✓
Sacha Chua is one of the best-known women in the Emacs world.

She ran a podcast about Emacs for a while, which might be relevant:

https://sachachua.com/blog/emacs-chat/


👤 bellyfullofbac
I suppose it's not up for discussion (since it's offtopic) that I find this mindset strange, it feels more like segregation rather than inclusivity, "I want to watch tutorials only made by my group."...

Then again, looking "Emacs tutorial" on YouTube I re-encountered a particular weird character I saw before, he's got a homepage where he solicits Patreon donations to ask him a question, he does YouTube streams where maybe 5 people show up where he talks about what you'd expect a "neckbeard nerd" to talk about, he seems to have been unable to find employment for many years, and he's also talked about women in weird way. I would not want my daughter to learn Emacs from him.


👤 kaeland
Here’s an emacs tutorial written by Laura Viglioni. Her tutorial covers setting up a react dev environment in emacs.

https://dev.to/viglioni/how-i-set-up-my-emacs-for-typescript...


👤 yewenjie
Emacs Conf 2020 had this talk about using org-mode and org-roam by Noorah Alhasan who AFAIK identifies as a woman.

Org-mode and Org-Roam for Scholars and Researchers https://emacsconf.org/2020/talks/17/


👤 jks
I have a different but related question: are there org-mode tutorials, by presenters of any gender, that show how they actually use org-mode as part of their workflows? I've seen enough tutorials where you are shown how to make

  * headlines

  ** in a hierarchy

  * and back to level 1

  1. and numbered lists
  2. [ ] and clickable items
...and all the other features, but I would be interested in seeing what kind of improved workflows or routines are enabled by using org-mode in some actual work.


👤 w4rh4wk5
I am afraid in that I cannot really help you there. I am a Vim user and usually only read written tutorials where I don't even know the gender of the author (which does not matter to me anyway).

However, I find the nature behind your request interesting and would like to better understand where exactly you are coming from.

> In the interest of my colleagues not getting the impression that its just a tool for a certain well-established crowd of male nerds

Where exactly would they get this impression from? Over the last decade I've seen so many different people nerding about Emacs (or Vim for that matter) that I'd never nail it down to be one coherent, well-established crowd. Especially with the rise of VSCode and its underlying complexity a lot of people join and leave that community every day.

> I was hoping to get help finding resources that portrayed it more inclusively

Which resources did you find that portrayed Emacs to be exclusive / non-inclusive in any way. Okay, you'll have a hard time if you are missing some fingers, but that's not what you are getting at.


👤 db48x
The currently–available tutorials were all created by volunteers. If none of them are acceptable then you should do it yourself or hire someone acceptable to do it.

👤 jonnycomputer
Thank you for those who chose to help. I appreciate you.

I'm afraid that the rest of the responses were not constructive. Worse, they've painted a picture that is not very flattering of the HN community, I'm afraid. I'm not some woke holy warrior--not by a long shot--but you all have convinced me that sexism is a bigger problem in tech than I'd given credence to thus far. Sad.


👤 macintux
This should have “Ask HN” in the title.

👤 the_third_wave
Those colleagues could just look past the sex of the person doing the talking and focus on the content, just like we've done for a long time - just like we've been taught. MLK wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. Your colleagues are most likely perfectly capable of judging tutorials by their content, not by the sex of the narrator. Segregation is what we should be glad we left behind, not what we should strife for.