Emacs as a Lecture Tool

Tldr

This page has notes about using Emacs for teaching in a university setting. I teach some computer science classes at UC Davis, these notes are informed by that experience. For now these are brief notes describing my setup and customizations that I’ve made.

Emacs

• My base Emacs is installed on MacOS using brew, I use the railwaycat emacs-mac package.

Spacemacs

• I started using the Spacemacs distro in Fall 2023, the same time that I started using Emacs
• I’m still using Spacemacs in Fall 2024.
• I’m not a huge fan of the package management
• I like the keybindings (I came to Emacs from Neovim and VSCode with Vim plugin)

Image-dired

• I just found out about image-dired.
  • This is useful for browsing through figures and diagrams that I’ve saved.
  • ImageMagick must be installed.
  • This issue and solution applied.

  (setq image-dired-cmd-create-thumbnail-program "/usr/local/bin/convert") ;; set the absolute path to the ImageMagick convert command
  (setq image-dired-queue-active-limit 8) ;; set the number of images image-dired will attempt to convert at a time
  (setq image-dired-debug t) ;; Display debugging messages

Org Mode

• I use Org Mode
• I use org-tree-slide
• In the long term, I would like have one org buffer for each lecture
• I use org-ref for citations, recently tried citar
  • org-ref-export with citeproc t refproc t

Math Equations

• I use org-latex-preview.
• I have some custom functions to automatically resize the preview images.
• I am not sure yet how to make one equation (of many on the same slide) larger than the rest.

Styling

• I copy-paste the same snippet of Local Variables that use face-remap-add-relative to adjust fonts and sizes for org faces.

Working with Images

• I make use of org-download-clipboard and org-download-screenshot to add images
• I can open images from the main Org buffer in a new buffer by moving point to the image and doing RET
• However, the new buffer that pops open is usually small.
• I have image-auto-resize set to t, this makes the image fit the window size. But the image doesn’t grow when I increase the size of the window.
• Resizing and doing M-x image-transform-fit-to-window fixes the above problem. This is bound to s w in my setup. I’d like to hook this onto evil-window-set-width so it happens automatically.

Alternating between PDFs and Org content

• For me, Org is the top-level structure, and I can detour to and return from PDFs by linking to them in the org buffer.

Publishing lecture notes

• I tried ox-hugo but had a hard time with setup, probably just wasn’t patient enough to understand the config.
• I have a custom function that exports an org buffer to a markdown file plus images. I choose the markdown file path and images directory interactively on each export. Not the most efficient, but works ok for the time being.

Stability

• I have noticed intermittent stability issues with Emacs.
• emacs-mac is MUCH more responsive and MUCH less prone to crashing than mainline emacs on MacOS.
• In some cases, I have noticed that savehist-mode seems to be the culprit.
  • Lag occurs at regular intervals

The approach from this page resulted in the following:

3692:(setq mu4e~headers-search-hist
3850:(setq mu4e--search-hist
18839:(setq command-history
131498:(setq eww-prompt-history
132242:(setq consult--find-history

From here it seems that mu4e--search-hist and command-history both result in large writes to the savehist cache.

Other notes on stability:

• https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/issues/9409

Other text-based presentation frameworks

There are a variety of text-based presentation frameworks:

• For several classes in the 23-24 year, I mostly used Polylux for Typst
• There’s Beamer for LaTeX, haven’t used it extensively
• There’s also Reveal.js for HTML/JS (or Markdown → HTML/JS)
• This year (24-25), I’ve experimented with org-tree-slide for Emacs Org-Mode

Notice that these all follow the (presentation framework) for (markup language) template.

Decision criteria include:

• what markup language do you want to write in?
• what markup language does the LLM want to write in?

Typst, being a new language, has worse LLM performance (circa Spring 2024, may have improved since). But it is equally powerful to LaTeX with superior syntax, builtins, and documentation in comparison to LaTeX (my opinion). Org-tree-slide is great, but might only make sense if you are already in the Emacs/Org ecosystem. Reveal was my first text-based presentation framework, maybe the easiest to get started in.