
Emacs Lisp Animations - signa11
http://dantorop.info/project/emacs-animation/
======
trop
It's quite pleasing to see this here. As noted on the page, these were notes
which accompanied a class. I wanted art students to be able to write code to
create something visual, and wanted them to be able to do this in an open
source cross-platform environment. Emacs was a perversely appealing means.

Keeping these examples working led to discovering an obscure regression in
Emacs
([https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=22490](https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=22490)).
I turns out that, excepting animators, very few Elisp programmers need to
generate zero newlines.

~~~
trocado
What was the students' response? Did they have a background in programming?

~~~
trop
The students didn't have any coding background. Which, in a way, was good --
they didn't know how absurd this was to start programming with Lisp, use ASCII
art as a visual vocabulary, and use Emacs and its REPL as an IDE.

I wanted the students to gain confidence in this weird situation by working
off of clear examples. Hence I made these extensive online notes.

The students were generally great at typing in these examples and getting them
to run, and some were creative with rearranging them, copying in extra code,
and changing variables/strings to produce interesting effects. I didn't see
"coding" in the sense of having a vision/plan, finding/inventing an algorithm
to realize it, and then refining the result. But I saw "hacking" in the
classic sense: gaining facility with an unlikely tool, and working through
variations until something intriguing occurred.

Given that it was an art class, I was actually pretty happy with this. This
felt in line with what allows for a lot of good art school work: students
starting out with a technique and working/reworking until it results in
something satisfying or maybe even resonant. I liked how it broke the paradigm
of "useful" coding. The Emacs environment became simply something fundamental
and even somewhat neutral to work at.

------
donio
Emacs has had SVG support for a while so you can get more than just ASCII art.
See the svg-clock package on ELPA for example. This is what the code looks
like:
[http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/elpa.git/tree/package...](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/elpa.git/tree/packages/svg-
clock/svg-clock.el)

Or for pixel graphics: [https://github.com/gongo/emacs-
nes](https://github.com/gongo/emacs-nes)

------
noufalibrahim
This is quite wild. I did a few simple animations for my intros at
emacsmovies.org. They were mostly manual moving of characters and M-x zone.
Nothing more.

------
nandkeypull
The next big thing: emacs demoscene!

------
tangue
_« Emacs ... is a great tool for animation »_. Emacs lovers never cease to
amaze me.

~~~
steveeq1
You should think of emacs as less as an editor and more as a lisp machine.

~~~
kleer001
... or an operating system ;)

~~~
tetris11
I like to think of it as a really bad axe. With it I can chop wood, wedge open
crates, shave, climb mountains, fight off monsters, pick my teeth, scratch my
head, and throw it at anyone I see.

I guess what I'm saying is - it hasn't killed me yet.

~~~
kleer001
Nice!

After a year of using emacs I wrote a few lines of elisp to put in some
hotkeys for functions I use all the time and now I finally feel like a
freakin' hacker-wizard, lol. Good times. I ain't never givin' this shit up.

