Top all-time · #644
Sacha Chua
Personal blog · sachachua.comproductivityprogramming
Sacha Chua's personal blog at sachachua.com covers productivity and programming. Since 2007, 97 different Hacker News readers have linked it 141 times, most often “Interview with Thierry Volpiatto, Maintainer of Emacs Helm (2018)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Often recommended · 16 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link her Emacs and org-mode posts as learning resources, and recommend her Emacs News roundups, visual guide and tutorials.
- Recommended for · 16 comments
- Praised as excellent, great and fantastic for learning Emacs and org-mode, especially Emacs News and her visual guide.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /blog/6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2011-04-08
- Interview with Thierry Volpiatto, Maintainer of Emacs Helm (2018)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-09-12
- /blog/2014/01/tips-learning-org-mode-emacs/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-03-17
- Sacha Chua: A No-Excuses Guide to Blogging (2014) [pdf]3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-06-10
- /blog/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-04-15
- /blog/emacs/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-29
- How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-05-18
- 2023-04-03 Emacs News2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-04-16
- Sketched Books – Sacha Chua2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-12-17
- Moving 18 years of comments out of Disqus and into my 11ty static site2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-31
What Hacker News says?
You may find this helpful ( http://sachachua.com/blog/2014/01/tips-learning-org-mode-ema... ). Also remember org mode is as simple or as complex as you want it to be!
Comment linking /blog/2014/01/tips-learning-org-mode-emacs/
on “Vim 8.0 is coming”Submitted EmacsConf 2024 Notes as a story · 340 points
HN discussionYou mean when a maintainer of Emacs setup the mirror? https://sachachua.com/blog/2015/12/2015-12-10-emacs-chat-joh...
Comment linking /blog/2015/12/2015-12-10-emacs-chat-john-wiegley-maintaining-emacs-can-help/
on “Give up GitHub: The time has come”Submitted Excerpts from a conversation about personal information management as a story · 211 points
HN discussionI think there's a lot to learn from starting from scratch, and it's something I hope to do too. Gladly! I'll keep the list to what I've studied so far. Here goes: - If you ever want to explore, say, Doom (Spacemacs is likely too bloated for someone who gravitates to a vanilla config), chemacs[1] is a nifty, simple profile switcher - I think there's a lot of value in studying what they've done with their mnemonic key…
Comment linking /blog/2013/05/how-to-learn-emacs-a-hand-drawn-one-pager-for-beginners/
on “Making Emacs Popular Again”Submitted How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners as a story · 209 points
HN discussion> which, as far as I can tell, started in earnest with Julia Evans Sacha Chua < http://sachachua.com/blog/> used to do this way earlier than Julia Evans. No flame though, just wanted to point this out.
Comment linking /blog/>
on “Show HN: A coloring book of data structures and algorithms”Submitted I made a font based on my handwriting as a story · 196 points
HN discussionBig fan of Sacha Chua: much to learn by way of emacs, productivity and org life https://sachachua.com/blog/emacs/
Comment linking /blog/emacs/
on “EmacsConf 2020 Talks”Submitted Why browse the Web in Emacs? (2008) as a story · 152 points
HN discussionMaintained, not wrote. John Wiegley wrote both. http://www.emacswiki.org/PlannerMode It is cool that Sacha maintained it, volunteering is awesome. I am pointing this correction out because Sacha's primary career is as a self-promotion specialist ( http://sachachua.com/blog/ ), so I have to be skeptical of how her name gets attached to technical work, more so than someone who doesn't pursue celebrity for profit. Peop…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech”Submitted Whats New in Emacs 24 as a story · 82 points
HN discussionMy personal favorite example: http://sachachua.com/blog/ She wrote org-mode for Emacs. Now she is at IBM Research.
Comment linking /blog/
on “Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech”Submitted 2024-01-01 Emacs News as a story · 80 points
HN discussionSacha Chua recently did one of her "Emacs Chats" with Xah Lee: http://sachachua.com/blog/category/podcast/emacs-chat-podcas...
Comment linking /blog/category/podcast/emacs-chat-podcast/
on “I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee”Submitted The shy connector: How to get strangers to talk to you as a story · 57 points
HN discussionhttp://www.sachachua.com is the blog of an avid Emacs user who promotes its use, and the plus is that there's a lot more interesting information there too as she documents her journey.
Comment linking /
on “Why GNU Emacs?”Submitted Livin’ la Vida Emacs as a story · 33 points
HN discussionYou can also disable issues entirely on a project, if it's slightly larger than just one script. This, plus a disclaimer on the readme like "This was made solely for my personal use and I cannot provide support!" seems like an okay way to go about this. I've written hacky one-offs before that other people used as a jumping-off point for something more serious, which is pretty cool to see. I'm always in favor of rele…
Comment linking /blog/2020/07/why-i-love-free-software/
on “How to pay your rent with your open source project”Submitted How I got hooked on Emacs as a story · 23 points
HN discussionhttps://emacsforosx.com/ https://prelude.emacsredux.com/en/latest/ http://emacsrocks.com/ https://sachachua.com/blog/category/emacs-news/
Comment linking /blog/category/emacs-news/
on “Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?”Submitted 2022-01-03 Emacs News as a story · 12 points
HN discussionI've found the Emacs Wiki always solidly maintained: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SiteMap S. Chua's blog is the best "zine" I think: https://sachachua.com/blog/ To avoid "but vi/vim and the shell…" which is a sort of "mental flu" every Emacser has to go through at least once in his life, understand this: "the UI paradigm of Emacs" is also called a roguelike interface by ESR, vi's too: "In Chapter 11 we described…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?”Submitted Moving 18 years of comments out of Disqus and into my 11ty static site as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThis is what I've done the past couple weeks and it's going pretty well: Start with plain Emacs. Print/write out the popular cheatsheets. Just make sure you know how to exit, access the documentation, and move around the windows/frames/buffers. Get Melpa & install some packages. Play with the config, adding keybindings, figure out hooks and so on. Copy some elisp functions from dotfiles on Github. Spam the documenta…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?”- mk · 2007-08-15
Submitted A whole lotta Emacs Lisp files as a story · 10 points
HN discussion http://sachachua.com/blog/2015/04/john-wiegley-on-organizing...
Comment linking /blog/2015/04/john-wiegley-on-organizing-your-emacs-configuration-with-use-package/
on “New Emacs maintainer”Submitted How to learn Emacs (a simple cheat sheet) as a story · 8 points
HN discussion>And every emacs user will have their own set of extensions, carefully curated. You'll find a lot of common extensions amongst power users. If you browse Emacs blog posts often, you'll see the same names popping up. For an overall view, I recommend Sacha Chua's weekly Emacs news: https://sachachua.com/blog/2019/06/2019-06-03-emacs-news/ And BTW, a number of the extensions listed on this submission (Org mode, calc, d…
Comment linking /blog/2019/06/2019-06-03-emacs-news/
on “Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)”Submitted What's in the Emacs newcomers-presets theme? as a story · 6 points
HN discussion
