I have over 60MB of audio content on my laptop spread across 755 subdirecories in over 9100 files. I also have many Internet stream shortcuts that I listen to on a regular basis.

This blog article outlines the media selector implementation in Emacspeak and shows how a small amount of Lisp code built atop Emacs' built-in affordances of completion provides a light-weight yet efficient interface. Notice that the implementation does not involve fancy things like SQL databases, MP3 tags that one needs to update etc.; the solution relies on the speed of today's laptops, especially given the speed of disk access.

As I type this up, the set of requirements as expressed in English is far more verbose (and likely more complicated) than its expression in Lisp!

1. Directory where we start AKA context is selected by function emacspeak-media-guess-directory.
   1. If default directory matches emacspeak-media-directory-regexp,use it.
   2. If default directory contains media files, then use it.
   3. If default directory contains directory emacspeak-media — then use it.
   4. Otherwise use emacspeak-media-shortcuts as the fallback.
2. Once we have selected the context, function emacspeak-media-read-resourceuses ido style interaction with fuzzy-matching to pick the file to play.
3. That function uses Emacs' built-in directory-files-recursively to build the collection to hand-off to completing-read; It uses an Emacspeak provided function ems–subdirs-recursively to build up the list of 755+ sub-directories that live under $XDG_MUSICDIR.

1. I can pick the media to play with a few keystrokes.
2. I use Emacs' repeat-mode to advantage whereby I can quickly change volume etc once content is playing before going back to work.
3. There's no media-player UI to get in my way while working, but I can stop playing media with a single keystroke.
4. Most importantly, I dont have to tag media, maintain databases or do other busy work to be able to launch the media that I want!

The hyperlinks to the Emacspeak code-base are the source of truth. I'll include a snapshot of the functions mentioned above for completeness.

This is an Emacspeak-specific follow-on to my article Emacs: Hidden Holiday Gems. This article extends its predecessor by:

1. Adding Emacspeak-specific details for each gem; the earlier article purposely avoided anything Emacspeak-specific.
2. Where appropriate, I'll point out the importance of choosing a solution that is appropriate to the user, e.g., low-vision vs complete eyes-free use. Note that for the most part, Emacspeak is optimized for the latter case.
3. As before, the goal is not to be exhaustive; — rather the goal is to be thought-provoking with respect to encouraging readers to discover their own optimal solution. The reference section at the end links to some of the follow-up discussion on the Emacspeak Mailing List.
4. All topics covered here are already well-documented in the Emacs and Emacspeak manuals, and this article will not attempt to replace those.

Selective Display

This expands and collapses content purely based on indentation. The human eye is very efficient at scanning down the margin and ignore content indented beyond a given level; selective-display provides the same affordance when you cannot see the display.

Registers

Easily becomes part of muscle-memory, especially when moving text around, duplicating content in multiple locations. For more complex use-cases, I use yasnippets, which is one of Emacs' many template libraries.

Bookmarks

Emacspeak builds heavily on Emacs' built-in bookmarks to provide:

1. Persistent bookmarks when reading EPub and Bookshare books.
2. Audio Marks (AMarks) within org-mode buffers for marking locations in audio streams such as Podcasts.
3. An Emacspeak browser for browsing saved eww-marks and a-marks.
4. Together, the above make a very useful note-taking extension to org-mode.

Tabulated Lists

Implements tabulated UIs and is speech-enabled by Emacspeak.

• Emacspeak augments it with additional keyboard navigation.
• This is leveraged in Emacs by a variety of

end-user packages including package.el and its asynchronous cousin paradox.el.

• It is also used to advantage by empv, a powerful

interface to the GNU MPv media player.

• AMarks mentioned in the previous item, this is my present means of listening to tech-talks on Youtube while taking notes using org-mode.

Forms Mode

Forms interface used by Emacspeak to browse BBC programs.

Mark Ring

Supported by default in Emacspeak but something I dont use much. Some of its affordances really shine in transient-mark-mode but that facility is somewhat counter to eyes-free use.

Undo

Both basic and advanced. However a long series of undo and redo commands as with tree-undo can get confusing quickly in eyes-free interaction.

Dired

I use dired-mode and its derivatives heavily:

• To browse the file-system as intended.
• With emacspeak-zoxide to rapidly move to far-away portions of the file system.
• With locate to search the file system.
• With command emacspeak-m-player-locate-media to find and play local media.
• With flx and fuzzy completion to provide a powerful interactive UI for finding and playing media such as Internet streams.

- Writeable Dired

Useful to:

• Consistently rename files, especially when confronted with filenames with embedded white space.

Org-Mode

This margin is too small to do it justice; see documentation for module emacspeak-org for all that Emacspeak does with org.

Magit

As with the previous item, see the associated Emacspeak documentation for emacspeak-magit.

Forge

I use forge for issue tracking, but often revert to old habits and use gh at the shell inside Emacs.

EWW

See the Emacspeak documentation foremacspeak-eww. Highlights include:

• Dom filtering,
• XPath filtering,
• MPlayer and EMpv integration for playing online media,
• EPub and Bookshare books,
• And much, much more.

Elfeed

My chosen means of following RSS and Atom feeds.

GNUS

For mail, now that Usenet is history.

• I use gnus as an imap mail reader for GMail.
• Emacspeak implements the equivalent of GMail's search operators.
• I complement gnus with package vm for reading email delivered locally; I use fetchmail to fetch mail and procmail to sort mail into folders in the background.
• And finally I use notmuch to search locally saved email.

Tramp

Accessing and working in the Cloud:

• I use tramp to open remote files.
• Emacspeak wizard emacspeak-wizards-tramp-open-location to quickly open files on servers I access often.
• If you work in the Cloud, Emacspeak lets you SSH to your CloudTop and have Emacs running on the CloudTop speak on your local machine.
• The above can be done using a plain old XTerm with screen, dtach, or emacs –daemon providing a persistent Emacs session at the remote end.
• Alternatively, you can use wizard emacspeak-wizards-remote-frame to open a graphical frame on the remote machine.

Eshell

A Shell that is deeply integrated into Emacs. Fully speech-enabled by Emacspeak. Well-suited for running compile, grep and friends for starters.

Comint

This is the goto solution for software development in Emacspeak, be it Common Lisp or Python.

Zip Archives

One more reason you dont need to leave Emacs for a text console.

Calculators

From the simple to complex, we have it all!

• Simple calculations.
• Symbolic Algebra.
• Calc in embedded mode can directly replace a calculation with an answer.
• For even smarter work-flows, leverage org-mode with calc.
• you can even audio-format computations in Calc output as LaTeX using AsTeR.

1. Mailing List Discussion.
2. Emacs: Hidden Holiday Gems.
3. Emacspeak Manual.

4. Emacspeak Blog Articles as a single page.

   Note that the Emacspeak blog, the online manual etc., are all available locally in the Emacspeak Git checkout.

The acronym HHG evokes Douglas Adams' Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy in the minds of most geeks. This article takes a quick semi-guided tour through some of the gems that are hidden in plain sight within Emacs. This article was prompted by some recent discussions on the emacs-devel@gnu.org list which revealed the somewhat obvious — not everyone uses all available features in Emacs — if that were even possible.

So without further ado, here is a brie list of hidden gems in Emacs as a teaser — I use many of these on a regular basis, but as you'll see there are gems that I know of that I haven't managed to integrate into my workflow, leave alone those gems that I am not even aware of.

Selective Display

Collapse/Expand content based on indentation. Useful in browsing code, as well as structured output from various shell commands.

Registers

Quickly save text fragments, buffer locations and window configurations and restore them easily. I use registers for saving text fragments, but have never used it as a means to navigate.

Bookmarks

Persist various types of locations. Note that registers can be persisted across Emacs sessions as well.

Tabulated Lists

Build up tabulated UIs that behave consistently.

Forms Mode

Leverage underlying syntax e.g., field-delimiters, to enable structured editing via a forms-like interface.

Mark Ring

Local and Global mark rings. This is one I've been aware of for over 30 years but never managed to work into my work-flow.

Undo

Both basic and advanced. I myself only use the most basic form of undo.

Dired

Surprisingly not everyone appears to use dired, or at least as heavily as I expected.

Writeable Dired

This became part of Emacs more than a decade ago — but often remains undiscovered and under-exploited. Ignorance leads to more complex and error-prone shell hacks.

Org-Mode

Org is often cited as one of the most powerful Emacs add-ons that makes Emacs attractive to engineers and authors alike. But the breadth and scope of this package means that not all of us use all of it. As an example, I use org-mode for all my writing, but have never used it for todo-list or agenda management.

Magit

Another magical gem that I use heavily — but there are more parts of Magit that I dont use than I use — not due to any shortcoming in Magit, but more because of the nature of my typical work-flow vs the myriad work-flows that Git provides and that Magit makes accessible to the mere mortal.

Forge

Interact with Git repositories — a powerful tool where I myself have only scratched the surface.

EWW

Hard to believe that shr and eww have now been part of Emacs for nearly a decade. Though not hidden, they still get ignored by most users because of the addiction to the JS-powered Web; EWW does not implement Javascript. But that shortcoming is a major win, both for efficiency and for preserving privacy — EWW remains one of the most effectivemeans of focusing on the real content of Web pages.

Elfeed

With EWW for surfacing the content in noisy News pages, Elfeed provides the complementary functionality of browsing RSS and Atom Feeds — which together let you focus on content as opposed to endlessly mnavigating a Web site.

GNUS

Gnus remains one of the most powerful email tools, but its potential as an email-reader often gets overlooked.

Tramp

When I first discovered Emacs in Grad School, ange-ftp for opening files on a remote site was an incredible innovation. As the Web took over and FTP disappeared, the ability to open remote files from within Emacs receded into the background — but that functionality quietly turned into something more powerful, namely tramp. I myself mostly ignored Tramp until I discovered about 20 years ago that it was a neat way to edit files as Root on my laptop; but Tramp really came back into its own when I started working from home during the pandemic.

Eshell

A Shell that is deeply integrated into Emacs. I believe I would be more productive if I used Eshell all the time, but despite myself, I'm still using Bash in Emacs shell-mode!

Comint

A Command Interpreter to bind them all! This is a hidden gem that is a true work-horse when it comes to all Emacs functionality for interacting with command interpreters. It is a good example of a mature platform-level affordance, where Emacs is the platform.

Zip Archives

Emacs can open archive files like zip,

tar.gz and friends and provide an interactive dired-like interface. It also turns out to be a light-weight way of excavating XML content from MSFT word-processor files (DocX).

Calculators

Yes, there is more than 1;-) The built-in not-so-light-weight calculator and the even more powerful (and also bundled ) calc package. I still remember the time I was buying my first home 25+ years ago, and sitting with my real-estate agent while she educated me on mortgages. She was looking over my shoulder as I typed in Emacs; what to her looked like plain text, and what to me was my Scratch Buffer. After we had considered some options, I typed a few keys to invoke Calc in embedded-mode and a second later she was looking at that plain-text display showing the monthly installment for the mortgage we were discussing!

1. There are clearly a lot more hidden gems than enumerated here; otherwise they wouldn't be Hidden.
2. These work best when Emacs provides a cleanly defined platform that enables the creation of these extensions via Emacs Lisp.
3. There is an interesting balance between letting a thousand flowers bloom vs refactoring to create common APIs based on developer needs. Org is an outstanding example of this, both with respect to enabling the discovery of such APIs, and an example of where a good set of platform-level APIs are rich for plucking; failure to do so means that at present, org-mode is turning into a platform in its own right atop the Emacs platform.

vHappy Holidays — And Share And Enjoy!

San Jose, CA, (November 22, 2023)

With several prominent tweeters (and mythical elephants) expanding coverage of #emacspeak, NASDOG: ESPK has now been consistently trading over the social net at levels close to that once attained by DogCom high-fliers—and is trading at levels close to that achieved by once better known stocks in the tech sector.

Emacspeak is a fully functional audio desktop that provides complete eyes-free access to all major 32 and 64 bit operating environments. By seamlessly blending live access to all aspects of the Internet such as ubiquitous assistance, Web-surfing, blogging, remote software development, streaming media, social computing and electronic messaging into the audio desktop, Emacspeak enables spoken access to local and remote information with a consistent and well-integrated user interface. A rich suite of task-oriented tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the evolving assistant-oriented social Internet cloud.

1. Updated Keybindings ⌨
2. Smart Buffer Selection ⛏
3. Audio Volume Adjust 🔈
4. Speech-Rate Adjust🚄
5. Twitter Support Removed X marks the spot.
6. BBC Sounds URL Template 📻
7. BBC HLS Streams using MPV 📻
8. ZOxide Integration ⏠ ⏡
9. emacspeak-pipewire ǁ

— And a lot more than will fit this margin. … 🗞

Note: This version requires emacs-29.1 or later.

Never a toy system, Emacspeak is voluntarily bundled with all major Linux distributions. Though designed to be modular, distributors have freely chosen to bundle the fully integrated system without any undue pressure—a documented success for the integrated innovation embodied by Emacspeak. As the system evolves, both upgrades and downgrades continue to be available at the same zero-cost to all users. The integrity of the Emacspeak codebase is ensured by the reliable and secure Linux platform and the underlying GIT versioning software used to develop and distribute the system.

Extensive studies have shown that thanks to these features, users consider Emacspeak to be absolutely priceless. Thanks to this wide-spread user demand, the present version remains free of cost as ever—it is being made available at the same zero-cost as previous releases.

At the same time, Emacspeak continues to innovate in the area of eyes-free Assistance and social interaction and carries forward the well-established Open Source tradition of introducing user interface features that eventually show up in luser environments.

On this theme, when once challenged by a proponent of a crash-prone but well-marketed mousetrap with the assertion "Emacs is a system from the 70's", the creator of Emacspeak evinced surprise at the unusual candor manifest in the assertion that it would take popular idiot-proven interfaces until the year 2070 to catch up to where the Emacspeak audio desktop is today. Industry experts welcomed this refreshing breath of Courage Certainty and Clarity (CCC) at a time when users are reeling from the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) unleashed by complex software systems backed by even more convoluted press releases.

Independent test results have proven that unlike some modern (and not so modern) software, Emacspeak can be safely uninstalled without adversely affecting the continued performance of the computer. These same tests also revealed that once uninstalled, the user stopped functioning altogether. Speaking with Aster Labrador, the creator of Emacspeak once pointed out that these results re-emphasize the user-centric design of Emacspeak; “It is the user — and not the computer– that stops functioning when Emacspeak is uninstalled!”.

Emacspeak can be downloaded from GitHub — see https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak you can visit Emacspeak on the WWW at http://emacspeak.sf.net. You can subscribe to the emacspeak mailing list — emacspeak@emacspeak.net. The Emacspeak Blog is a good source for news about recent enhancements and how to use them.

The latest development snapshot of Emacspeak is always available at GitHub.

• Emacspeak 59 delivers better ergonomics by minimizing the need for chording, but sadly, with no dog to guide its way.
  • Emacspeak 58 delivers better ergonomics by minimizing the need for chording.
  • Emacspeak 57.0 is named in honor of Tilden Labrador.
  • Emacspeak 56.0 (AgileDog) belies its age to be as agile as Tilden.
  • Emacspeak 55.0 (CalmDog) attempts to be as calm as Tilden.
  • Emacspeak 54.0 (EZDog) learns to take it easy from Tilden.
  • Emacspeak 53.0 (EfficientDog) focuses on efficiency.
  • Emacspeak 52.0 (WorkAtHomeDog) makes working remotely a pleasurable experience.
  • Bigger and more powerful than any smart assistAnt, AssistDog provides

instant access to the most relevant information at all times.

• Emacspeak 50.0 (SageDog) embraces the wisdom of stability as opposed to rapid change and the concomitant creation of bugs.🚭: Naturally Intelligent (NI)™ at how information is spoken, Emacspeak

is entirely free of Artificial Ingredients (AI)™.

• Emacspeak 49.0 (WiseDog) leverages the wisdom gleaned from earlier releases to provide an enhanced auditory experience.
• Emacspeak 48.0 (ServiceDog) builds on earlier releases to provide continued end-user value.
• Emacspeak 47.0 (GentleDog) goes the next step in being helpful while letting users learn and grow.
• Emacspeak 46.0 (HelpfulDog) heralds the coming of Smart Assistants.
• Emacspeak 45.0 (IdealDog) is named in recognition of Emacs' excellent integration with various programming language environments — thanks to this, Emacspeak is the IDE of choice for eyes-free software engineering.
• Emacspeak 44.0 continues the steady pace of innovation on the audio desktop.
• Emacspeak 43.0 brings even more end-user efficiency by leveraging the ability to spatially place multiple audio streams to provide timely auditory feedback.
• Emacspeak 42.0 while moving to GitHub from Google Code continues to innovate in the areas of auditory user interfaces and efficient, light-weight Internet access.
• Emacspeak 41.0 continues to improve on the desire to provide not just equal, but superior access — technology when correctly implemented can significantly enhance the human ability.
• Emacspeak 40.0 goes back to Web basics by enabling efficient access to large amounts of readable Web content.
• Emacspeak 39.0 continues the Emacspeak tradition of increasing the breadth of user tasks that are covered without introducing unnecessary bloatware.
• Emacspeak 38.0 is the latest in a series of award-winning releases from Emacspeak Inc.
• Emacspeak 37.0 continues the tradition of delivering robust software as reflected by its code-name.
• Emacspeak 36.0 enhances the audio desktop with many new tools including full EPub support — hence the name EPubDog.
• Emacspeak 35.0 is all about teaching a new dog old tricks — and is aptly code-named HeadDog in on of our new Press/Analyst contact. emacspeak-34.0 (AKA Bubbles) established a new beach-head with respect to rapid task completion inan eyes-free environment.
• Emacspeak-33.0 AKA StarDog brings unparalleled cloud access to the audio desktop.
• Emacspeak 32.0 AKA LuckyDog continues to innovate via open technologies for better access.
• Emacspeak 31.0 AKA TweetDog — adds tweeting to the Emacspeak desktop.
• Emacspeak 30.0 AKA SocialDog brings the Social Web to the audio desktop—you can't but be social if you speak!
• Emacspeak 29.0—AKAAbleDog—is a testament to the resilliance and innovation embodied by Open Source software—it would not exist without the thriving Emacs community that continues to ensure that Emacs remains one of the premier user environments despite perhaps also being one of the oldest.
• Emacspeak 28.0—AKA PuppyDog—exemplifies the rapid pace of development evinced by Open Source software.
• Emacspeak 27.0—AKA FastDog—is the latest in a sequence of upgrades that make previous releases obsolete and downgrades unnecessary.
• Emacspeak 26—AKA LeadDog—continues the tradition of introducing innovative access solutions that are unfettered by the constraints inherent in traditional adaptive technologies.
• Emacspeak 25 —AKA ActiveDog —re-activates open, unfettered access to online information.
• Emacspeak-Alive —AKA LiveDog —enlivens open, unfetteredinformation access with a series of live updates that once again demonstrate the power and agility of open source software development.
• Emacspeak 23.0 — AKA Retriever—went the extra mile in fetching full access.
• Emacspeak 22.0 —AKA GuideDog —helps users navigate the Web more effectively than ever before.
• Emacspeak 21.0 —AKA PlayDog —continued the Emacspeak tradition of relying on enhanced productivity to liberate users.
• Emacspeak-20.0 —AKA LeapDog —continues the long established GNU/Emacs tradition of integrated innovation to create a pleasurable computing environment for eyes-free interaction.
• emacspeak-19.0 –AKA WorkDog– is designed to enhance user productivity at work and leisure.
• Emacspeak-18.0 –code named GoodDog– continued the Emacspeak tradition of enhancing user productivity and thereby reducing total cost of ownership.
• Emacspeak-17.0 –code named HappyDog– enhances user productivity by exploiting today's evolving WWW standards.
• Emacspeak-16.0 –code named CleverDog– the follow-up to SmartDog– continued the tradition of working better, faster, smarter.
• Emacspeak-15.0 –code named SmartDog–followed up on TopDog as the next in a continuing series of award-winning audio desktop releases from Emacspeak Inc.
• Emacspeak-14.0 –code named TopDog–was

the first release of this millennium.

• Emacspeak-13.0 –codenamed YellowLab– was the closing release of the 20th. century.
• Emacspeak-12.0 –code named GoldenDog– began leveraging the evolving semantic WWW to provide task-oriented speech access to Webformation.
• Emacspeak-11.0 –code named Aster– went the final step in making Linux a zero-cost Internet access solution for blind and visually impaired users.
• Emacspeak-10.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-2000) code named WonderDog– continued the tradition of award-winning software releases designed to make eyes-free computing a productive and pleasurable experience.
• Emacspeak-9.0 –(AKA Emacspeak 99) code named BlackLab– continued to innovate in the areas of speech interaction and interactive accessibility.
• Emacspeak-8.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-98++) code named BlackDog– was a major upgrade to the speech output extension to Emacs.
• Emacspeak-95 (code named Illinois) was released as OpenSource on the Internet in May 1995 as the first complete speech interface to UNIX workstations. The subsequent release, Emacspeak-96 (code named Egypt) made available in May 1996 provided significant enhancements to the interface. Emacspeak-97 (Tennessee) went further in providing a true audio desktop. Emacspeak-98 integrated Internetworking into all aspects of the audio desktop to provide the first fully interactive speech-enabled WebTop.

Originally based at Cornell (NY) — http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman —home to Auditory User Interfaces (AUI) on the WWW, Emacspeak is now maintained on GitHub —https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak. The system is mirrored world-wide by an international network of software archives and bundled voluntarily with all major Linux distributions. On Monday, April 12, 1999, Emacspeak became part of the Smithsonian's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The Emacspeak mailing list is archived at Emacspeak Mail Archive –the home of the Emacspeak mailing list– thanks to Greg Priest-Dorman, and provides a valuable knowledge base for new users.

Going forward, Aster, Hubbell and Tilden acknowledge their exclusive monopoly on setting the direction of the Emacspeak Audio Desktop (🦮) and promise to exercise their freedom to innovate and her resulting power responsibly (as before) in the interest of all dogs.

*About This Release:

Windows-Free (WF) is a favorite battle-cry of The League Against Forced Fenestration (LAFF). –see http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm for details on the ill-effects of Forced Fenestration.

CopyWrite )C( Aster, Hubbell and Tilden Labrador. All Writes Reserved. HeadDog (DM), LiveDog (DM), GoldenDog (DM), BlackDog (DM) etc., are Registered Dogmarks of Aster, Hubbell and Tilden Labrador. All other dogs belong to their respective owners.

Emacs has had long-standing features like outline-mode and outline-minor-mode that often get forgotten in the face of newer affordances like org-mode. At the same time, Emacs continues to acquire new features — in this article, I am specifically alluding to repeat-mode. The combinatorial explosion that is the result of the various ways of bringing these together is mind-boggling — and often the result is that one fails to take advantage of what has become possible. The result is that one ends up sticking to one'slong-established habits at the risk of failing to significantly enhance one's productivity.

• Structured navigation is a significant productivity enhancer — especially in my case since I rely exclusively on an auditory interface.
• The above applies to both textual documents and programming source.
• Starting all the way back in 1991, I started using folding-mode to organize code into hierarchical containers that could be expanded and collapsed; and this is what makes Emacs' eco-system amazing; folding-mode still works and is available on melpa in 2023.
• About a year ago one of the Emacs maintainers (Stefan Mounier) helped me update portions of Emacspeak, and in the process pointed out that I could just use outline-minor-mode to expand and collapse sections of code in .el files.
• At the time I filed this away for later use — I was still reluctant to abandon the 30+ year investment in folding-mode.
• About a year ago, I discovered repeat-mode in Emacs and started leveraging it for everything — including outline-mode and org-mode amongst others.
• Despite the years of investment in folding-mode, it had one drawback; keeping the fold-marks (special comments) in sync was always a bit of a hastle.

  • Bringing The Old And New Together

    This week I brought all of the above context together to:

• Cut over the Emacspeak codebase to stop using folding-mode.
• Turning the fold-marks to comments that outline-minor-mode understood was a trivial application of my typo.plPerl script.
• I had already set up Emacspeak to use repeat-mode for the various outline modes.
• Another annoyance with outline that I had fixed over 20+ years ago was to pick an easier to press prefix-key for outline; I use C-o.

• I can now skim the Emacspeak sources (as well as the Emacs sources of course) with very few keystrokes.
• Example: Pressing C-o C-n navigates by section headings; when skimming, I only need to press C-o the first time thanks to repeat-mode.
• I also bound j and k in the outline-mode keymaps to avoid having to chord when skimming — j is easier to press than C-n.

• Would be nice to enhance outline-minor-mode to understand sectioning comments in other programming languages.
  • The annoyance with the default (and unusable) prefix key for the outline modes needs to fix in Emacs core.

Emacs has no shortage of multiple built-in means of navigating the file system with smart, context-sensitive and fuzzy completion. That said, there is one tool outside Emacs I have discovered in the last six months that brings something extra — Zoxide, a smarter cd built in Rust.

Once installed, zoxide works well in Emacs shells, as well as at terminals inside or outside Emacs. Read the zoxide docs for more details, but in a nutshell, this tool remembers directories you workin, and lets you jump to them by typing short, unique substrings.

So with zoxide installed, you can:

1. Switch to a shell buffer,
2. Execute a zoxide navigation command, e.g., z <pattern>.

3. Once there, you can easily open files, launch dired etc.

   But given that opening dired on that target is what I often want, the above work-flow still involved two steps too many. So in typical Emacs fashion, I wrote a short function that short-circuits this process

Note: there is nothing emacspeak specific in what follows.

1. Interactive command emacspeak-zoxide prompts for a pattern, then launches dired on the zoxide result.
2. It uses if-let to advantage:
   • If zoxide is installed,and
   • There is a zoxide result for the specified query,
   • Launch dired on that directory.
   • Else, signal the appropriate error.
   • Notice that if-let expresses this clearly.

(defun
      emacspeak-zoxide (q)
      "Query zoxide  and launch dired.
      Shell Utility zoxide --- implemented in Rust --- lets you jump to
      directories that are used often.
      This command does for Emacs, what zoxide does at the  shell."
      (interactive "sZoxide:")
      (if-let
      ((zoxide (executable-find "zoxide"))
      (target
      (with-temp-buffer
      (if (= 0 (call-process zoxide nil t nil "query" q))
      (string-trim (buffer-string))))))
      (funcall-interactively #'dired  target)
      (unless zoxide (error "Install zoxide"))
      (unless target (error "No Match"))))
      

In my setup, i bind this to C-; j which is convenient to press and is a mnemonic for jump.

see previous article on dont punish your finger tips that described how to minimize chording in emacs. that article alluded to possibly using return as an additional control_right key; this article describes the implementation and things i discovered in setting it up.

the design described here was discovered by this google search.

• 1. the above works — i can now hold down return with my right hand when hitting keys like a with my left; this makes my fingers happy.
• one issue that i failed to fix — though unimportant except for my curiosity:
• the control_r key on my laptop has now turned into a return key, it produces return in all cases, i.e., whether tapped or held-down.
• i still continue to find xmodmap confusing — though that is likely my fault, and not that of xmodmap.

A collection of keybinding changes I have arrived at over time to protect my fingers.Note that I have now used Emacs for more than 33 years, and some of these changes may well have helped me much earlier; on the other hand, I likely didn't notice these issues because myhands then were not the same as what they are now.

See earlier articles on this topic for context:

• Minimize chording using XCape
• Ergonomic Buffer Selection

So to summarize, my Emacs uses:

1. CapsLock as Control.
2. Using XCape, quickly releasing Control emits C-e — the eEmacspeak prefix-key.

Note: I'm not a trained ergonomist; the following are observations based on my experience and may not apply to everyone; I suspect the size of one's hands, the width of the keyboard etc., all matter. For the last 3+ years, I've exclusively used a laptop keyboard, in my case a Lenovo.

1. I now find that replacing key-chords by a sequence of non-chords makes my hands happier. The trick is to replace a chord by no more than 2 keys.
2. Since Caps lock (left pinky) is my Control key, C-s is not as nice as C-l; notice that the former requires chording with two fingres of the same hand, whereas the lattre spreads the work among both hands on an English qwerty keyboard.
3. One work-around for the above might be to have RET emit Control if held down, but I haven't done that (yet).
4. On the left-hand, chords that require extending or scrunching one's fingres when hitting a chord are more painful. Thus, C-z and C-x are more painful to hit than C-d. Emacs hardly uses C-z and C-c; but unfortunately, C-x is an important prefix key in stock Emacs.

1. I have left-shift and right-shift emit C-s and C-r using XCape.
2. I bound C-l to ctl-x-map (still experimental). This remapping fails to take effect in places like Dired and Gnus.
3. I additionally bound find-file to C-; o.
4. A long time ago, I discovered M-m (back-to-indentation) and I never hit C-a to move to the start of the line.
5. When I remap things, I never take away the original Emacs bindings; I only provide alternatives.
6. I use C-,, C-., C-;, and C-' as prefix keys. Downside: these only work under X, but the time where I only ran Emacs in a terminal are long gone.

See my Emacs Startup File for the setup.

There's likely a lot more to be discovered in this context; time will reveal all!

San Jose, CA, (May 4, 2023)

With several prominent tweeters (and mythical elephants) expanding coverage of #emacspeak, NASDOG: ESPK has now been consistently trading over the social net at levels close to that once attained by DogCom high-fliers—and is trading at levels close to that achieved by once better known stocks in the tech sector.

Emacspeak is a fully functional audio desktop that provides complete eyes-free access to all major 32 and 64 bit operating environments. By seamlessly blending live access to all aspects of the Internet such as ubiquitous assistance, Web-surfing, blogging, remote software development, social computing and electronic messaging into the audio desktop, Emacspeak enables spoken access to local and remote information with a consistent and well-integrated user interface. A rich suite of task-oriented tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the evolving assistant-oriented social Internet cloud.

1. AsTeR: Audio System For Technical Readings. 🦮
2. Updated Keybindings for better ergonomics. ⌨
3. Speech-Enable Package Devdocs. 🗎
4. Speech-Enable empv. 📺
5. Speech-Enable Treesitter Navigation. 🐒
6. Speech-Enable Tabulated-List-Mode. ␋
7. Speech-Enable FFIP — find file in project. 📁
8. Speech-Enable EXWM Emacs Window Manager. 🪟
9. Audio Marks (AMarks). 🔉
10. Search Wizards. 🪄

11. Media History browser. ℗

    — And a lot more than will fit this margin. … 🗞

Note: This version requires emacs-28.2 or later.

Never a toy system, Emacspeak is voluntarily bundled with all major Linux distributions. Though designed to be modular, distributors have freely chosen to bundle the fully integrated system without any undue pressure—a documented success for the integrated innovation embodied by Emacspeak. As the system evolves, both upgrades and downgrades continue to be available at the same zero-cost to all users. The integrity of the Emacspeak codebase is ensured by the reliable and secure Linux platform and the underlying GIT versioning software used to develop and distribute the system.

Extensive studies have shown that thanks to these features, users consider Emacspeak to be absolutely priceless. Thanks to this wide-spread user demand, the present version remains free of cost as ever—it is being made available at the same zero-cost as previous releases.

At the same time, Emacspeak continues to innovate in the area of eyes-free Assistance and social interaction and carries forward the well-established Open Source tradition of introducing user interface features that eventually show up in luser environments.

On this theme, when once challenged by a proponent of a crash-prone but well-marketed mousetrap with the assertion "Emacs is a system from the 70's", the creator of Emacspeak evinced surprise at the unusual candor manifest in the assertion that it would take popular idiot-proven interfaces until the year 2070 to catch up to where the Emacspeak audio desktop is today. Industry experts welcomed this refreshing breath of Courage Certainty and Clarity (CCC) at a time when users are reeling from the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) unleashed by complex software systems backed by even more convoluted press releases.

Independent test results have proven that unlike some modern (and not so modern) software, Emacspeak can be safely uninstalled without adversely affecting the continued performance of the computer. These same tests also revealed that once uninstalled, the user stopped functioning altogether. Speaking with Aster Labrador, the creator of Emacspeak once pointed out that these results re-emphasize the user-centric design of Emacspeak; “It is the user — and not the computer– that stops functioning when Emacspeak is uninstalled!”.

Emacspeak can be downloaded from GitHub — see https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak you can visit Emacspeak on the WWW at http://emacspeak.sf.net. You can subscribe to the emacspeak mailing list — emacspeak@emacspeak.net. The Emacspeak Blog is a good source for news about recent enhancements and how to use them.

The latest development snapshot of Emacspeak is always available at GitHub.

• Emacspeak 58 delivers better ergonomics by minimizing the need for chording.
• Emacspeak 57.0 is named in honor of Tilden Labrador.
• Emacspeak 56.0 (AgileDog) belies its age to be as agile as Tilden.
• Emacspeak 55.0 (CalmDog) attempts to be as calm as Tilden.
• Emacspeak 54.0 (EZDog) learns to take it easy from Tilden.
• Emacspeak 53.0 (EfficientDog) focuses on efficiency.
• Emacspeak 52.0 (WorkAtHomeDog) makes working remotely a pleasurable experience.
• Bigger and more powerful than any smart assistAnt, AssistDog provides

instant access to the most relevant information at all times.

• Emacspeak 50.0 (SageDog) embraces the wisdom of stability as opposed to rapid change and the concomitant creation of bugs.🚭: Naturally Intelligent (NI)™ at how information is spoken, Emacspeak

is entirely free of Artificial Ingredients (AI)™.

• Emacspeak 49.0 (WiseDog) leverages the wisdom gleaned from earlier releases to provide an enhanced auditory experience.
• Emacspeak 48.0 (ServiceDog) builds on earlier releases to provide continued end-user value.
• Emacspeak 47.0 (GentleDog) goes the next step in being helpful while letting users learn and grow.
• Emacspeak 46.0 (HelpfulDog) heralds the coming of Smart Assistants.
• Emacspeak 45.0 (IdealDog) is named in recognition of Emacs' excellent integration with various programming language environments — thanks to this, Emacspeak is the IDE of choice for eyes-free software engineering.
• Emacspeak 44.0 continues the steady pace of innovation on the audio desktop.
• Emacspeak 43.0 brings even more end-user efficiency by leveraging the ability to spatially place multiple audio streams to provide timely auditory feedback.
• Emacspeak 42.0 while moving to GitHub from Google Code continues to innovate in the areas of auditory user interfaces and efficient, light-weight Internet access.
• Emacspeak 41.0 continues to improve on the desire to provide not just equal, but superior access — technology when correctly implemented can significantly enhance the human ability.
• Emacspeak 40.0 goes back to Web basics by enabling efficient access to large amounts of readable Web content.
• Emacspeak 39.0 continues the Emacspeak tradition of increasing the breadth of user tasks that are covered without introducing unnecessary bloatware.
• Emacspeak 38.0 is the latest in a series of award-winning releases from Emacspeak Inc.
• Emacspeak 37.0 continues the tradition of delivering robust software as reflected by its code-name.
• Emacspeak 36.0 enhances the audio desktop with many new tools including full EPub support — hence the name EPubDog.
• Emacspeak 35.0 is all about teaching a new dog old tricks — and is aptly code-named HeadDog in on of our new Press/Analyst contact. emacspeak-34.0 (AKA Bubbles) established a new beach-head with respect to rapid task completion in an eyes-free environment.
• Emacspeak-33.0 AKA StarDog brings unparalleled cloud access to the audio desktop.
• Emacspeak 32.0 AKA LuckyDog continues to innovate via open technologies for better access.
• Emacspeak 31.0 AKA TweetDog — adds tweeting to the Emacspeak desktop.
• Emacspeak 30.0 AKA SocialDog brings the Social Web to the audio desktop—you can't but be social if you speak!
• Emacspeak 29.0—AKAAbleDog—is a testament to the resilliance and innovation embodied by Open Source software—it would not exist without the thriving Emacs community that continues to ensure that Emacs remains one of the premier user environments despite perhaps also being one of the oldest.
• Emacspeak 28.0—AKA PuppyDog—exemplifies the rapid pace of development evinced by Open Source software.
• Emacspeak 27.0—AKA FastDog—is the latest in a sequence of upgrades that make previous releases obsolete and downgrades unnecessary.
• Emacspeak 26—AKA LeadDog—continues the tradition of introducing innovative access solutions that are unfettered by the constraints inherent in traditional adaptive technologies.
• Emacspeak 25 —AKA ActiveDog —re-activates open, unfettered access to online information.
• Emacspeak-Alive —AKA LiveDog —enlivens open, unfettered information access with a series of live updates that once again demonstrate the power and agility of open source software development.
• Emacspeak 23.0 — AKA Retriever—went the extra mile in fetching full access.
• Emacspeak 22.0 —AKA GuideDog —helps users navigate the Web more effectively than ever before.
• Emacspeak 21.0 —AKA PlayDog —continued the Emacspeak tradition of relying on enhanced productivity to liberate users.
• Emacspeak-20.0 —AKA LeapDog —continues the long established GNU/Emacs tradition of integrated innovation to create a pleasurable computing environment for eyes-free interaction.
• emacspeak-19.0 –AKA WorkDog– is designed to enhance user productivity at work and leisure.
• Emacspeak-18.0 –code named GoodDog– continued the Emacspeak tradition of enhancing user productivity and thereby reducing total cost of ownership.
• Emacspeak-17.0 –code named HappyDog– enhances user productivity by exploiting today's evolving WWW standards.
• Emacspeak-16.0 –code named CleverDog– the follow-up to SmartDog– continued the tradition of working better, faster, smarter.
• Emacspeak-15.0 –code named SmartDog–followed up on TopDog as the next in a continuing series of award-winning audio desktop releases from Emacspeak Inc.
• Emacspeak-14.0 –code named TopDog–was

the first release of this millennium.

• Emacspeak-13.0 –codenamed YellowLab– was the closing release of the 20th. century.
• Emacspeak-12.0 –code named GoldenDog– began leveraging the evolving semantic WWW to provide task-oriented speech access to Webformation.
• Emacspeak-11.0 –code named Aster– went the final step in making Linux a zero-cost Internet access solution for blind and visually impaired users.
• Emacspeak-10.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-2000) code named WonderDog– continued the tradition of award-winning software releases designed to make eyes-free computing a productive and pleasurable experience.
• Emacspeak-9.0 –(AKA Emacspeak 99) code named BlackLab– continued to innovate in the areas of speech interaction and interactive accessibility.
• Emacspeak-8.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-98++) code named BlackDog– was a major upgrade to the speech output extension to Emacs.
• Emacspeak-95 (code named Illinois) was released as OpenSource on the Internet in May 1995 as the first complete speech interface to UNIX workstations. The subsequent release, Emacspeak-96 (code named Egypt) made available in May 1996 provided significant enhancements to the interface. Emacspeak-97 (Tennessee) went further in providing a true audio desktop. Emacspeak-98 integrated Internetworking into all aspects of the audio desktop to provide the first fully interactive speech-enabled WebTop.

Originally based at Cornell (NY) — http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman —home to Auditory User Interfaces (AUI) on the WWW, Emacspeak is now maintained on GitHub —https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak. The system is mirrored world-wide by an international network of software archives and bundled voluntarily with all major Linux distributions. On Monday, April 12, 1999, Emacspeak became part of the Smithsonian's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The Emacspeak mailing list is archived at Emacspeak Mail Archive –the home of the Emacspeak mailing list– thanks to Greg Priest-Dorman, and provides a valuable knowledge base for new users.

Going forward, Aster, Hubbell and Tilden acknowledge their exclusive monopoly on setting the direction of the Emacspeak Audio Desktop (🦮) and promise to exercise their freedom to innovate and her resulting power responsibly (as before) in the interest of all dogs.

*About This Release:

Windows-Free (WF) is a favorite battle-cry of The League Against Forced Fenestration (LAFF). –see http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm for details on the ill-effects of Forced Fenestration.

CopyWrite )C( Aster, Hubbell and Tilden Labrador. All Writes Reserved. HeadDog (DM), LiveDog (DM), GoldenDog (DM), BlackDog (DM) etc., are Registered Dogmarks of Aster, Hubbell and Tilden Labrador. All other dogs belong to their respective owners.

In my previous article Ergonomics Using xcape I described my setup to minimize chording in Emacs. The setup is working well, and in the few weeks of usage, I've reduce the xcape timeout setting from 250ms to 170ms, this is the timeout that controls the behavior of modifier keys in xcape.

Next, I decided that getting some feedback from Emacs and Emacspeak when xcape behavior is triggered would act as training wheels while getting used to the setup.

I considered the following:

1. Adding a feature to xcape that produces a sound cue on triggering modified behavior — would work everywhere in X.
2. Having Emacs produce some feedback when xcape behavior is triggered.
3. Asked on emacs-devel as to how one would do this in Emacsand was pointed at echo-keystrokes by one of the core Emacs maintainers.

I phrased my question on emacs-devel as is there an elisp hook for implementing this. Turns out no new code is needed; Emacs has a echo-keystrokes custom option that controls how long Emacs waits before displaying an incomplete key-sequence.

So now, I have echo-keystrokes set to 0.05 — and Emacspeak speaks the resulting incomplete keystroke that is displayed by Emacs.

Still playing with various values of echo-keystrokes but that is easy — it's just one custom setting.

To quote Larry Wall of Perl fame,

      Lazy programmer equals good programmer!
      

Describes customizations under X that makes my hands happier. Leverages features and (mis-features) of modern-day laptops to break old habits and reduce chording in common cases.

I have been using Emacs for 33 years now and at this point, much of my Emacs usage is based on muscle memory. This has its good and bad points; the good ones are obvious; I dont need to think about what keys I press. But it also has some downside; I likely press more keysthan I ought to for a given result.

1. I learn to use Emacs on a TTY (text console) and all my habits are driven by the keys available on a terminal.
2. Under X you have more keys available, but I resisted running X until around 2008.
3. Now, I almost never run Emacs on a TTY, except when I need to rescue a broken X setup.
4. after turning caps_lock to Control I forgot about the other modifier keys; I press Escape for Meta.
5. I also defined C-; and friends as additional Emacs prefix keys.
6. The above saves your hands because you dont chord using themodifier keys on the bottom row.
7. But you waste 6 modifier keys on a laptop where keys are in short supply.

• The motivation to leverage the laptop keyboard is higher now, since with the arrival of the pandemic, that has been my primary (only) machine.
• I can chord without thinking using the modified caps_lock as Control. But I also noticed that I choard a lot.
• Chords I use most often as a prefix:
  • C-e — Emacspeak prefix,
  • C-s and C-r — Isearch,
  • C-c and C-x — emacs command prefix.
• Looking at the bottom row of the laptop keyboard, there are three modifier keys to either side of the spacebar.
• Adding the left and right Shift modifiers gives 8 keys that could do something useful when not used as a modifier key.

I discovered xcape a while ago, but had set it aside for future exploration; The observations made in the previous section indicated that that time was now!

So here is my xcape Setup and associated XModmap as of the time of writing:

1. A week later, I'm slowly retraining my muscle memory — I use the new affordances described here about 25% of the time.
2. I find myself using the new features in the second half of the day when my hands are more tired.
3. The effect of thinking before pressing a key reminds me of the time I learn to use dvorak for text input; I still do so sometimes to give my hands a break.
4. The new mappings give some surprising results e.g., alt shift saves the buffer, but buyer beware, alt super quits Emacs.
5. Am sure more muscle memory will emerge for oft-repeated tasks.

In fond memory of Aster who first showed the way for 10 years; to Hubbell and Tilden who ably followed her lead over the next 22+ years!

On The Internet
No one knows you're not a dog!	Nor if you're the same dog!	Or even the same gender!
(2/15/1987—12/05/1999)	(12/21/1997—4/11/2011)	(8/4/2009—9/3/2022)

The work describing Audio System For Technical Readings (AsTeR) was presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell Universityon Monday, Jan 17, 1994 for my PhD. This release is an updated version of AsTeR that uses the Software DECTalk.

• AsTeR audio-formats TeX and LaTeX documents.
• User interface is implemented in Emacs.
• It uses the Emacspeak speech-server dtk-soft to connect to the software DECTalk.
• The audio-formatter is implemented in Common Lisp (SBCL).
• Emacs commands call Common Lisp via slime to communicate with Aster.

• Install Emacspeak 57.0 or later from Github.
• Install slime and auctex using M-x package-install.
• Install flex, SBCL and cl-asdf using the linux package manager.
• Install Software DECTalk from Github.

1. cd <emacspeak> to change to your emacspeak directory.
2. Get source via git checkout https://github.com/tvraman/aster-math
3. cd aster-math/lisp && make

• Add directory aster-math/ui/ to your Emacs load-path.
• Run M-x load-library aster; M-x aster.
• Aster commands are on Emacs prefix-key C-; SPC and C-' a.
• M-x describe-function aster displays help.
• To speak math using AsTeR:
  1. Send a TeX file.
  2. Send math content from any Emacs buffer.
  3. When editing LaTeX — including from within org-mode buffers.
  4. When browsing Wikipedia pages containing mathematics using Emacs' EWW browser. (Make sure to first disable shr-discard-aria-hidden).
  5. From Emacs Calculator (calc).
  6. From the Emacs interface to Sage — a symbolic algebra system.
  7. Papers from arxiv.org — see Arxiv.org Accessibility Report
• Once Aster starts speaking, you can use Aster's browser to move around.

1. Demo recorded in October 2022.
2. Demo recorded in 1994.
3. Brian Hayes: Speaking Of Mathematics, American Scientist, March 1996 — An accessible overview of AsTeR.
4. Envisioning Speech:Scientific American, Wayte Gibbs, September 1996 — Describes AsTeR, Audio-formatting and Emacspeak.
5. Proceedings: RFB Math & Science Symposium, May 12 – 13 1994.
6. PHd Thesis, January 1994.

I access research papers from arxiv.org multiple times a week. Having originally worked on access to STEM content for my PhD over 30 yearsago, I find it both encouraging and challenging as I continue to acquire access to the research materials I need.

As the Digital Library of the future, arxiv is committed to improving the state of STEM Access; see the Accessibility report they recently published. A few months ago after talking to them about their goals, I wrote down some ideas that would make my own access to arxiv a smoother experience; posting them here so folks in the STEM Accessibility community can expand and build on these ideas.

Make Arxiv a destination for Accessible Scientific documents where blind students and researchers can consume the latest technical content via alternative modes of interaction that best suit their individual needs.

A REST API to automate the download of multiple formats.

1. Build PDFs using PDFLaTeX rather than the DVI->PS->PDF pipeline.
2. Ensure that PDFs are one-column layout.
3. Build HTML+Math content from LaTeX using TeX4HT and friends.
4. Build out a collection of high-quality LaTeX macros for specific sub-domains in CS and Math so authors dont need to invent their own macros.
5. Allow authors to contribute macros for new notation as it gets invented.
6. Incorporate Speech Rules Engine (SRE) from Volker Sorge.
7. Explore ChromeBooks where ChromeVox is already built-in.

Once we have:

1. Arxiv: building PDF and HTML the way we desire.
2. Client-side setup recipe – initially for a ChromeBook or Linux running my present environment (see final Teaser section).
3. Mathjax and SRE injected at the right points on the backend at arxiv.

The target audience should be able to:

1. Search and discover content on arxiv.
2. View and consume content from Arxiv via the browser of choice with spoken feedback built-in.

1. Test the flow with a few initial members of the target audience to discover the pain-points and fix them.
2. Communicate what we learn via arxiv given the traffic and start publicizing the solution.
3. Rinse and repeat ….

1. Graphs – start with Graphviz — Dot Graphics.
2. Graphs as in X-Y plots — there has been some work on data Sonification — but it's still early and exploratory.

1. Speech Rule Engine from Volker Sorge.
2. MathJax
3. TeX4HT On Debian Linux, this is in package texlive-plain-generic.list — installed as /usr/bin/xhlatex.
4. Emacspeak — includes support for Math via SRE — AKA poor man's AsTeR.
5. Teaser: Heard from a bird: Speaking Of Mathematics: #emacspeak #STEM Again DECTalk → Again AsTeR.

San Jose, CA, (November 23, 2022)

With several prominent tweeters (and mythical elephants) expanding coverage of #emacspeak, NASDOG: ESPK has now been consistently trading over the social net at levels close to that once attained by DogCom high-fliers—and is trading at levels close to that achieved by once better known stocks in the tech sector.

Emacspeak is a fully functional audio desktop that provides complete eyes-free access to all major 32 and 64 bit operating environments. By seamlessly blending live access to all aspects of the Internet such as ubiquitous assistance, Web-surfing, blogging, remote software development, social computing and electronic messaging into the audiodesktop, Emacspeak enables spoken access to local and remote information with a consistent and well-integrated user interface. A rich suite of task-oriented tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the evolving assistant-oriented social Internet cloud.

1. Speech server for software DECTalk. 📢
2. Learn Smarter By Taking Rich, Hypertext Notes. 🏫
3. Integrated Youtube player using mpv. 📹
4. Leverage Emacs Repeat-Mode to minimize chording. ⌨
5. Speech-Enable NotMuch mail. 📪
6. Screen brightness with module light. 🔅
7. Emacspeak Auditory Display Under Pulseaudio 🔊
8. Speciality browsers for various types of bookmarks. 📑

9. Sounds Themes Using OGG. ℗

   — And a lot more than will fit this margin. … 🗞

Note: This version requires emacs-28.1 or later.

Never a toy system, Emacspeak is voluntarily bundled with all major Linux distributions. Though designed to be modular, distributors have freely chosen to bundle the fully integrated system without any undue pressure—a documented success for the integrated innovation embodied by Emacspeak. As the system evolves, both upgrades and downgrades continue to be available at the same zero-cost to all users. The integrity of the Emacspeak codebase is ensured by the reliable and secure Linux platform and the underlying GIT versioning software used to develop and distribute the system.

Extensive studies have shown that thanks to these features, users consider Emacspeak to be absolutely priceless. Thanks to this wide-spread user demand, the present version remains free of cost as ever—it is being made available at the same zero-cost as previous releases.

At the same time, Emacspeak continues to innovate in the area of eyes-free Assistance and social interaction and carries forward the well-established Open Source tradition of introducing user interface features that eventually show up in luser environments.

On this theme, when once challenged by a proponent of a crash-prone but well-marketed mousetrap with the assertion "Emacs is a system from the 70's", the creator of Emacspeak evinced surprise at the unusual candor manifest in the assertion that it would take popular idiot-proven interfaces until the year 2070 to catch up to where the Emacspeak audio desktop is today. Industry experts welcomed this refreshing breath of Courage Certainty and Clarity (CCC) at a time when users are reeling from the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) unleashed by complex software systems backed by even more convoluted press releases.

Independent test results have proven that unlike some modern (and not so modern) software, Emacspeak can be safely uninstalled without adversely affecting the continued performance of the computer. These same tests also revealed that once uninstalled, the user stopped functioning altogether. Speaking with Aster Labrador, the creator of Emacspeak once pointed out that these results re-emphasize the user-centric design of Emacspeak; “It is the user — and not the computer– that stops functioning when Emacspeak is uninstalled!”.

Emacspeak can be downloaded from GitHub — see https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak you can visit Emacspeak on the WWW at http://emacspeak.sf.net. You can subscribe to the emacspeak mailing list — emacspeak@emacspeak.net. The Emacspeak Blog is a good source for news about recent enhancements and how to use them.

The latest development snapshot of Emacspeak is always available at GitHub.

• Emacspeak 57.0 is named in honor of Tilden Labrador.
• Emacspeak 56.0 (AgileDog) belies its age to be as agile as Tilden.
• Emacspeak 55.0 (CalmDog) attempts to be as calm as Tilden.
• Emacspeak 54.0 (EZDog) learns to take it easy from Tilden.
• Emacspeak 53.0 (EfficientDog) focuses on efficiency.
• Emacspeak 52.0 (WorkAtHomeDog) makes working remotely a pleasurable experience.
• Bigger and more powerful than any smart assistAnt, AssistDog provides

instant access to the most relevant information at all times.

• Emacspeak 50.0 (SageDog) embraces the wisdom of stability as opposed to rapid change and the concomitant creation of bugs.🚭: Naturally Intelligent (NI)™ at how information is spoken, Emacspeak

is entirely free of Artificial Ingredients (AI)™.

• Emacspeak 49.0 (WiseDog) leverages the wisdom gleaned from earlier releases to provide an enhanced auditory experience.
• Emacspeak 48.0 (ServiceDog) builds on earlier releases to provide continued end-user value.
• Emacspeak 47.0 (GentleDog) goes the next step in being helpful while letting users learn and grow.
• Emacspeak 46.0 (HelpfulDog) heralds the coming of Smart Assistants.
• Emacspeak 45.0 (IdealDog) is named in recognition of Emacs' excellent integration with various programming language environments — thanks to this, Emacspeak is the IDE of choice for eyes-free software engineering.
• Emacspeak 44.0 continues the steady pace of innovation on the audio desktop.
• Emacspeak 43.0 brings even more end-user efficiency by leveraging the ability to spatially place multiple audio streams to provide timely auditory feedback.
• Emacspeak 42.0 while moving to GitHub from Google Code continues to innovate in the areas of auditory user interfaces and efficient, light-weight Internet access.
• Emacspeak 41.0 continues to improve on the desire to provide not just equal, but superior access — technology when correctly implemented can significantly enhance the human ability.
• Emacspeak 40.0 goes back to Web basics by enabling efficient access to large amounts of readable Web content.
• Emacspeak 39.0 continues the Emacspeak tradition of increasing the breadth of user tasks that are covered without introducing unnecessary bloatware.
• Emacspeak 38.0 is the latest in a series of award-winning releases from Emacspeak Inc.
• Emacspeak 37.0 continues the tradition of delivering robust software as reflected by its code-name.
• Emacspeak 36.0 enhances the audio desktop with many new tools including full EPub support — hence the name EPubDog.
• Emacspeak 35.0 is all about teaching a new dog old tricks — and is aptly code-named HeadDog in on of our new Press/Analyst contact. emacspeak-34.0 (AKA Bubbles) established a new beach-head with respect to rapid task completion inan eyes-free environment.
• Emacspeak-33.0 AKA StarDog brings unparalleled cloud access to the audio desktop.
• Emacspeak 32.0 AKA LuckyDog continues to innovate via open technologies for better access.
• Emacspeak 31.0 AKA TweetDog — adds tweeting to the Emacspeak desktop.
• Emacspeak 30.0 AKA SocialDog brings the Social Web to the audio desktop—you can't but be social if you speak!
• Emacspeak 29.0—AKAAbleDog—is a testament to the resilliance and innovation embodied by Open Source software—it would not exist without the thriving Emacs community that continues to ensure that Emacs remains one of the premier user environments despite perhaps also being one of the oldest.
• Emacspeak 28.0—AKA PuppyDog—exemplifies the rapid pace of development evinced by Open Source software.
• Emacspeak 27.0—AKA FastDog—is the latest in a sequence of upgrades that make previous releases obsolete and downgrades unnecessary.
• Emacspeak 26—AKA LeadDog—continues the tradition of introducing innovative access solutions that are unfettered by the constraints inherent in traditional adaptive technologies.
• Emacspeak 25 —AKA ActiveDog —re-activates open, unfettered access to online information.
• Emacspeak-Alive —AKA LiveDog —enlivens open, unfetteredinformation access with a series of live updates that once again demonstrate the power and agility of open source software development.
• Emacspeak 23.0 — AKA Retriever—went the extra mile in fetching full access.
• Emacspeak 22.0 —AKA GuideDog —helps users navigate the Web more effectively than ever before.
• Emacspeak 21.0 —AKA PlayDog —continued the Emacspeak tradition of relying on enhanced productivity to liberate users.
• Emacspeak-20.0 —AKA LeapDog —continues the long established GNU/Emacs tradition of integrated innovation to create a pleasurable computing environment for eyes-free interaction.
• emacspeak-19.0 –AKA WorkDog– is designed to enhance user productivity at work and leisure.
• Emacspeak-18.0 –code named GoodDog– continued the Emacspeak tradition of enhancing user productivity and thereby reducing total cost of ownership.
• Emacspeak-17.0 –code named HappyDog– enhances user productivity by exploiting today's evolving WWW standards.
• Emacspeak-16.0 –code named CleverDog– the follow-up to SmartDog– continued the tradition of working better, faster, smarter.
• Emacspeak-15.0 –code named SmartDog–followed up on TopDog as the next in a continuing series of award-winning audio desktop releases from Emacspeak Inc.
• Emacspeak-14.0 –code named TopDog–was

the first release of this millennium.

• Emacspeak-13.0 –codenamed YellowLab– was the closing release of the 20th. century.
• Emacspeak-12.0 –code named GoldenDog– began leveraging the evolving semantic WWW to provide task-oriented speech access to Webformation.
• Emacspeak-11.0 –code named Aster– went the final step in making Linux a zero-cost Internet access solution for blind and visually impaired users.
• Emacspeak-10.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-2000) code named WonderDog– continued the tradition of award-winning software releases designed to make eyes-free computing a productive and pleasurable experience.
• Emacspeak-9.0 –(AKA Emacspeak 99) code named BlackLab– continued to innovate in the areas of speech interaction and interactive accessibility.
• Emacspeak-8.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-98++) code named BlackDog– was a major upgrade to the speech output extension to Emacs.
• Emacspeak-95 (code named Illinois) was released as OpenSource on the Internet in May 1995 as the first complete speech interface to UNIX workstations. The subsequent release, Emacspeak-96 (code named Egypt) made available in May 1996 provided significant enhancements to the interface. Emacspeak-97 (Tennessee) went further in providing a true audio desktop. Emacspeak-98 integrated Internetworking into all aspects of the audio desktop to provide the first fully interactive speech-enabled WebTop.

Originally based at Cornell (NY) — http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman —home to Auditory User Interfaces (AUI) on the WWW, Emacspeak is now maintained on GitHub —https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak. The system is mirrored world-wide by an international network of software archives and bundled voluntarily with all major Linux distributions. On Monday, April 12, 1999, Emacspeak became part of the Smithsonian's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The Emacspeak mailing list is archived at Emacspeak Mail Archive –the home of the Emacspeak mailing list– thanks to Greg Priest-Dorman, and provides a valuable knowledge base for new users.

Going forward, Tilden acknowledges his exclusive monopoly on setting the direction of the Emacspeak Audio Desktop (🦮) and promises to exercise this freedom to innovate and her resulting power responsibly (as before) in the interest of all dogs.

*About This Release:

Windows-Free (WF) is a favorite battle-cry of The League Against Forced Fenestration (LAFF). –see http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm for details on the ill-effects of Forced Fenestration.

CopyWrite )C( Aster, Hubbell and Tilden Labrador. All Writes Reserved. HeadDog (DM), LiveDog (DM), GoldenDog (DM), BlackDog (DM) etc., are Registered Dogmarks of Aster, Hubbell and Tilden Labrador. All other dogs belong to their respective owners.

As a student, I learned to take notes in Braille while in class and while learning from audio books. When reviewing the material, reading the notes was far more efficient than re-listening to the original recordings; however at the time, I had no means to easily jump to the original content when perusing my notes.

Fast-forward to the age of online computing, a complete audio desktop in the form of Emacspeak, a wealth of online resources in the form of E-Books, Audio Books, Podcasts and Blogs, all backed by Universal Search and accessible from a consistent environment. So I've been asking myself what note-taking in this environment should look like. This article summarizes the present state of what I use at present.

1. All of the following should work equally well for locally stored material, e.g., downloaded E-Books from Bookshare.org or Project Gutenberg, as well as material hosted on the Internet in the form of Blogs and Podcasts.
2. Create named bookmarks in E-Books (EPub, Daisy).
3. Create AMarks —bookmarks that point to positions in an audio files.
4. Above should be possible independent of whether the learning material is available locally, or accessed via the Internet.
5. Enable the creation of hyperlinks to such bookmarks.
6. Enable the easy creation of notes — organized by topic — while reading E-Books or listening to audio material.
7. Enable the embedding of hyperlinks to the bookmarks mentioned earlier within these notes.
8. Final experience: creation of notes should require minimal effort; when reading the notes, it should be easy to open the relevant portion of the content that underlies the notes.

being

1. This describes a flexible workflow that is built out of multiple small components.
2. Illustrating various workflows as above outlines the space of possible solutions.
3. Keeping the notes in org-mode ensures that the notes are long-lived, since org-mode files are essentially plain-text with an easy to parse syntax for parsing the underlying structure if needed to implement future extensions.

Porting Emacspeak sound environment to Pulseaudio.

Until now, emacspeak features that enhance the auditory display have relied exclusively on ALSA and avoided Pulseaudio all together. As Pulseaudio improves, and simultaneously gets harder to get rid of, I recently ported the required features to work under Pulseaudio, see below for details.

• Notifications, e.g., speaking the time, incoming IM messages

etc. are spoken on a separate notification stream.

• The above normally plays on the right ear, but enhanced with a binaural effect.
• This can be configured to be on the left ear when running Emacspeak remotely on a cloud-top.
• A Bauer Stereo To Binaural (BS2B) filter is applied to all output streams to provide an enhanced headphones listening experience.
• The outloud server has been updated to request lower latency from Pulse; Pulseaudio defaults are too high for highly responsive TTS.

For details on Emacspeak's enhancement to the auditory display, see prior articles listed in the References section.

All of these features have been available until now by installing a custom .asoundrc; these are now available under Pulseaudio by installing a .config/pulse/default.pa in the user's home directory.

cp EMACSPEAK_DIR/etc/pulse/default.pa ~/.config/pulse; pulseaudio -k

The above is a one-time operation that sets up the audio environment — see etc/pulse/README.org.

1. Augmented Headphone Listening On Linux For The Emacspeak Audio Desktop
2. Soundscapes On The Emacspeak Audio Desktop
3. Follow-Up: Soundscapes on the emacspeak Audio Desktop
4. A Ladspa Work-Bench For The Emacspeak Desktop
5. Generating Spatialized Auditory Icons Using MPlayer And Ladspa
6. Listening To Multiple Media Streams On The Emacspeak Audio Desktop
7. Using Multiple TTS Streams On The emacspeak Audio Desktop
8. Enhanced Audio On The Emacspeak Desktop

San Jose, CA, (May 1, 2022)

With several prominent tweeters expanding coverage of #emacspeak, NASDOG: ESPK has now been consistently trading over the social net atlevels close to that once attained by DogCom high-fliers—and is trading at levels close to that achieved by once better known stocks in the tech sector.

Emacspeak is a fully functional audio desktop that provides complete eyes-free access to all major 32 and 64 bit operating environments. By seamlessly blending live access to all aspects of the Internet such as ubiquitous assistance, Web-surfing, blogging, remote software development, social computing and electronic messaging into the audiodesktop, Emacspeak enables spoken access to local and remote information with a consistent and well-integrated user interface. A rich suite of task-oriented tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the evolving assistant-oriented social Internet cloud.

1. Updated eldoc support 🕮
2. Updated elpy support 🐍
3. Updated language switching for Espeak 󠀁
4. Updated Transient Support 𝥍
5. External Browsers From EWW 🕸
6. Updated wizards and muggles 🧙
7. Updated url templates for smarter Web access ♅

8. Fully tested under emacs-28 native compilation 🚄

   — And a lot more than will fit this margin. … 🗞

Note: This version requires emacs-27.1 or later.

Never a toy system, Emacspeak is voluntarily bundled with all major Linux distributions. Though designed to be modular, distributors have freely chosen to bundle the fully integrated system without any undue pressure—a documented success for the integrated innovation embodied by Emacspeak. As the system evolves, both upgrades and downgrades continue to be available at the same zero-cost to all users. The integrity of the Emacspeak codebase is ensured by the reliable and secure Linux platform and the underlying GIT versioning software used to develop and distribute the system.

Extensive studies have shown that thanks to these features, users consider Emacspeak to be absolutely priceless. Thanks to this wide-spread user demand, the present version remains free of cost as ever—it is being made available at the same zero-cost as previous releases.

At the same time, Emacspeak continues to innovate in the area of eyes-free Assistance and social interaction and carries forward the well-established Open Source tradition of introducing user interface features that eventually show up in luser environments.

On this theme, when once challenged by a proponent of a crash-prone but well-marketed mousetrap with the assertion "Emacs is a system from the 70's", the creator of Emacspeak evinced surprise at the unusual candor manifest in the assertion that it would take popular idiot-proven interfaces until the year 2070 to catch up to where the Emacspeak audio desktop is today. Industry experts welcomed this refreshing breath of Courage Certainty and Clarity (CCC) at a time when users are reeling from the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) unleashed by complex software systems backed by even more convoluted press releases.

Independent test results have proven that unlike some modern (and not so modern) software, Emacspeak can be safely uninstalled without adversely affecting the continued performance of the computer. These same tests also revealed that once uninstalled, the user stopped functioning altogether. Speaking with Aster Labrador, the creator of Emacspeak once pointed out that these results re-emphasize the user-centric design of Emacspeak; “It is the user — and not the computer– that stops functioning when Emacspeak is uninstalled!”.

Emacspeak can be downloaded from GitHub — see https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak you can visit Emacspeak on the WWW at http://emacspeak.sf.net. You can subscribe to the emacspeak mailing list — emacspeak@emacspeak.net. The Emacspeak Blog is a good source for news about recent enhancements and how to use them.

The latest development snapshot of Emacspeak is always available at GitHub.

• Emacspeak 56.0 (AgileDog) belies its age to be as agile as Tilden.
• Emacspeak 55.0 (CalmDog) attempts to be as calm as Tilden.
• Emacspeak 54.0 (EZDog) learns to take it easy from Tilden.
• Emacspeak 53.0 (EfficientDog) focuses on efficiency.
• Emacspeak 52.0 (WorkAtHomeDog) makes working remotely a pleasurable experience.
• Bigger and more powerful than any smart assistAnt, AssistDog provides

instant access to the most relevant information at all times.

• Emacspeak 50.0 (SageDog) embraces the wisdom of stability as opposed to rapid change and the concomitant creation of bugs.🚭: Naturally Intelligent (NI)™ at how information is spoken, Emacspeak

is entirely free of Artificial Ingredients (AI)™.

• Emacspeak 49.0 (WiseDog) leverages the wisdom gleaned from earlier releases to provide an enhanced auditory experience.
• Emacspeak 48.0 (ServiceDog) builds on earlier releases to provide continued end-user value.
• Emacspeak 47.0 (GentleDog) goes the next step in being helpful while letting users learn and grow.
• Emacspeak 46.0 (HelpfulDog) heralds the coming of Smart Assistants.
• Emacspeak 45.0 (IdealDog) is named in recognition of Emacs' excellent integration with various programming language environments — thanks to this, Emacspeak is the IDE of choice for eyes-free software engineering.
• Emacspeak 44.0 continues the steady pace of innovation on the audio desktop.
• Emacspeak 43.0 brings even more end-user efficiency by leveraging the ability to spatially place multiple audio streams to provide timely auditory feedback.
• Emacspeak 42.0 while moving to GitHub from Google Code continues to innovate in the areas of auditory user interfaces and efficient, light-weight Internet access.
• Emacspeak 41.0 continues to improve on the desire to provide not just equal, but superior access — technology when correctly implemented can significantly enhance the human ability.
• Emacspeak 40.0 goes back to Web basics by enabling efficient access to large amounts of readable Web content.
• Emacspeak 39.0 continues the Emacspeak tradition of increasing the breadth of user tasks that are covered without introducing unnecessary bloatware.
• Emacspeak 38.0 is the latest in a series of award-winning releases from Emacspeak Inc.
• Emacspeak 37.0 continues the tradition of delivering robust software as reflected by its code-name.
• Emacspeak 36.0 enhances the audio desktop with many new tools including full EPub support — hence the name EPubDog.
• Emacspeak 35.0 is all about teaching a new dog old tricks — and is aptly code-named HeadDog in on of our new Press/Analyst contact. emacspeak-34.0 (AKA Bubbles) established a new beach-head with respect to rapid task completion inan eyes-free environment.
• Emacspeak-33.0 AKA StarDog brings unparalleled cloud access to the audio desktop.
• Emacspeak 32.0 AKA LuckyDog continues to innovate via open technologies for better access.
• Emacspeak 31.0 AKA TweetDog — adds tweeting to the Emacspeak desktop.
• Emacspeak 30.0 AKA SocialDog brings the Social Web to the audio desktop—you can't but be social if you speak!
• Emacspeak 29.0—AKAAbleDog—is a testament to the resilliance and innovation embodied by Open Source software—it would not exist without the thriving Emacs community that continues to ensure that Emacs remains one of the premier user environments despite perhaps also being one of the oldest.
• Emacspeak 28.0—AKA PuppyDog—exemplifies the rapid pace of development evinced by Open Source software.
• Emacspeak 27.0—AKA FastDog—is the latest in a sequence of upgrades that make previous releases obsolete and downgrades unnecessary.
• Emacspeak 26—AKA LeadDog—continues the tradition of introducing innovative access solutions that are unfettered by the constraints inherent in traditional adaptive technologies.
• Emacspeak 25 —AKA ActiveDog —re-activates open, unfettered access to online information.
• Emacspeak-Alive —AKA LiveDog —enlivens open, unfetteredinformation access with a series of live updates that once again demonstrate the power and agility of open source software development.
• Emacspeak 23.0 — AKA Retriever—went the extra mile in fetching full access.
• Emacspeak 22.0 —AKA GuideDog —helps users navigate the Web more effectively than ever before.
• Emacspeak 21.0 —AKA PlayDog —continued the Emacspeak tradition of relying on enhanced productivity to liberate users.
• Emacspeak-20.0 —AKA LeapDog —continues the long established GNU/Emacs tradition of integrated innovation to create a pleasurable computing environment for eyes-free interaction.
• emacspeak-19.0 –AKA WorkDog– is designed to enhance user productivity at work and leisure.
• Emacspeak-18.0 –code named GoodDog– continued the Emacspeak tradition of enhancing user productivity and thereby reducing total cost of ownership.
• Emacspeak-17.0 –code named HappyDog– enhances user productivity by exploiting today's evolving WWW standards.
• Emacspeak-16.0 –code named CleverDog– the follow-up to SmartDog– continued the tradition of working better, faster, smarter.
• Emacspeak-15.0 –code named SmartDog–followed up on TopDog as the next in a continuing series of award-winning audio desktop releases from Emacspeak Inc.
• Emacspeak-14.0 –code named TopDog–was

the first release of this millennium.

• Emacspeak-13.0 –codenamed YellowLab– was the closing release of the 20th. century.
• Emacspeak-12.0 –code named GoldenDog– began leveraging the evolving semantic WWW to provide task-oriented speech access to Webformation.
• Emacspeak-11.0 –code named Aster– went the final step in making Linux a zero-cost Internet access solution for blind and visually impaired users.
• Emacspeak-10.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-2000) code named WonderDog– continued the tradition of award-winning software releases designed to make eyes-free computing a productive and pleasurable experience.
• Emacspeak-9.0 –(AKA Emacspeak 99) code named BlackLab– continued to innovate in the areas of speech interaction and interactive accessibility.
• Emacspeak-8.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-98++) code named BlackDog– was a major upgrade to the speech output extension to Emacs.
• Emacspeak-95 (code named Illinois) was released as OpenSource on the Internet in May 1995 as the first complete speech interface to UNIX workstations. The subsequent release, Emacspeak-96 (code named Egypt) made available in May 1996 provided significant enhancements to the interface. Emacspeak-97 (Tennessee) went further in providing a true audio desktop. Emacspeak-98 integrated Internetworking into all aspects of the audio desktop to provide the first fully interactive speech-enabled WebTop.

Originally based at Cornell (NY) — http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman —home to Auditory User Interfaces (AUI) on the WWW, Emacspeak is now maintained on GitHub —https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak. The system is mirrored world-wide by an international network of software archives and bundled voluntarily with all major Linux distributions. On Monday, April 12, 1999, Emacspeak became part of the Smithsonian's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The Emacspeak mailing list is archived at Emacspeak Mail Archive –the home of the Emacspeak mailing list– thanks to Greg Priest-Dorman, and provides a valuable knowledge base for new users.

Going forward, Tilden acknowledges his exclusive monopoly on setting the direction of the Emacspeak Audio Desktop (🦮) and promises to exercise this freedom to innovate and her resulting power responsibly (as before) in the interest of all dogs.

*About This Release:

Windows-Free (WF) is a favorite battle-cry of The League Against Forced Fenestration (LAFF). –see http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm for details on the ill-effects of Forced Fenestration.

CopyWrite )C( Aster, Hubbell and Tilden Labrador. All Writes Reserved. HeadDog (DM), LiveDog (DM), GoldenDog (DM), BlackDog (DM) etc., are Registered Dogmarks of Aster, Hubbell and Tilden Labrador. All other dogs belong to their respective owners.

Love it or hate it, lisp advice is powerful and useful. This article covers some of the places where advice can provide a means of discovering useful behaviors that can then be later codified without resorting to advice. Advice can also prove to be a powerful means of experimentation; these experiments can become permanent, e.g., when the resulting modifications introduced via advice are only relevant to a small minority — a good example is package Emacspeak. These are but two extremes of a continuum and advice enables many possibilities in that range.

This article is written in the light of nearly 28 years of Emacspeak development, a time during which I have learn some useful lessons on how to use advice safely and program defensively. This article itself does not take any position in the Advice is evil, dont use it debate — it is here to help you if you do decide to use advice for a given task.

1. Temporarily trace a given function — advice can display messages on entry and exit to the advised function. Emacs' own built-in debug-on-entry mostly obviates the need to do this.
2. You want custom behavior for some command in a package, where the package author (hasn't yet) provided an appropriate before or after hook. Implementing the desired behavior as a before or after advice is a friction-free means of experimenting with your idea. Once proven useful, the advice-based prototype can be used to motivate the introduction of the new hook, and once implemented, you can eliminate the advice.
3. Having implemented a custom behavior, you discover that theauthor of the package you are extending is unable to incorporate your suggestion. Advice here can provide a light-weight alternative to forking the package in question.
4. The modified behavior you wish to implement is relevant to a small minority. You need to advice a large number of functions because the modified behavior you desire requires complete access to the calling context and environment. A good example is generating rich contextual spoken feedback — advice is excellently suited to this task.

These tips are written in terms of defadvice but apply equally well to the API introduced in module nadvice.

1. Use before/after advice as far as possible, and resort to around advice only when you must.
2. Name all your advice fragments consistently.
3. Do not depend on the argument names used in the function being advised, instead use ad-get-arg to positionally access the advised function's arguments.
4. Use lexical scoping in all your functions, and be rigorous in declaring any special variables using (cl-declare (special …)) in your code. The byte-compiler is your friend; use this declaration when you see warnings about special variables.
5. Except for very simple advice fragments, use a let form inside your advice to bind variables.
6. Within your advice, do not depend on any global state that you haven't yourself bound within the let body in your advice.
7. If you write around advice, ensure that the last form in your advice is ad-return-value. Dont modify this value unless you absolutely must.
8. Make sure to use ad-do-it in your around advice so that the original function gets called — except in the very rare cases where you want to entirely bypass the original function.
9. In the rare case where you have multiple defadvice on the same function, note that you can specify the order win which these are called. Use this only when experimenting, and make sure to clean-up later by combining the advice fragments into a single call to defadvice.

• Advice was contributed to Emacs in early 1994 by Hans Chalupsky. I started the Emacspeak project a few months after and am indebted to him — both for his advice implementation and for numerous email exchanges with him at the time as I learnt to use advice.
• I released Emacspeak in April 1995. A few days later I was thrilled to receive a phone call from RMS — where he told me all the reasons why I shouldn't use advice. This was distressing to say the least; I had two choices — abandon Emacspeak usingadvice, or to ignore his advice. I took the middle-road; I made careful note of all his admonitions and warnings, and the result was to program defensively. Many of the tips listed in the previous section are a direct consequence of keeping an eye out for the various pitfalls he outlined during that phone call.
• I've also garnered useful tips and tricks on the emacs-devel list over the years from folks like Stefan Mounier — especially as Emacs transitioned to module nadvice in 2014.

Emacspeak has supported Cloud Computing since 1995, i.e., long before the term was invented. I have used Emacs with Emacspeak running on remote servers (called cloud-top in the rest of this article) since that time, with a local speech server on my client machine providing spoken feedback. The underlying ssh-based scripts have changed over time; this article documents what I have been using for the last 7 years or more. As with everything else Linux, you should not use this without understanding how it works. All of therelevant code is checked into GitHub, but if you use it without understanding, you are likely to get 2 for the price of 1😀.

1. Emacspeak produces all spoken and non-spoken feedback via a speech server — see Emacspeak: Beautiful Code for the detailed architecture overview.
2. This server runs as a separate process and can either run locally i.e. on the machine running emacs; it can also run remotely, e.g. your laptop from which you login to your cloud-top.
3. Note the local and remote terminology in the above — to Emacspeak, the machine where Emacs runs is the local machine, so your machine in the cloud is local to Emacspeak.
4. Consequently, the machine from where you SSH to the cloud, a laptop, a Raspberry Pi, or in a future a tin-can that you use as a client is remote to emacspeak.

1. When you start Emacs with Emacspeak loaded, Emacs starts the speech-server as the first step in the emacspeak startup. normally this starts the local server for your preferred TTS engine.
2. See the emacspeak manual for how this speech-server is determined.
3. When running Emacspeak on a cloud-top, this local speech server is just a simple shell script that connects to a local port — by default 2222.
4. When you connect to your cloud-top via SSH, you first reverse port forward port 2222 from the cloud-top back to your client. This causes data sent to port 2222 on the cloud-top by Emacs to show up on port 2222 on the local machine where your speech server is listening.
5. With that reverse port forwarding in place and assuming that espeak is your TTS engine, running the speech-server cloud-espeak on the cloud-top connects back to your client to produce spoken output.
6. For the previous step to work, something (or someone) needs to be listening on port 2222 on your client.

7. So you need to start the relevant speech server on your client before you ssh to your cloud-top — in the case of espeak, this is ssh-espeak.

   See directory bash-utils in your emacspeak Git checkout for the relevant Bash scripts.

Here is what the workflow looks like, again, use this only if you have read and understood the previous section. SeeBash Utils for the scripts mentioned below. Everything below assumes a Bash Shell.

On your cloud-top, specify the speech-server to use by running

      export DTK_PROGRAM=cloud-espeak
      

You can put the above in your .bash_profile on your cloud-top.

On your client device, run

      . <emacspeak_dir>/bash-utils/remote
      

This need be done only once per interactive shell.It defines bash functions remote and rtts.

Next, run Bash function remote defined in the script you just loaded.

      remote host.example.com  speech-server espeak
      

This does the following:

1. Starts a local speech server for the TTS engine espeak.
2. Opens an SSH session to the cloud-top host.example.com.
3. Plays a musical chime (using sox) to cue completion.
4. Depending on your SSH setup, you may or may not need to type your ssh password at this point; avoiding having to type a password is beyond the purview of this article, consult the SSH manual pages.
5. Now, run Emacs on the cloud-top. Assuming that you have updated your Emacs initialization to load Emacspeak, this will get Emacspeak running on the cloud-top talking on your client.
6. Note that typically, you should run something like screen on the cloud-top and run Emacs within that screen session; this will let you persist a running Emacs across multiple login/logout.

On a well-configured setup, you typically need only do:

1. Run the bash function that starts the local TTS server, and then connects to the cloud-top via SSH with reverse-port forwarding active.
2. Assuming there is an Emacs session running under screen at the remote end, it'll start talking on your local client.

San Jose, CA, (Nov 24, 2021)

With several prominent tweeters expanding coverage of #emacspeak, NASDOG: ESPK has now been consistently trading over the social net atlevels close to that once attained by DogCom high-fliers—and is trading at levels close to that achieved by once better known stocks in the tech sector.

Emacspeak is a fully functional audio desktop that provides complete eyes-free access to all major 32 and 64 bit operating environments. By seamlessly blending live access to all aspects of the Internet such as ubiquitous assistance, Web-surfing, blogging, remote software development, social computing and electronic messaging into the audiodesktop, Emacspeak enables spoken access to local and remote information with a consistent and well-integrated user interface. A rich suite of task-oriented tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the evolving assistant-oriented social Internet cloud.

1. Speech-enable Emacs Application Framework Ÿ
2. Updated Soundscapes 🔊
3. Updated Auditory Icons 🎧
4. Updated Transient Support 𝥍
5. Speech-Enabled CalibreDB 📚

6. External Browsers From EWW 🕸

   — And a lot more than will fit this margin. … 🗞

Note: This version requires emacs-27.1 or later.

Never a toy system, Emacspeak is voluntarily bundled with all major Linux distributions. Though designed to be modular, distributors have freely chosen to bundle the fully integrated system without any undue pressure—a documented success for the integrated innovation embodied by Emacspeak. As the system evolves, both upgrades and downgrades continue to be available at the same zero-cost to all users. The integrity of the Emacspeak codebase is ensured by the reliable and secure Linux platform and the underlying GIT versioning software used to develop and distribute the system.

Extensive studies have shown that thanks to thesee features, users consider Emacspeak to be absolutely priceless. Thanks to this wide-spread user demand, the present version remains free of cost as ever—it is being made available at the same zero-cost as previous releases.

At the same time, Emacspeak continues to innovate in the area of eyes-free Assistance and social interaction and carries forward the well-established Open Source tradition of introducing user interface features that eventually show up in luser environments.

On this theme, when once challenged by a proponent of a crash-prone but well-marketed mousetrap with the assertion "Emacs is a system from the 70's", the creator of Emacspeak evinced surprise at the unusual candor manifest in the assertion that it would take popular idiot-proven interfaces until the year 2070 to catch up to where the Emacspeak audio desktop is today. Industry experts welcomed this refreshing breath of Courage Certainty and Clarity (CCC) at a time when users are reeling from the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) unleashed by complex software systems backed by even more convoluted press releases.

Independent test results have proven that unlike some modern (and not so modern) software, Emacspeak can be safely uninstalled without adversely affecting the continued performance of the computer. These same tests also revealed that once uninstalled, the user stopped functioning altogether. Speaking with Aster Labrador, the creator of Emacspeak once pointed out that thesee results re-emphasize the user-centric design of Emacspeak; “It is the user — and not the computer– that stops functioning when Emacspeak is uninstalled!”.

Emacspeak can be downloaded from GitHub — see https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak you can visit Emacspeak on the WWW at http://emacspeak.sf.net. You can subscribe to the emacspeak mailing list — emacspeak@emacspeak.net. The Emacspeak Blog is a good source for news about recent enhancements and how to use them.

The latest development snapshot of Emacspeak is always available at GitHub.

• Emacspeak 55.0 (CalmDog) attempts to be as calm as Tilden.
• Emacspeak 54.0 (EZDog) learns to take it easy from Tilden.
• Emacspeak 53.0 (EfficientDog) focuses on efficiency.
• Emacspeak 52.0 (WorkAtHomeDog) makes working remotely a pleasurable experience.
• Bigger and more powerful than any smart assistAnt, AssistDog provides

instant access to the most relevant information at all times.

• Emacspeak 50.0 (SageDog) embraces the wisdom of stability as opposed to rapid change and the concomitant creation of bugs.🚭: Naturally Intelligent (NI)™ at how information is spoken, Emacspeak

is entirely free of Artificial Ingredients (AI)™.

• Emacspeak 49.0 (WiseDog) leverages the wisdom gleaned from earlier releases to provide an enhanced auditory experience.
• Emacspeak 48.0 (ServiceDog) builds on earlier releases to provide continued end-user value.
• Emacspeak 47.0 (GentleDog) goes the next step in being helpful while letting users learn and grow.
• Emacspeak 46.0 (HelpfulDog) heralds the coming of Smart Assistants.
• Emacspeak 45.0 (IdealDog) is named in recognition of Emacs' excellent integration with various programming language environments — thanks to this, Emacspeak is the IDE of choice for eyes-free software engineering.
• Emacspeak 44.0 continues the steady pace of innovation on the audio desktop.
• Emacspeak 43.0 brings even more end-user efficiency by leveraging the ability to spatially place multiple audio streams to provide timely auditory feedback.
• Emacspeak 42.0 while moving to GitHub from Google Code continues to innovate in the areas of auditory user interfaces and efficient, light-weight Internet access.
• Emacspeak 41.0 continues to improve on the desire to provide not just equal, but superior access — technology when correctly implemented can significantly enhance the human ability.
• Emacspeak 40.0 goes back to Web basics by enabling efficient access to large amounts of readable Web content.
• Emacspeak 39.0 continues the Emacspeak tradition of increasing the breadth of user tasks that are covered without introducing unnecessary bloatware.
• Emacspeak 38.0 is the latest in a series of award-winning releases from Emacspeak Inc.
• Emacspeak 37.0 continues the tradition of delivering robust software as reflected by its code-name.
• Emacspeak 36.0 enhances the audio desktop with many new tools including full EPub support — hence the name EPubDog.
• Emacspeak 35.0 is all about teaching a new dog old tricks — and is aptly code-named HeadDog in on of our new Press/Analyst contact. emacspeak-34.0 (AKA Bubbles) established a new beach-head with respect to rapid task completion inan eyes-free environment.
• Emacspeak-33.0 AKA StarDog brings unparalleled cloud access to the audio desktop.
• Emacspeak 32.0 AKA LuckyDog continues to innovate via open technologies for better access.
• Emacspeak 31.0 AKA TweetDog — adds tweeting to the Emacspeak desktop.
• Emacspeak 30.0 AKA SocialDog brings the Social Web to the audio desktop—you can't but be social if you speak!
• Emacspeak 29.0—AKAAbleDog—is a testament to the resilliance and innovation embodied by Open Source software—it would not exist without the thriving Emacs community that continues to ensure that Emacs remains one of the premier user environments despite perhaps also being one of the oldest.
• Emacspeak 28.0—AKA PuppyDog—exemplifies the rapid pace of development evinced by Open Source software.
• Emacspeak 27.0—AKA FastDog—is the latest in a sequence of upgrades that make previous releases obsolete and downgrades unnecessary.
• Emacspeak 26—AKA LeadDog—continues the tradition of introducing innovative access solutions that are unfettered by the constraints inherent in traditional adaptive technologies.
• Emacspeak 25 —AKA ActiveDog —re-activates open, unfettered access to online information.
• Emacspeak-Alive —AKA LiveDog —enlivens open, unfetteredinformation access with a series of live updates that once again demonstrate the power and agility of open source software development.
• Emacspeak 23.0 — AKA Retriever—went the extra mile in fetching full access.
• Emacspeak 22.0 —AKA GuideDog —helps users navigate the Web more effectively than ever before.
• Emacspeak 21.0 —AKA PlayDog —continued the Emacspeak tradition of relying on enhanced productivity to liberate users.
• Emacspeak-20.0 —AKA LeapDog —continues the long established GNU/Emacs tradition of integrated innovation to create a pleasurable computing environment for eyes-free interaction.
• emacspeak-19.0 –AKA WorkDog– is designed to enhance user productivity at work and leisure.
• Emacspeak-18.0 –code named GoodDog– continued the Emacspeak tradition of enhancing user productivity and thereby reducing total cost of ownership.
• Emacspeak-17.0 –code named HappyDog– enhances user productivity by exploiting today's evolving WWW standards.
• Emacspeak-16.0 –code named CleverDog– the follow-up to SmartDog– continued the tradition of working better, faster, smarter.
• Emacspeak-15.0 –code named SmartDog–followed up on TopDog as the next in a continuing series of award-winning audio desktop releases from Emacspeak Inc.
• Emacspeak-14.0 –code named TopDog–was

the first release of this millennium.

• Emacspeak-13.0 –codenamed YellowLab– was the closing release of the 20th. century.
• Emacspeak-12.0 –code named GoldenDog– began leveraging the evolving semantic WWW to provide task-oriented speech access to Webformation.
• Emacspeak-11.0 –code named Aster– went the final step in making Linux a zero-cost Internet access solution for blind and visually impaired users.
• Emacspeak-10.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-2000) code named WonderDog– continued the tradition of award-winning software releases designed to make eyes-free computing a productive and pleasurable experience.
• Emacspeak-9.0 –(AKA Emacspeak 99) code named BlackLab– continued to innovate in the areas of speech interaction and interactive accessibility.
• Emacspeak-8.0 –(AKA Emacspeak-98++) code named BlackDog– was a major upgrade to the speech output extension to Emacs.
• Emacspeak-95 (code named Illinois) was released as OpenSource on the Internet in May 1995 as the first complete speech interface to UNIX workstations. The subsequent release, Emacspeak-96 (code named Egypt) made available in May 1996 provided significant enhancements to the interface. Emacspeak-97 (Tennessee) went further in providing a true audio desktop. Emacspeak-98 integrated Internetworking into all aspects of the audio desktop to provide the first fully interactive speech-enabled WebTop.

Originally based at Cornell (NY) — http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman —home to Auditory User Interfaces (AUI) on the WWW, Emacspeak is now maintained on GitHub —https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak. The system is mirrored world-wide by an international network of software archives and bundled voluntarily with all major Linux distributions. On Monday, April 12, 1999, Emacspeak became part of the Smithsonian's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The Emacspeak mailing list is archived at Emacspeak Mail Archive –the home of the Emacspeak mailing list– thanks to Greg Priest-Dorman, and provides a valuable knowledge base for new users.

Going forward, Tilden acknowledges his exclusive monopoly on setting the direction of the Emacspeak Audio Desktop (🦮) and promises to exercise this freedom to innovate and her resulting power responsibly (as before) in the interest of all dogs.

*About This Release:

Windows-Free (WF) is a favorite battle-cry of The League Against Forced Fenestration (LAFF). –see http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm for details on the ill-effects of Forced Fenestration.

CopyWrite )C( Aster, Hubbell and Tilden Labrador. All Writes Reserved. HeadDog (DM), LiveDog (DM), GoldenDog (DM), BlackDog (DM) etc., are Registered Dogmarks of Aster, Hubbell and Tilden Labrador. All other dogs belong to their respective owners.