Emacs Project 2013-05

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

2021-04-29 this page is kept for historical reasons. This is when i was in extreme poverty, about to die.

Vote which one you want me to work on. Tell your friends please. http://pledgie.com/campaigns/19973

dear all,

i haven't been doing well. Rent is due this month of May, $1500, and i only have $200. I don't have a car, sold it 2 years ago. I've been living on $3 a day for past many years. Started to put ads on my site a year ago, and that's getting me about $300 a month, and that's my income.

So, this time, i'd like to start some kickstart project. Been thinking over it for a month. But was indecisive on what i should write down, propose, or degree of disclosing my situation.

in January, many people helped me, in particular many oversea Chinese. Sorry i didn't make it thru. It's recorded here: Xah Financial Crisis 2012-12

this time, i wanted to propose emacs projects, not just asking for help.

in past few weeks, been frantically writing several emacs modes. Here they are:

right now, the {HTML, CSS, elisp} modes work fairly well. They have many features not in standard emacs modes. But they are still beta.

The emacs elisp manual project would be the most difficult one. It'll probably take me several months to create a good draft version. But given a full month's work, i'll create a good infrastructure, with all the chapters on text processing related done. It'll be on github or similar, and afterwards it'll be a collaborative project that people can easily grow it.

I have tried to set up a kickstarter site for the elisp mode for $1000, but it'll need few days for them to approve it, then it'll take up to a month to get money, then, they and amazon together takes 10%. During past week, i've already pretty much worked out a fairly good elisp mode. It colors syntax of vast majority of elisp keywords. (it piggy backs on emacs-lisp-mode though.)

so, the plan is to propose to you a project, where people can help fund it. Writing out the proposal and presenting it well is a hard. I've been dithering about it for weeks now. But in 2 days i don't know where i'll be anymore. So now, am putting out my thoughts quickly. It's a pleasure to write these words, one minutes ten thousands words. But to peddle myself in public, hard. You can consider the above as project that's already mostly done sans fuss.

my concern is, in 2 more days, if i don't come up with $1500, the apartment complex corporation is not into emacs. They gonna take action fast. I'll be out on the street, with no car, and $400 to survive on. For most of my life, i've been living in a ascetic, hermit, platonic life, so i don't have friends that can help.

here's a proposal:

What do you get? You get the emacs packages under GPL, plus, in the header file, you'll be listed as sponsor who funded the project, with the amount you put in. (or anonymous if you want)

I understand that the project would be much better presented on some dedicated sites such as kickstarter, with a nice video presentation. Here's a video of me recorded last week on pen-spinning.

Xah Lee Pen Spinning

Thank you for reading.