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I use emacs from time to time, and I consider myself an advanced beginner. I have wrote 2 or 3 times a relatively extensive .emacs and sinked several hours each
by harperlee 6y ago
I use emacs from time to time, and I consider myself an advanced beginner. I have wrote 2 or 3 times a relatively extensive .emacs and sinked several hours each time playing with its configuration, searching for nifty things, reading other people's blog posts; played with org mode and used eww to geek out a little bit.
This is, in my opinion, the best way to introduce people to light .emacs configuration. To the point that I think there should be 4 or 5 different minimal .emacs such as this one in the main project page.
I understand why there is resistance to enhance the default UX and configuration, and I see the allure of spacemacs, doom, prelude, etc. But it is overkill, and pushes you down a configuration slippery slope that some enjoy too much and others dread, but that kills productivity.
> you learnt that it recommends Emacs and SLIME for development environment and it seemed like a significant additional learning curve for you?
This is the key. This is what pushes a lot of people away from emacs. Just have a "1 click" better default that also serves as a tutorial / example of how to cover 1 simple use case: one for common lisp, another one for clojure, a couple of different ones for python, one for writing a book. Just feed the space between no config and 3h of research. Have something to point out to newbies.
- susam 6y agoThank you for sharing your feedback. I agree, completely! If we can have small .emacs files for each of the popular use cases that one can read and understand completely in 10-20 minutes, it would make the journey for new Emacs users easier. Emacs is a great piece of software. It is highly extensible. Whenever I see someone starting off directly with Spacemacs or Portacle, I feel that an important opportunity to appreciate the extensibility of Emacs is being missed. I have a similar gripe towards the current state of Java programming when I see young engineers starting off with Eclipse or IntelliJ without appreciating how to compile and run programs using the javac and java command line programs. It often bites them back when they have to troubleshoot the program on a production system where there is no IDE and they can only see very long arguments to "java -cp". But I digress here. My hope with a project like this is that it will help in reducing the allure of readymade fully customized Emacs distributions to some extent and encourage hacking on Emacs itself to customize it to one's own needs, taste, and preferences.
- teataster 6y agoI have been using Emacs for about 5 years. I don't think I will ever graduate from advanced beginner. I learn something new every week. And I would say I have done fairly sophisticated stuff with Emacs. I also think you are right. I am very grateful I managed to get a preconfigured Emacs to start my journey.
- ReneFroger 6y agoGood question. Perhaps you could refer 'newbies' to https://emacs.zeef.com https://emacs.zeef.com where they might find out what fits their needs?
- O_H_E 6y agoI think that is the type of overkill options galore we are trying to avoid.
- vvillena 6y agoIs there an easy way to play with different configurations? I rely heavily on Spacemacs, but being able to play with custom minimal configs quickly would be awesome.