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This little project of mine made the front page here a few days ago, so I’m not trying to beat a dead horse or anything, but I just want to surface it here agai

This little project of mine made the front page here a few days ago, so I’m not trying to beat a dead horse or anything, but I just want to surface it here again in case anybody finds it useful. I have made a starter kit at leverages many of the now built-in features of Emacs 29.1. You can get very far with regards to completion, project management, language, server, etc. just by tweaking a few defaults. I have put some of these nice tweaks together in a starter kit called “Emacs bedrock“: https://sr.ht/~ashton314/emacs-bedrock/ https://sr.ht/~ashton314/emacs-bedrock/ Let me know if you find it useful, or if you have any comments or suggestions. :-) I’m still working on incorporating some feedback I got earlier.

jordigh 3y ago
Heh, people are still putting up their config files online and blogging about them, eh? Some things in Emacs never change, no matter how many bells and whistles are in the latest version. :)
- adityaathalye 3y ago
  Yes, we are :) I just published my newly hand-rolled config https://github.com/adityaathalye/dotemacs https://github.com/adityaathalye/dotemacs At some point if/when I upgrade to 29.1, I will be able to delete some lines such as the ones that install use-package. :)
- Scarbutt 3y ago
  Wait until you learn about users of that editor called vim.
- tmalsburg2 3y ago
  It's the whole point of Emacs that it's malleable and can (should) be tailored to the own personal users needs.
JNRowe 3y ago
A link to that discussion for those of us who missed it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37385716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37385716
bradrn 3y ago
I’ve used Emacs for quite a few years now, but I had a look at emacs-bedrock when it was posted, and discovered a whole bunch of interesting settings and packages I’d never seen before. I’ve now switched my config over from Ivy to Vertico (and associated packages), and am much happier with it. Thank you so much for making this!
- ashton314 3y ago
  Daniel Mendler (minad on GitHub) et al. have some seriously awesome packages. The latest one I’ve fallen in love with that I haven’t yet added to bedrock is Jinx [1]: a fast spell-checker that supports multiple languages in the same buffer, checks spelling of words based off of font-lock class (read: spell checking in doc strings and comments but not in actual code) and a slick interface that makes correcting words a breeze. I’m so happy to hear you’ve found some helpful things from bedrock! Happy hacking!
  - bradrn 3y ago
    > Daniel Mendler (minad on GitHub) et al. have some seriously awesome packages. Absolutely! What I like about them is how they each focus on doing one thing well, making use of built-in functionality so they all work well with the rest of Emacs. It makes a nice change from the bigger packages which are so featureful they become hard to understand.
  - mickeyp 3y ago
    `flyspell-prog-mode' can spell check comments and strings just fine, too.
lenkite 3y ago
Really tempted to try out emacs 29.1. I wish someone would compare Neovim with all the bling aginst Emacs with all the bling - with all the pros/cons along with startup-times and performance (intellisense, etc). Want to get out of vscode.
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  The "bling" depends on the use case, emacs has many packages not all of which can be installed and in use at the same time.
- Shared404 3y ago
  Haven't done a full writeup, but Doom Emacs is _really_ nice. Takes a little while to acclimate, but it's very useful once you're used to it.
  - reddit_clone 3y ago
    Ya I am a fan of Doom Emacs too. It is the world of Vim wrapped in world of Emacs. Best of both worlds.
- witx 3y ago
  I left emacs around 2018 or 2019 after 8 years of use as my main. A couple weeks ago I started configuring neovim to use it as my main editor outside of work. I'm doing mostly what I did back when I started with emacs which was copy and pasting the code that the plugin creaters advised and go from there. My main takeaway is that Lua is an immensely better language than Lisp for this use case, and when something goes wrong I feel the same about the stack trace. I've had a better experience tweaking the configuration in Lua as well. I never tried neovim's starter frameworks (NVChad, LunarVim, etc) so I can't compare them to emacs's. I was never able to use well emacs's frameworks because either they were too convoluted ann hard to customize or kept crashing. Also when opening or formatting large files (sometimes not so large) emacs would freeze for a very long time. Also, LSP was not around, or was in its infancy, so my experience with code completion and intellisense was very poor, but perhaps that has changed. Finally, emacs's plugin called "Magit" is a godsend and I lack a similar tool ever since. With all that said emacs was very special for me because it fueled my passion for open software and being able to control and customize the tools I use. I really hope it got better and keeps kicking!
elevader 3y ago
Your starter kit inspired me to finally bite the bullet and write my own emacs config from scratch instead of using doom. I'm not sure yet if I'm thankful for that, time will tell ;)
globular-toast 3y ago
I saw this and finally after 15 years of using emacs I will be recommending it to people and getting them to use this starter kit. Previously I just couldn't explain to people what I love about emacs without thinking about the huge barrier they have to overcome to make it nice. I also couldn't in good faith recommend a "batteries included" starter kit like doom because I don't use it and I'm not sure if it has what I love about emacs which is it sets you free. I've also read the linked blog post about avy and forced myself to get familiar with it. Jumping all over the screen is great (I set it up jump across all visible frames in my tiling wm). I'm going to investigate consult et al next (already use vertico and orderless).
Otek 3y ago
It amazes me that it took so long for emacs to have this kind of started kit. And I haven’t thought of it either. Thank you and please support it!
tagfowufe 3y ago
It's incredibly useful to me. I love it. I find it nicely curated and true to the word 'starter' (kit). If I knew more about Emacs, this is definitely what I would have created, and in a similar manner. It's that lil' layer of configuration that's missing that makes the first clash with emacs sane. I like the structure. I also like the fact that there's a 'researcher' mixin. Would absolutely love to see your opinionated inclusion of org-roam, and general.el. I recently dabbled into System Crafters' 'Emacs from Sratch' series [0], which is incredibly well thought-out. After 5 hours of following it, you kinda get feature parity between his config and this; but in Berock's case it's done more natively which is really, really neat. I only miss some basic config with general.el. I feel super lucky to have started in Emacs when they finally added LSP and Treesitter support, and with System Crafters' help and yours! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74zOY-vgkyw&list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7bBJ4ZO7BXjSZ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74zOY-vgkyw&list=PLEoMzSkcN8...

jordigh 3y ago

Heh, people are still putting up their config files online and blogging about them, eh? Some things in Emacs never change, no matter how many bells and whistles are in the latest version. :)

adityaathalye 3y ago
Yes, we are :) I just published my newly hand-rolled config https://github.com/adityaathalye/dotemacs https://github.com/adityaathalye/dotemacs At some point if/when I upgrade to 29.1, I will be able to delete some lines such as the ones that install use-package. :)
Scarbutt 3y ago
Wait until you learn about users of that editor called vim.
tmalsburg2 3y ago
It's the whole point of Emacs that it's malleable and can (should) be tailored to the own personal users needs.

JNRowe 3y ago

A link to that discussion for those of us who missed it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37385716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37385716

bradrn 3y ago

I’ve used Emacs for quite a few years now, but I had a look at emacs-bedrock when it was posted, and discovered a whole bunch of interesting settings and packages I’d never seen before. I’ve now switched my config over from Ivy to Vertico (and associated packages), and am much happier with it. Thank you so much for making this!

ashton314 3y ago
Daniel Mendler (minad on GitHub) et al. have some seriously awesome packages. The latest one I’ve fallen in love with that I haven’t yet added to bedrock is Jinx [1]: a fast spell-checker that supports multiple languages in the same buffer, checks spelling of words based off of font-lock class (read: spell checking in doc strings and comments but not in actual code) and a slick interface that makes correcting words a breeze. I’m so happy to hear you’ve found some helpful things from bedrock! Happy hacking!
- bradrn 3y ago
  > Daniel Mendler (minad on GitHub) et al. have some seriously awesome packages. Absolutely! What I like about them is how they each focus on doing one thing well, making use of built-in functionality so they all work well with the rest of Emacs. It makes a nice change from the bigger packages which are so featureful they become hard to understand.
- mickeyp 3y ago
  `flyspell-prog-mode' can spell check comments and strings just fine, too.

lenkite 3y ago

Really tempted to try out emacs 29.1. I wish someone would compare Neovim with all the bling aginst Emacs with all the bling - with all the pros/cons along with startup-times and performance (intellisense, etc). Want to get out of vscode.

worthless-trash 3y ago
The "bling" depends on the use case, emacs has many packages not all of which can be installed and in use at the same time.
Shared404 3y ago
Haven't done a full writeup, but Doom Emacs is _really_ nice. Takes a little while to acclimate, but it's very useful once you're used to it.
- reddit_clone 3y ago
  Ya I am a fan of Doom Emacs too. It is the world of Vim wrapped in world of Emacs. Best of both worlds.
witx 3y ago
I left emacs around 2018 or 2019 after 8 years of use as my main. A couple weeks ago I started configuring neovim to use it as my main editor outside of work. I'm doing mostly what I did back when I started with emacs which was copy and pasting the code that the plugin creaters advised and go from there. My main takeaway is that Lua is an immensely better language than Lisp for this use case, and when something goes wrong I feel the same about the stack trace. I've had a better experience tweaking the configuration in Lua as well. I never tried neovim's starter frameworks (NVChad, LunarVim, etc) so I can't compare them to emacs's. I was never able to use well emacs's frameworks because either they were too convoluted ann hard to customize or kept crashing. Also when opening or formatting large files (sometimes not so large) emacs would freeze for a very long time. Also, LSP was not around, or was in its infancy, so my experience with code completion and intellisense was very poor, but perhaps that has changed. Finally, emacs's plugin called "Magit" is a godsend and I lack a similar tool ever since. With all that said emacs was very special for me because it fueled my passion for open software and being able to control and customize the tools I use. I really hope it got better and keeps kicking!

elevader 3y ago

Your starter kit inspired me to finally bite the bullet and write my own emacs config from scratch instead of using doom. I'm not sure yet if I'm thankful for that, time will tell ;)

globular-toast 3y ago

I saw this and finally after 15 years of using emacs I will be recommending it to people and getting them to use this starter kit. Previously I just couldn't explain to people what I love about emacs without thinking about the huge barrier they have to overcome to make it nice. I also couldn't in good faith recommend a "batteries included" starter kit like doom because I don't use it and I'm not sure if it has what I love about emacs which is it sets you free. I've also read the linked blog post about avy and forced myself to get familiar with it. Jumping all over the screen is great (I set it up jump across all visible frames in my tiling wm). I'm going to investigate consult et al next (already use vertico and orderless).

Otek 3y ago

It amazes me that it took so long for emacs to have this kind of started kit. And I haven’t thought of it either. Thank you and please support it!

tagfowufe 3y ago

It's incredibly useful to me. I love it. I find it nicely curated and true to the word 'starter' (kit). If I knew more about Emacs, this is definitely what I would have created, and in a similar manner. It's that lil' layer of configuration that's missing that makes the first clash with emacs sane. I like the structure. I also like the fact that there's a 'researcher' mixin. Would absolutely love to see your opinionated inclusion of org-roam, and general.el. I recently dabbled into System Crafters' 'Emacs from Sratch' series [0], which is incredibly well thought-out. After 5 hours of following it, you kinda get feature parity between his config and this; but in Berock's case it's done more natively which is really, really neat. I only miss some basic config with general.el. I feel super lucky to have started in Emacs when they finally added LSP and Treesitter support, and with System Crafters' help and yours! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74zOY-vgkyw&list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7bBJ4ZO7BXjSZ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74zOY-vgkyw&list=PLEoMzSkcN8...