5 ms·

Emacs Bedrock 2.0

191 points by ashton314 26d ago

nxobject 26d ago
Well, I guess I'm at that point in my two-year cycle where I alternate between BBEdit and Emacs as my daily driver...
inatreecrown2 26d ago
Very nice presentation and project. From the README of the linked repo: "When I started learning Emacs, my dad gave me his .emacs file. (That's what we used back in ye olden days instead of .emacs.d/init.el and stuff.) I used it without modification for many years. Eventually I learned how to write my own functions and customizations. This package aims to give other users a similar experience. When someone comes to me and expresses their desire to learn Emacs, I can point them at this to help them get over the initial hump, but not coddle them so much that they're afraid or unable to change things to their liking."
- niceguy1827 26d ago
  I'm still using .emacs today! and I have all my elpaca and the fancy pants stuff in it
  - ashton314 25d ago
    I love Elpaca! The built-in package management story has gotten so much better in the past 10 years, but Elpaca is so, so good. My personal config is kinda the antithesis of Bedrock—it's bloated, slow, and uses over 100 packages. Elpaca handles installing/updating/managing those like a charm, however. I kept Elpaca out of Bedrock because I wanted a strictly built-ins-first experience, but if anyone asks what I use when they outgrow package.el, Elpaca is my first and only recommendation.
    - sph 25d ago
      I've done use-package, straight, quelpa, tried elpaca a few years back when the hype grew and it was a buggy mess, back to use-package when it was merged into core. I'm tired boss. There's a little too much churn I feel these days. I dislike the default package management system, but until a better one is merged into core, I'll keep updating my packages manually once a year when I remember.
      - ashton314 21d ago
        Exhaustion very understandable. Elpaca is nice and stable now, and the integration with use-package is fabulous. But if the built-in is working for you, no need to change it. Now that use-package supports the :vc keyword, there’s imo much less of a compelling reason to use Elpaca and the like.
- stevejb 26d ago
  I distinctly remember my dad telling my "my .emacs file is older than you are." I'm 41!
  - alex1138 26d ago
    People attack Stallman for some things but I guess I'm happy GNU exists and Emacs might be the most visible example
    - stevejb 25d ago
      I feel the same way. I don't like or dislike Stallman, and certainly disagree with him on a lot of stuff, but I can appreciate what he stands for and for GNU in general.
  - adityaathalye 25d ago
    Holy Batman... You folks are all, literally XKCD 297! https://xkcd.com/297/ https://xkcd.com/297/ (Lisp Cycles)
  - nxobject 25d ago
    Come to think about it, if I wanted a write-once-run-forever-language, Elisp would be the ultimate language to do so...
AloysB 26d ago
> Remove wgrep in favor of built-in grep-change-to-grep-edit-mode. TIL! I might be able to remove my wgrep too. I love those highly crafted starter kits, they are full of gems. Thank you!
- ashton314 25d ago
  :) Yay! No shade on wgrep, mind you—I used that for a long time and it's been one of my favorite tools. But now I just… don't need it. It's so nice being able to do consult-ripgrep -> export results to a buffer -> change to edit mode -> search-and-replace project-wide.
ashton314 26d ago
Here’s a link to the repo directly: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock I hope Bedrock is useful to some people. :)
- mih 26d ago
  Was a user of Bedrock for quite a while. Have switched to minimal-emacs.d (https://github.com/jamescherti/minimal-emacs.d https://github.com/jamescherti/minimal-emacs.d) since and find that it suits my tastes a lot better.
  - smartmic 26d ago
    Same journey like me!
- adityaathalye 25d ago
  Every Emacs user eventually finds their rock bottom, er, Bedrock :D Kidding kidding... Cool project, thanks for sharing and kind of validating the stuff I ended up doing [0]. Hooray, use-package! That meandering (floundering?) culminated in my Emacs, which is a single `init.el file` (hooray, use-package): https://github.com/adityaathalye/dotemacs https://github.com/adityaathalye/dotemacs [0] The blow-by-blow of which is documented in this excessively long blog post series I ended up writing as I was..., well, the title says it all; Emerging from dotemacs bankruptcy the hard way https://www.evalapply.org/posts/emerging-from-dotemacs-bankruptcy/index.html#main https://www.evalapply.org/posts/emerging-from-dotemacs-bankr... The linked post is the first in the series, and it enumerates what features / capabilities I was going for, and the key references I used while figuring out the configuration, from scratch.
dreamcompiler 26d ago
> Bedrock now uses the lexical-binding: t cookie in all its .el files. This is the right thing to do if you wrote your .el files recently and assumed lexical-binding was true and you understand the implications thereof. OTOH if your .el files are older and written before lexical binding was possible, it's best to set the cookies of those files to nil. Or go over them with a fine-toothed comb and rewrite them (if necessary) for lexical binding.
- setopt 26d ago
  > and you understand the implications thereof Isn’t lexical binding the default in more or less all other programming languages? So for people who don’t understand the implications, and wrote their .el files recently, lexical binding is likely less surprising behavior than the alternative?
  - dreamcompiler 25d ago
    Absolutely correct! I find dynamic binding quite annoying in the modern era; it can cause subtle and unexpected errors. Common Lisp switched mainstream Lisp programmers over to lexical binding in the 1980s. Scheme had used it from day one. But Emacs dragged its feet for decades. In the past I wrote my .el files assuming dynamic binding because lexical binding was not available. Until I have the time and inclination to rewrite that code I mark them with lexical-binding: nil because that was the assumption under which they were written. If you blindly set lexical-binding: t at the top of all your old .el files you're likely to cause errors if that code depended on dynamic binding, e.g. the 'getx' function here: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Lexical-Binding.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Le...
gcr 26d ago
I was wondering if this was going to be some Rust fork of Emacs, à la Java Minecraft vs Bedrock Minecraft
- DonHopkins 26d ago
  I thought it was a mnemonic memory system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfJXd0rSCqo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfJXd0rSCqo
warpech 26d ago
Thank you for starting the blog post with reminding what the project is. So many blogs (and newsletters for that sake) assume the reader knows and remembers what they are about
fractal618 26d ago
Isn’t eMacs just a text editor like vim or nano?
- gumby 26d ago
  Hah, is this a troll? It’s a lot older than those editors. EMACS started as Eugene Ciccareli’ init file for the TECO editor (which was also a programming language) around 1976. Hence the name (Eugene‘s Macros). It was later rewritten in Lisp for Multics, the MIT Lisp Machine (I worked on one for the Xerox lisp machine as well), and later Unix (in those cases using lisp only as an extension language)
  - setopt 26d ago
    > Hence the name (Eugene‘s Macros) Interesting, do you have a source for this? I’ve always read that it stood for Editor MACros, are you saying this is a backronym?
    - flexagoon 26d ago
      Doesn't seem true, the Wikipedia page for Emacs only mentions Eugene once as one of the early contributors, not as the creator. The original TECO macros were made by Guy L Steele Jr.
      - gumby 25d ago
        There was a lot of swapping of what was in other peoples’ inits (there was no security on ITS at all). I discovered that others just linked to my (compiled) init file due to people complaining when I changed it. Since Wikipedia didn’t even exist until emacs was more than 25 years old and little was written down in a way acceptable to Wikipedia, consider pages on topics of that vintage to be vague
        trelane 25d ago
        It has sources (see my comment above). Do you have corroborating sources? I (and others) would be keenly interested in them!
dharmatech 26d ago
Hey Ashton, I see you're with PLT. :-) Since Racket is built on Chez, you might like this. It's an Emacs-like editor built in Chez Scheme: https://github.com/paveluv/e https://github.com/paveluv/e
- deleted 26d ago
  [deleted]
- bbkane 25d ago
  Pop a screenshot in your README please!
daitangio 26d ago
I am in my 10 years cycle in which I will go back to emacs. Emacs is so powerful but has a different terminology, and vscode was so easy and snappy...so I got accustomed to VSCode, but it is becoming slower and it has a lot of telemetry attached to it. Is it time to give emacs another try
- indy 26d ago
  yes, stick with emacs even when the next shiny new editor appears and begins it's inevitable descent into becoming bloated and slow
  - devnonymous 26d ago
    I agree, this is why I still use vi :-) Sorry couldn't resist
    - ncphillips 26d ago
      Neovim has been game changing. Literally nothing I miss from VSCode or Jetbrains now
      - maleldil 26d ago
        I'm missing a good way to turn on/off plugins and settings depending on the directory. Eg turning off rust-analyzer on some projects, or using pyright instead of mypy as the LSP.
        speedster217 26d ago
        Doesn't lazy.nvim have some support for that? I use the LazyVim distribution but I remember something in the docs about per-repo plugin settings
    - flexagoon 26d ago
      Real programmers use butterflies
favadi 26d ago
With the new newcomers-presets theme in Emacs 31, I removed most of my customization in the init.el. I’m not sure if a minimal starter kit provide anything over it.
- Buttons840 26d ago
  It's a theme? Does it change more than just appearance?
  - favadi 25d ago
    A theme in Emacs can execute any functions and not limited to changing appearance only. I agree that it’s counterintuitive and even sounds somewhat dangerous.
KneeAwn 25d ago
Very cool work! Just wanted to say hi, I had a class with you with Kimball a few years back. Hope you’re doing well!
- ashton314 25d ago
  Hey! I'm doing great, thanks. Kimball's class was a lot of fun. Nice you "see" you again. (Can't tell who you are by your username—feel free to email me at the address on my blog if you want.)

191 points by ashton314 26d ago

Well, I guess I'm at that point in my two-year cycle where I alternate between BBEdit and Emacs as my daily driver...

Very nice presentation and project. From the README of the linked repo: "When I started learning Emacs, my dad gave me his .emacs file. (That's what we used back in ye olden days instead of .emacs.d/init.el and stuff.) I used it without modification for many years. Eventually I learned how to write my own functions and customizations. This package aims to give other users a similar experience. When someone comes to me and expresses their desire to learn Emacs, I can point them at this to help them get over the initial hump, but not coddle them so much that they're afraid or unable to change things to their liking."

niceguy1827 26d ago
I'm still using .emacs today! and I have all my elpaca and the fancy pants stuff in it
- ashton314 25d ago
  I love Elpaca! The built-in package management story has gotten so much better in the past 10 years, but Elpaca is so, so good. My personal config is kinda the antithesis of Bedrock—it's bloated, slow, and uses over 100 packages. Elpaca handles installing/updating/managing those like a charm, however. I kept Elpaca out of Bedrock because I wanted a strictly built-ins-first experience, but if anyone asks what I use when they outgrow package.el, Elpaca is my first and only recommendation.
  - sph 25d ago
    I've done use-package, straight, quelpa, tried elpaca a few years back when the hype grew and it was a buggy mess, back to use-package when it was merged into core. I'm tired boss. There's a little too much churn I feel these days. I dislike the default package management system, but until a better one is merged into core, I'll keep updating my packages manually once a year when I remember.
    - ashton314 21d ago
      Exhaustion very understandable. Elpaca is nice and stable now, and the integration with use-package is fabulous. But if the built-in is working for you, no need to change it. Now that use-package supports the :vc keyword, there’s imo much less of a compelling reason to use Elpaca and the like.
stevejb 26d ago
I distinctly remember my dad telling my "my .emacs file is older than you are." I'm 41!
- alex1138 26d ago
  People attack Stallman for some things but I guess I'm happy GNU exists and Emacs might be the most visible example
  - stevejb 25d ago
    I feel the same way. I don't like or dislike Stallman, and certainly disagree with him on a lot of stuff, but I can appreciate what he stands for and for GNU in general.
- adityaathalye 25d ago
  Holy Batman... You folks are all, literally XKCD 297! https://xkcd.com/297/ https://xkcd.com/297/ (Lisp Cycles)
- nxobject 25d ago
  Come to think about it, if I wanted a write-once-run-forever-language, Elisp would be the ultimate language to do so...

AloysB 26d ago

> Remove wgrep in favor of built-in grep-change-to-grep-edit-mode. TIL! I might be able to remove my wgrep too. I love those highly crafted starter kits, they are full of gems. Thank you!

ashton314 25d ago
:) Yay! No shade on wgrep, mind you—I used that for a long time and it's been one of my favorite tools. But now I just… don't need it. It's so nice being able to do consult-ripgrep -> export results to a buffer -> change to edit mode -> search-and-replace project-wide.

ashton314 26d ago

Here’s a link to the repo directly: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock I hope Bedrock is useful to some people. :)

mih 26d ago
Was a user of Bedrock for quite a while. Have switched to minimal-emacs.d (https://github.com/jamescherti/minimal-emacs.d https://github.com/jamescherti/minimal-emacs.d) since and find that it suits my tastes a lot better.
- smartmic 26d ago
  Same journey like me!
adityaathalye 25d ago
Every Emacs user eventually finds their rock bottom, er, Bedrock :D Kidding kidding... Cool project, thanks for sharing and kind of validating the stuff I ended up doing [0]. Hooray, use-package! That meandering (floundering?) culminated in my Emacs, which is a single `init.el file` (hooray, use-package): https://github.com/adityaathalye/dotemacs https://github.com/adityaathalye/dotemacs [0] The blow-by-blow of which is documented in this excessively long blog post series I ended up writing as I was..., well, the title says it all; Emerging from dotemacs bankruptcy the hard way https://www.evalapply.org/posts/emerging-from-dotemacs-bankruptcy/index.html#main https://www.evalapply.org/posts/emerging-from-dotemacs-bankr... The linked post is the first in the series, and it enumerates what features / capabilities I was going for, and the key references I used while figuring out the configuration, from scratch.

dreamcompiler 26d ago

> Bedrock now uses the lexical-binding: t cookie in all its .el files. This is the right thing to do if you wrote your .el files recently and assumed lexical-binding was true and you understand the implications thereof. OTOH if your .el files are older and written before lexical binding was possible, it's best to set the cookies of those files to nil. Or go over them with a fine-toothed comb and rewrite them (if necessary) for lexical binding.

setopt 26d ago
> and you understand the implications thereof Isn’t lexical binding the default in more or less all other programming languages? So for people who don’t understand the implications, and wrote their .el files recently, lexical binding is likely less surprising behavior than the alternative?
- dreamcompiler 25d ago
  Absolutely correct! I find dynamic binding quite annoying in the modern era; it can cause subtle and unexpected errors. Common Lisp switched mainstream Lisp programmers over to lexical binding in the 1980s. Scheme had used it from day one. But Emacs dragged its feet for decades. In the past I wrote my .el files assuming dynamic binding because lexical binding was not available. Until I have the time and inclination to rewrite that code I mark them with lexical-binding: nil because that was the assumption under which they were written. If you blindly set lexical-binding: t at the top of all your old .el files you're likely to cause errors if that code depended on dynamic binding, e.g. the 'getx' function here: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Lexical-Binding.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Le...

gcr 26d ago

I was wondering if this was going to be some Rust fork of Emacs, à la Java Minecraft vs Bedrock Minecraft

DonHopkins 26d ago
I thought it was a mnemonic memory system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfJXd0rSCqo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfJXd0rSCqo

warpech 26d ago

Thank you for starting the blog post with reminding what the project is. So many blogs (and newsletters for that sake) assume the reader knows and remembers what they are about

fractal618 26d ago

Isn’t eMacs just a text editor like vim or nano?

gumby 26d ago
Hah, is this a troll? It’s a lot older than those editors. EMACS started as Eugene Ciccareli’ init file for the TECO editor (which was also a programming language) around 1976. Hence the name (Eugene‘s Macros). It was later rewritten in Lisp for Multics, the MIT Lisp Machine (I worked on one for the Xerox lisp machine as well), and later Unix (in those cases using lisp only as an extension language)
- setopt 26d ago
  > Hence the name (Eugene‘s Macros) Interesting, do you have a source for this? I’ve always read that it stood for Editor MACros, are you saying this is a backronym?
  - flexagoon 26d ago
    Doesn't seem true, the Wikipedia page for Emacs only mentions Eugene once as one of the early contributors, not as the creator. The original TECO macros were made by Guy L Steele Jr.
    - gumby 25d ago
      There was a lot of swapping of what was in other peoples’ inits (there was no security on ITS at all). I discovered that others just linked to my (compiled) init file due to people complaining when I changed it. Since Wikipedia didn’t even exist until emacs was more than 25 years old and little was written down in a way acceptable to Wikipedia, consider pages on topics of that vintage to be vague
      - trelane 25d ago
        It has sources (see my comment above). Do you have corroborating sources? I (and others) would be keenly interested in them!

dharmatech 26d ago

Hey Ashton, I see you're with PLT. :-) Since Racket is built on Chez, you might like this. It's an Emacs-like editor built in Chez Scheme: https://github.com/paveluv/e https://github.com/paveluv/e

deleted 26d ago
[deleted]
bbkane 25d ago
Pop a screenshot in your README please!

daitangio 26d ago

I am in my 10 years cycle in which I will go back to emacs. Emacs is so powerful but has a different terminology, and vscode was so easy and snappy...so I got accustomed to VSCode, but it is becoming slower and it has a lot of telemetry attached to it. Is it time to give emacs another try

indy 26d ago
yes, stick with emacs even when the next shiny new editor appears and begins it's inevitable descent into becoming bloated and slow
- devnonymous 26d ago
  I agree, this is why I still use vi :-) Sorry couldn't resist
  - ncphillips 26d ago
    Neovim has been game changing. Literally nothing I miss from VSCode or Jetbrains now
    - maleldil 26d ago
      I'm missing a good way to turn on/off plugins and settings depending on the directory. Eg turning off rust-analyzer on some projects, or using pyright instead of mypy as the LSP.
      - speedster217 26d ago
        Doesn't lazy.nvim have some support for that? I use the LazyVim distribution but I remember something in the docs about per-repo plugin settings
  - flexagoon 26d ago
    Real programmers use butterflies

favadi 26d ago

With the new newcomers-presets theme in Emacs 31, I removed most of my customization in the init.el. I’m not sure if a minimal starter kit provide anything over it.

Buttons840 26d ago
It's a theme? Does it change more than just appearance?
- favadi 25d ago
  A theme in Emacs can execute any functions and not limited to changing appearance only. I agree that it’s counterintuitive and even sounds somewhat dangerous.

KneeAwn 25d ago

Very cool work! Just wanted to say hi, I had a class with you with Kimball a few years back. Hope you’re doing well!

ashton314 25d ago
Hey! I'm doing great, thanks. Kimball's class was a lot of fun. Nice you "see" you again. (Can't tell who you are by your username—feel free to email me at the address on my blog if you want.)