alt Hacker NewsI'm happy to see these improvements. One thing that has always been annoying with Emacs is how much configuration is required to get a modern editor going. Things like Doom Emacs, and Spacemacs try to solve that problem, but both feel far removed from vanilla emacs. I wish Emacs came with several presets so with a single line, you could transform the editor to different base points. For example, most devs want treesitter highlighting and LSP enabled by default. Why not have a preset like (preset-base-ide-1), so we don't need 200 lines of configuration before we can function? Instead we could build off of a much closer starting point.
Replies
Emacs is not great software because it has good features. It’s great software because it conforms itself and those features to the user’s needs and preferences. If one of those preferences is short, canned config, we’ve got a way to express that (spacemacs and doom). But if one can’t be arsed to express their preferences even in those frameworks … emacs might not be the software for them.
You are just worrying for no good reason. Doom Emacs and Spacemacs are both very good; being far removed from vanilla emacs is not a problem to be worried about.
I think it is cultural. It's kinda like building your own lightsaber as a Jedi. The part of Emacs/Vim initiation is building your own configuration that works for you. Setting up plugins, keybindings, colorschemes etc. It's part of the fun of it (at least for me).
Indeed. I myself am on Doom Emacs but I've increasingly been thinking of moving over to vanilla Emacs. I'm a bit worried about the transition period due to all the keybind differences but I'm sure it's not too bad.
As a Vim user (just admitting to my ignorance here), is it not feasible to make something like this yourself? Emacs is said to be flexible and extensible enough, or at least I’m under the impression that it has that reputation.
I imagine it would take a lot of time, maybe. Any greybeards that do this?
What are these things you have that makes Emacs a modern editor?
I have cua-mode and don't show startup message. What else do I need to modernize Emacs?
Claude: configure my Emacs such that … has worked pretty well for me lately.
> Why not have a preset like (preset-base-ide-1), so we don't need 200 lines of configuration before we can function? Instead we could build off of a much closer starting point
First you need to define what is that much better starting point? Something VSCode like? I find VS Code a bad example of software development tooling (anemic file management, integration with external tooling is cunbersome, VCS integration is flimsy, Code viewing is poor,…).
VSCode is a swiss knife. It has a few tools that are handy for occasional needs. But Vim and Emacs provide a complete toolbox. Learn it once and be set for life.
The only reason we still have IDE is kafkaesque ecosystems that requires expansive and custom tooling just to make sense of it. People can use vim to write code for the Linux kernel but needs XCode for a 5 screens app.
Bedrock Emacs is pretty much this, its what I finally used after I declared config-bankruptcy with Doom, and it gave me the room I needed to get my own setup together
This comment shows up on every single emacs thread and for the life of me I can't understand why. It takes one line in a shell to pull down a premade config and if that were to be built on, who would decide what gets put in? I don't think it's worth anyone's time to decide what everyone needs in a premade config.