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Two Years of Emacs Solo

rahuljuliato.com

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Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#12

Post by skydhash »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #10

The "why" is kinda sketchy. The difference between what is shipped in Emacs and in ELPA is somewhat arbitrary. In fact, there are many built in packages that have their updates shipped in ELPA, meaning if you aren't using ELPA then your builtin packages might have unpatched bugs. There's also no reason why you have to literally write everything yourself either. You can find open source licensed packages, read them to…

> There's also no reason why you have to literally write everything yourself either.

> It's roughly equivalent to trying to discover all of our scientific knowledge yourself from scratch vs taking "for granted" the knowledge discovered by your forebears.

The author do have another config with all the bells and whistles. But Emacs does come with a lot of packages and tweaking them isn't that much work compared to building a full suite like Helm, especially with the awesome documentation system. Getting a v0.x of anything can be a matter of minutes. And then you wake up one day and you've built a whole OS for your workflows.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#13

Post by porcoda »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #10

The "why" is kinda sketchy. The difference between what is shipped in Emacs and in ELPA is somewhat arbitrary. In fact, there are many built in packages that have their updates shipped in ELPA, meaning if you aren't using ELPA then your builtin packages might have unpatched bugs. There's also no reason why you have to literally write everything yourself either. You can find open source licensed packages, read them to…

> Absolutely not. Reading a language is crucial.

I don't think the post implied that this package writing activity was a write-only activity where reading and learning is strictly forbidden.

> You can find open source licensed packages, read them to understand them, and then copy them into your config. Doing everything from scratch is a waste of time unless you enjoy the process (in which case go nuts).

The post clearly indicates the relatively large set of open source packages they looked at and understood before doing their own packages. The author graciously acknowledges them and their influence on the work:

"Emacs Solo doesn't install external packages, it is deeply influenced by them. diff-hl, ace-window, olivetti, doom-modeline, exec-path-from-shell, eldoc-box, rainbow-delimiters, sudo-edit, and many others showed me what was possible and set the bar for what a good Emacs experience looks like. Where specific credit is due, it's noted in the source code itself."

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#14

Post by tom_ »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #10

The "why" is kinda sketchy. The difference between what is shipped in Emacs and in ELPA is somewhat arbitrary. In fact, there are many built in packages that have their updates shipped in ELPA, meaning if you aren't using ELPA then your builtin packages might have unpatched bugs. There's also no reason why you have to literally write everything yourself either. You can find open source licensed packages, read them to…

It's nothing like rediscovering everything. Not only is it only Emacs, but it's also been designed by people with a goal of being straightforward to use by people. And whatever you create just needs to be useful to you personally anyway.

I think of it more like building stuff out of Lego without following any instructions.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#15

Post by lvass »

This is beautiful, incredibly sane, and awesome reference material. There's no way I'd use a 3500 lines init.el or most of the extras, but somehow I feel like a good chunk of the stuff here should be upstreamed if we one day consider it reasonable to change default behaviors in a major update.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#18

Post by jimbokun »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #10

The "why" is kinda sketchy. The difference between what is shipped in Emacs and in ELPA is somewhat arbitrary. In fact, there are many built in packages that have their updates shipped in ELPA, meaning if you aren't using ELPA then your builtin packages might have unpatched bugs. There's also no reason why you have to literally write everything yourself either. You can find open source licensed packages, read them to…

I’m not sure how you missed it, but the “why” was clearly a challenge to better learn and understand Emacs. And because it was fun.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#19

Post by bananamogul »

If I was going to reimplement Emacs it wouldn't be with Lisp.

Is there some reason Lisp is superior to any other general-purpose programming language for text editing? I'm skeptical because to my knowledge, Emacs is the only major text editor written in Lisp.

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