[emacs-berlin] Emacs Starter Kits

Thu Jul 24 14:50:17 CEST 2014

The next emacs-berlin is next week already!

I chatted a bit with Andy the other day about these starter kits, for
experienced users they are too opinionated, but certain settings they all
have in common. These are just considered "sensible defaults". This gave me
the idea of pulling out these settings in a "reset stylesheet".

For example some of the settings I have so far are:

(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)                  ; no splash screen
(menu-bar-mode -1)                              ; no menu bar
(tool-bar-mode -1)                                ; no tool bar
(scroll-bar-mode -1)                            ; no scroll bar
(setq initial-scratch-message nil)              ; empty *scratch* buffer
(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)
(require 'uniquify)
(setq uniquify-buffer-name-style 'post-forward) ; "file.ext|dir" instead of
"file.ext<2>"
(fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p)

I'd be interested to hear if the majority agrees with these, and what else
you would add. Potentially we could pull these into a shared package that
you can just install on a vanilla emacs.

What do you think, and what would you add?

2014-07-12 19:00 GMT+02:00 Arne Brasseur <arne.brasseur at gmail.com>:

> Thanks for the feedback Fredrik. I'm doing some more in-depth comparison,
> see attached org file for what I have so far.
>
> I'm comparing emacs-starter-kit, emacs24-starter-kit, Prelude, Graphene,
> emacs-live, as well as the custom config of a few high profile long time
> emacs users (Bodil Stokke, Avdi Grimm and Ryan Davis/zenspider)
>
> They vary wildly in scope. The first two are quite minimal both in
> packages they load and in customization. Graphene has only a small number
> of dependencies but does quite a bit of configuration, Prelude has quite a
> bit of both, and emacs-live is basically a massive distribution of
> everything under the sun :)
>
> emacs24-starter-kit I found super interesting because the whole thing is
> written in literal org mode. It only has a single .el file to load the org
> files.
>
> So far I've mostly looked at what packages all of these use. It's
> interesting that they all do packaging differently. package.el has no way
> of checking into source control what packages are installed. Emacs-live
> takes the easy route by just "vendoring" everything. emacs-starter-kit is
> itself an ELPA package, so it can simply define dependencies. Half of the
> config's I've looked at have their own variation of (defun
> require-or-install (package)). Avdi uses el-get which sits on top of
> package.el but can also install from git or emacswiki. Graphene is the only
> one using Cask which is basically Bundler for Emacs. At least zenspider
> made his version of "require-or-install" into a reusable thing called
> package+.
>
> Magit is the only package all these configs have in common. Smex is also
> common, a smart ido based replacement for M-x. I didn't know about smex, it
> looks pretty good. Other common general purpose packages are yasnippet,
> expand-region and find-file-in-project. Things are split 50/50 between
> paredit and smartparens.
>
> Comparing the actual configurations will be something else... but I'm
> starting to think that rebuilding my config by hand, liberally taking from
> these projects might be the way to go. emacs-starter-kit, the most popular
> of these by github stars, has actually decided to become just a guide on
> how to set things up, instead of being a ready made config.
>
> So far for initial observations (:
>
>
>
>
>
> 2014-07-12 14:07 GMT+02:00 Fredrik Wallberg <fredrik.wallberg at gmail.com>:
>
> Hi Arne,
>>
>> Prelude is very very nice -- I recommended it to an experienced vimmer
>> colleague the other day and it seems to work just great out of the
>> box.
>> Also, I recently installed Emacs-live (because Overtone) -- but
>> haven't yet found the time to merge my own stuff back into it.
>>
>> Best / Fredrik
>>
>> On 12 July 2014 12:54, Arne Brasseur <arne.brasseur at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I'm starting to look at and evaluate a couple of the "emacs starter
>> kits"
>> > out there, maybe eventually declaring .emacs.d bankruptcy, or maybe
>> gently
>> > merging the parts I like.
>> >
>> > I'm particularly interested in Emacs-Live since it's great for playing
>> with
>> > Clojure and Overtone, but it's also the most opinionated and hardest to
>> > combine with an existing setup.
>> >
>> > Do you have experience with any of these, in particular Prelude or
>> > Emacs-Live? What's do you think of these? Has anyone succesfully made
>> the
>> > transition?
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> > Arne
>> >
>> > --
>> > | @plexus  | arnebrasseur.net | The Happy Lambda |
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > emacs-berlin mailing list
>> > emacs-berlin at emacs-berlin.org
>> > https://mailb.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-berlin
>> >
>> _______________________________________________
>> emacs-berlin mailing list
>> emacs-berlin at emacs-berlin.org
>> https://mailb.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-berlin
>>
>
>
>
> --
> | @plexus <https://twitter.com/plexus>  | arnebrasseur.net | The Happy
> Lambda <https://leanpub.com/happylambda> |
>

-- 
| @plexus <https://twitter.com/plexus>  | arnebrasseur.net | The Happy
Lambda <https://leanpub.com/happylambda> |
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailb.org/pipermail/emacs-berlin/attachments/20140724/e4fadd18/attachment.html>