.emacs.d VS use-package

If you want to dip your toes, I'd maybe try out https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs if you like vi style keybindings or https://github.com/seagle0128/.emacs.d or if you want to use something more traditional. Then I'd recommend https://github.com/gcv/julia-snail for the julia side of things.

Do not use doom as the heretics suggest! It is an awful experience and very janky, they also change how emacs is configured in a weird way that doesn't lead to one understanding the lisp or how emacs starts up. I'd suggest witchmacs (https://github.com/snackon/Witchmacs) or centaur emacs (https://github.com/seagle0128/.emacs.d) to get a feel of how a config actually looks like. With doom it is obscured under so much. As an exvimmer I moved to god-mode and emacs bindings just because everything always works with these. Using evil gets a little complicated since it doesn't always function properly. But using evil is probably best for you at the moment.

My favourite emacs starter kit is centaur emacs, it makes great use of hydras and improves on the standard key bindings. But I have to say I love the look of NΛNO and the svg-lib. u/Nicolas-Rougier, have you thought about combining some of the features of centaur with your work?

If you are looking for an alternative to doom without evil mode, I recommend centaur emacs. https://github.com/seagle0128/.emacs.d

To me, Vanilla Emacs config certainly. I create Centaur Emacs for myself and share to others.

There is https://github.com/seagle0128/.emacs.d and there is my own distro https://github.com/Ultra-Hax/magmamacs which is more minimal but less customizable and more opinionated both of these distros are very minimal and blazing fast.

Example configuration - https://github.com/seagle0128/.emacs.d/blob/e225dbe431f1e7ad368f3fe11d63ceb60c5acfcb/lisp/init-window.el#L142

Another way would be to redefine parts of the bind-key macro or its use-package support functions

The package-install call installs use-package that provides a utility of the same name to make it easier to manage packages. It's admittedly a little overkill for this specific config, but it's a cheap investment that sets you up for later success.

Granted, the Doom macro makes your code looks nice and compact. But you can get very close to that just by using do-list and define-key together. Or by using the bind-key.el package, which is included with Use-package.

> Deps is well documented.

> The issue I personally found is that I needed to look at a bunch of OS project's deps.edn to see how people commonly structure things. Other than that it is a simple tool.

This strikes me as a contradiction, because if it was well documented you wouldn’t need to look at other people’s configs to see how to use it.

My experience with deps.edn is that every time I start a project and make a deps.edn file, I immediately draw a blank and don’t know how to structure it, so I open ones from other projects to start lifting stuff out of them.

I still don’t know how to reliably configure a project to use nrepl or socket repl without just using an editor plugin. I definitely have no idea how to use those in conjunction with a tool like reveal.

To me, none of that is simple. Simple would be like Emacs’ use-package. With that I know how to add dependencies, specify keybinds, and do initialization and configuration off the top of my head. And it has really nice documentation with tons of examples.

https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

Since you are doing code development, the first things to go for would be setting up your emacs packaging (installing use-package and melpa (use-package's documentation covers this) so you have more packages to choose from (do be careful to not just pick things willy nilly but research them a bit first)) and then setting up lsp-mode. lsp-mode lets you use LSP servers for the specific programming languages you work with in a somewhat unified fashion. You then need to install and setup the LSP servers for the languages you use, and possibly install language specific Emacs packages as support (note, Emacs has builtin functionality for many).

I'm using use-package as my package manager and the package ligature for the ligatures.

I have been crafting my emacs config for about 10 years. I started with vanilla and intentionally stayed away from frameworks. About two years ago I declared config bankruptcy and went down for a rewrite using use-package and straight.

ref: https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

use-package! is a macro over use-package, and respect its syntax, with a few additions. Useful reference on use-package keywords.