crafted-emacs VS emacs-which-key

Keep an eye on Crafted Emacs which has a v2Beta release branch. It's been evolving. The v2Beta is a rewrite. It aims to provide a minimalist leg up on vanilla Emacs for new Emacs users. It's goal is to take you from first steps to a point where you have learned a great deal and built your configuration. Then you may be comfortable ditching the Crafted Emacs boilerplate configuration entirely. Think of it as a starter kit. Follow SystemCrafters on YouTube (live stream mostly) & Matrix (they are leaving Discord). Despite the live stream being lengthy, there is much to be learned as you bear witness to David figuring things out. Over time, you pickup on those techniques such as looking up a variable state, reviewing functions, evaluating snippets of Elisp in real time, etc. Also recommend, Mastering Emacs as a fantastic ebook with free updates. Once 29.1 ships, no doubt, there will be a free update to the ebook.

I'd recommend you have a look at crafted-emacs. It's an example of how far Emacs can actually go without third-party packages. Then you can add minimal packages (completion and specific tool integrations) to further enhance the experience.

For me it's quite stable except some issues I had with vertico. Anyways, I first started to rewrite my doom config into plain vanilla emacs (with org mode literate configs), and then I discovered crafted which allowed me to remove some code with commonly set sane defaults, e.g. stuff from https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs/blob/master/modules/crafted-defaults.el.

I have been surprised at how many people have so ardently defended only using built-ins and raw package.el and their own janky ensure methods when use-package was available and did it all better. And, it even lets you configure Emacs itself (not just packages), as well as seamlessly letting you try different package management tools like straight.el. Getting it into Emacs itself hopefully makes this a more prevalent way of showing users how to craft their own config.

If you need a staring point for configuring there's some nice light ones like emacs-bedrock and crafted-emacs, and also some fully pre-configured Emacs distributions that you can choose from (though those look harder to configure to one's personal needs to me, but I haven't tried them so wouldn't know).

I'll second https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs

And if you find yourself between the two extremes, perhaps https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs

I think which-key already solves exactly that: https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

As for the "complicated keybindings general" -- I assume because remembering things like C-x C-s is hard because of the shifted keystrokes? I get that, and there is in fact a solution for less used keybindings which I love, called 'which-key' https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

I would recommend installing the which-key package, which is a fantastic discoverability aid. If you ever want an example config to get some inspiration, I have one here: Emacs Bedrock

Make sure you have which-key installed and turned on. When using a keybinding that has a prefix (like C-x or C-c), it displays all the keybindings that start with that prefix.

which-key for the shortcut menus

there are some packages to help with the keybings, which-key shows a list of keybind and its command and (guru-mode)[https://github.com/bbatsov/guru-mode] enforces to use the "best" keybind, for exemple, it forces you to use C-n to move the cursor, blocking you to use the down key, and if you press the down key, it show a text in minibuffer to the best keybind.

Thanks for confirming, I think it's an issue in which-key itself: https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key/pull/166

If you haven't already, definitely check out the package which-key.

> even though I'm a terminal user ... I really like the discoverability of GUIs, and that's where a good GUI is unbeatable by CLI.

CLI has poor discoverability? Sure; but even on the terminal, discoverability can still be good:

A couple of nice examples of discoverability in keyboard-focused programs:

- emacs' which-key[0]; there's a vim port[1] too. This shows you (some) of the available keybindings for the next input, and a short label. So you don't have to remember what `SPC h p ...` or all the options under `SPC f...`.. but it still helps to recall that `SPC h` is for 'help' related commands, `SPC f` for file related commands.

- emacs' magit[2][3]. Magit is so good at discoverability, that I'd rate it as the best tool for using git with. I've learned more about git from using it.

[0] https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

[1] https://github.com/liuchengxu/vim-which-key

[2] https://magit.vc/

[3] https://emacsair.me/2017/09/01/magit-walk-through/

Am I right in thinking this is quite similar to which-key?