crafted-emacs VS prelude

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 forgot how absolutely horrible the new user experience is...

The bbatsov/prelude project was started in 2011 to help address that problem. I started using it not long after that, and it's been a joy to use ever since.

And by "started using" I mean I forked it on GitHub, stared personalizing, and then merging/rebasing from upstream ever since at my own leisure.

https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

https://prelude.emacsredux.com/en/latest/

From 2011 to present, not everyone in the Emacs community feels bbatsov's Emacs Prelude makes the best/correct decisions, but given how long Emacs has been around and how large the community has been over time, what can you really expect?

It's certainly a lighter-weight starter kit compared to Doom Emacs and Spacemacs. (I'm not knocking those projects!). I've also looked at some of the newer starter kits mentioned in other comments here and previous HN threads; they seem okay to me, just reinventing a lot of the same "wheels" you'll find in Prelude but in a less refined form in many cases... such are the freedoms, joys, and trials of Free Software.

If I recall correctly, on my mac I had an issue with the meta and super keys. I had to rebind Meta to Cmd and Super to Opt. Im pretty sure I used Bozhidar Batsov's solution for this.

Another reason for you to stick to Emacs is Emacs Lisp. If you enjoy writing lisp you are not going to find a better piece of software written in any other lisp language. I prefer common lisp to elisp (alot!) but this is a fact in my opinion. Plus elisp is somewhat similar to common lisp and learning/appreciating the differrnces between the two will make you a better lisp programmer.

https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/blob/master/core/prelude-...

I have based my emacs config on Emacs Prelude from u/bbatsov, because I did not trust starting from vanilla emacs.

When some days ago I decided to use org-mode again, I didn't use Doom Emacs, and it was the best decision that I've made. Instead, I used Prelude, which is a very simple and powerful Emacs config, and it's much less opinionated than Doom Emacs and Spacemacs. Then I disabled the Prelude theme, and combined it with Nano-Emacs. Now I have a very simple Emacs config, which provides me with some of the best tools, and also a very beautiful and elegant theme. I can change everything I want very easily, customized it to my needs.

How do you know? You said you want "fully setup" :) Prelude? Spacemacs? Your own version?

Thanks :)… it was originally heavily inspired by Emacs Prelude, but has since drifted quite far from it.