dash.el VS use-package

A lot of Clojure-style goodness can be provided by using the excellent dash package:

We will mainly look at 3 packages: s.el, f.el and dash.el. Two of these packages (first and last) are maintained by Magnar Sveen, who are also known for Emacs Rocks and What The .emacs.d (which are still great resources for learning and finding inspiration for your Emacs configuration!). We will also look at ht.el. These packages are used a lot in many of the Emacs packages you use in a day to day basis, like lsp-mode and rustic just to name a few. As most of these already have tons of examples in their READMEs, my main goal of this article is to inspire you to check them out. Hopefully you will know of one new package after reading this article :)

That error means that the -compose function is undefined and it should come from https://github.com/magnars/dash.el

Fail #1: Wrong type argument: symbolp, "dash" Try symbolifying the key string dash... Fetcher: nil Source: https://github.com/magnars/dash.el.git

elpa dash recipe is (dash :url https://github.com/magnars/dash.el.git :doc dash.texi :auto-sync t) Fail #1: Wrong type argument: symbolp, "dash" Try symbolifying the key string dash... Fail #2: Failed to checkout ‘dash’: ‘Symbol’s function definition is void: quelpa-build--checkout-nil’

It is quite a bit more readable comparing (for example) to what you'd do in Python, basically a matter of few extra quotes. Here's an example https://github.com/magnars/dash.el/blob/a17b6b5409825891423b...

Another benefit apart from macros is that you can replace whole subexpressions to modify the function code: https://github.com/raxod502/el-patch#el-patch Although arguably you can achieve the same with source code and other languages: https://github.com/adamchainz/patchy#patchy

Although (as a keen Emacs user & someone who often hacks into existing librairies) user I'm not really convinced either that homoiconicity plays that huge of a role in Emacs malleability in particular -- to me it's more about hooks/advice system and being able to dynamically override things to tweak into the way I want them to behave -- and I don't see a good reason why this couldn't be possible in other languages.

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.