org-pdftools VS doom-emacs

An alternative is to open PDFs, from Zotero or from anywhere else, with Emacs' pdf-tools (https://github.com/vedang/pdf-tools). If you annotate the pdf, those annotations are part of the pdf. And you can also use org-noter (https://github.com/weirdNox/org-noter) and org-noter-pdftools (https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools; but see https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools/issues/93#issuecomment-1493314118 if you use the new org-noter from https://github.com/org-noter/org-noter).

Periodically, I go through the pdfs I've read (I have a collection in Zotero for the stuff I am in the process of reading) and I use org-noter-pdftools (see https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools ; this is different from, and extends and depends on, org-noter which, by the way, has recently got new maintainers) to extract all annotations in the pdf to a note that is associated to each pdf. One to one mapping here: one pdf file - one .org file for notes. These notes are basically just org(-roam) files that store the annotations for easy searching (see below) and to allow my linking to specific, individual, highlights (or text annotations). I think that initially setting everything up to my satisfaction was a little bit confusing (e.g., the names of some functions I think are the same between org-noter and org-noter-pdftools and sometimes it was unclear to me the differences in functionality between the two packages); but now it works flawlessly. From org-noter-pdftools I specially like how easy it is to get all the highlights, text annotations, etc (not manual scribbling, of course, and see also below for "typewritter" annotations) into an org-roam note that links directly to the exact location in the pdf.

Check out my screencast on org-noter. I don't think anything else comes close to this kind of workflow. Unfortunately it's not production ready yet. There's a related project org-noter--pdftools, I don't recall what it's state is.

First I tried config from here - https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/19686/how-to-use-pdf-tools-pdf-view-mode-in-emacs but the package in unmaintained, so I used https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools

[2] https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools

$ rm -rf ~/.config/emacs # Remove the existing directory if necessary git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs ~/.config/emacs ~/.config/emacs/bin/doom install

Sounds like what you want is emacs, but preconfigured. In that case, have you tried Doom Emacs, Spacemacs or any of the myriad of others like those?

darren@pop-os:~$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs ~/.emacs.d Cloning into '/home/darren/.emacs.d'... remote: Enumerating objects: 1156, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (1156/1156), done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1042/1042), done. remote: Total 1156 (delta 85), reused 650 (delta 71), pack-reused 0 Receiving objects: 100% (1156/1156), 1.13 MiB | 7.29 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (85/85), done.

I used to do something like -{ nixosConfig, config, lib, pkgs, ... }: -let - xdgConfig = config.xdg.configHome; -in { - home.activation = { - foo = lib.hm.dag.entryAfter [ "writeBoundary" ] '' - doomdir="${xdgConfig}/doom"; - # $VERBOSE_ARG - if [ -d "$doomdir" ]; then - $DRY_RUN_CMD git -C "$doomdir" pull http master || true - else - # git clone and change url - http="https://git." - $DRY_RUN_CMD git clone "$http" "$doomdir" - # the new url needs ssh keys setup - git -C "$doomdir" remote add http "$http" - git -C "$doomdir" remote set-url origin "gitea@git." - fi - emacsdir="${xdgConfig}/emacs" - if [ -d "$emacsdir" ]; then - if [ -d "$emacsdir/.local" ]; then - $DRY_RUN_CMD $emacsdir/bin/doom sync - fi - else - $DRY_RUN_CMD git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs "$emacsdir" - fi - ''; - }; -}

`;; Needed to add javascript-eslint to the the next-checker after lsp so that it would actually load, as that wasn’t happening by deafult ;; also needed to runit after the lsp-afer-initalize-hook because otherwise ‘lsp wasn’t a valid checker (add-hook ‘lsp-after-initialize-hook (lambda () (flycheck-add-next-checker ‘lsp ‘javascript-eslint))) ;; https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/issues/1530 ;; Potential alternative to the above ;; (after! (:and lsp-mode flycheck) ;; (flycheck-add-next-checker ‘lsp ‘javascript-eslint))

The performance lag of Spacemacs was addressed by Doom Emacs ( https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs ). Have you tried Doom Emacs by any chance. After syncing everything, the performance is stellar in my opinion.

but I just realized, you're probably better off using doom emacs. The defaults are sane, customizations are almost always optional and the community's really active/helpful. (Disclaimer: I'm a doom emacs user with ~2k lines of config)

While Doom is more opinionated, it's not too difficult make Emacs your own, most of the choices are optimized anyway. Currently the head of Spacemacs devs is not active on the project anymore. Also I don't think it's hard to upstream code to Doom, as long as the code is thoroughly written, take a similar example on both sides: the introduction of a completion engine as layer/module (same packages are installed): - https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/pull/14901: 23 comments, 7 participants - https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/pull/4664: 576 comments, 20 participants

Also Doom emacs has one. https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/tree/master/modules/lang/common-lisp

Nowadays, I use https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs with WSL2 but only for org-mode. For code, I have either Sublime Text or VS Code.