scimax VS dotemacs

Compare scimax vs dotemacs and see what are their differences.

scimax

An emacs starterkit for scientists and engineers (by jkitchin)

dotemacs

My emacs configuration. (by mclear-tools)
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scimax dotemacs
19 16
985 89
- -
7.3 6.1
8 days ago 18 days ago
Emacs Lisp Emacs Lisp
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
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Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

scimax

Posts with mentions or reviews of scimax. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-27.
  • Jupyter and org-mode in scimax [video]
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Oct 2023
  • Testing different Emacs distros easy way in Emacs 29/30
    4 projects | /r/emacs | 4 Apr 2023
  • Switched to Emacs a week ago, really thrilled so far. Looking for help on a few (somewhat advanced) questions.
    5 projects | /r/emacs | 1 Apr 2023
    Scimax should have out of box setup for bibliography, references etc. Anyway, regardless of what you use Emacs for, one step a time, would be my recommendation. Just start using it and solve problems as you experience them. It is better to add a single thing at a time when you need it, than to add 1000 different things because you think you will need them, and then not know what you have or what causes a problem.
  • Embed excalidraw in Emacs?
    6 projects | /r/emacs | 18 Feb 2023
    https://github.com/wdavew/org-excalidraw is close. I discovered you can install Excalidraw from Chrome, and then it is like a local program. That is pretty amazing in itself. org-excalidraw indeed offers an org-link and way to make an excalidraw file from emacs, edited natively in an external excalidraw window. The svg preview does not work though if you use freehand lines in your image, and I was unable to install the npm packages on my Mac for some uninteresting reason related to DNS, but it did work in a node docker image. I find writing in excalidraw less advanced than in tools like Notability or PDFExpert. There are some artifacts in excalidraw from smoothing, or dangling pixels that I don't love. I forgot I had previously used https://github.com/lepisma/org-krita. Krita is a full drawing program, and this integrates into org-mode with image previews nicely. I am not that skilled in using it, and as a full drawing program, it has a learning curve. I wrote https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax/blob/master/scimax-inkscape.el to integrate inkscape into org-mode. It works, but I find inkscape slow to open, and I am not that skilled in using it.
  • Emacs and knowledge management for scientists
    7 projects | /r/emacs | 21 Jan 2023
    Maybe give scimax a go?
  • Emacs as org-mode interpreter - standalone, batch mode?
    5 projects | /r/emacs | 13 Jan 2023
    Anyway, if you want something geared toward scientific usage, there is Scimax by J. Kitchin. There may be some others, but I am not aware off.
  • emacs distributions without evil?
    3 projects | /r/emacs | 5 Nov 2022
    Apart from the ones already mention, John Kitchin's science-focused Scimacs is also an option.
  • Preferred Citation Management and Knowledge Management Tools?
    3 projects | /r/bioinformatics | 12 Jul 2022
  • Possible to display errors in src block results?
    2 projects | /r/orgmode | 3 May 2022
    Got it. Then, I recommend watching other videos by John Kitchin. He had some introductory presentations on Python programming in Org mode. He developed the whole Emacs system optimised for python, Org, and research work: https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax/
  • Writing papers/thesis in org with a barebone config
    5 projects | /r/orgmode | 27 Jan 2022
    Not barebones, but I would consider looking at scimax, which is an emacs configuration that likely is similar to your work flow. You can also look to PhD theses written in org-mode and shared on github, there are a few with sensible configurations you might want to just copy.

dotemacs

Posts with mentions or reviews of dotemacs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-05-16.
  • emacs-groundup
    4 projects | /r/emacs | 16 May 2022
    7 - Meow: Meow is great. I switched from evil a few months ago and am pretty happy with it. I also dropped general.el for bind-key.el, which is included with use-package (which I see you are using anyway). You can look at my setup of meow here and a more generic setup of keybindings here. I haven't had any trouble with using this instead of general.
  • tab-bar-mode: How to change tab bar appearence?
    4 projects | /r/emacs | 1 Mar 2022
    Another thing you might consider (this depends on how many tabs you usually keep open, etc.) is not displaying tabs in the tab-bar at all (setq tab-bar-show nil) and displaying them in the echo-area instead. I use a combination of https://github.com/fritzgrabo/tab-bar-echo-area and https://github.com/qaiviq/echo-bar.el to give a consistent but very unobtrusive presentation of the tabs in the echo bar on the bottom right. You can see that in this image -- and my config for it is here.
  • Has anyone ever written a research paper by only using org-mode?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 17 Feb 2022
    Yes. It’s not a problem (it’s also easy to write papers in markdown using markdown mode). If you want to see some of the packages involved look at my setup-writing.el file in my config.
  • Writing papers/thesis in org with a barebone config
    5 projects | /r/orgmode | 27 Jan 2022
    You can take a look atmy setup and see if any of it looks helpful. The relevant modules for you will be:
  • How to C-x b but to related buffers only?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 15 Oct 2021
    Yeah +1 for perspective.el. I use it with projectile to manage projects and have discrete buffers for different projects. You can look at my setup if it is helpful here.
  • Bikeshedding Friday: How do you organize your init file?
    7 projects | /r/emacs | 17 Sep 2021
    I also think a multi file modular setup is the way to go. I do this in tandem with use-package statements and it works well and is relatively easy to troubleshoot. You’re welcome to see what might be useful to you from my config: https://github.com/mclear-tools/dotemacs
  • New grad student, new to emacs, hoping to use for academic note taking/writing, completely lost on where to start
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 7 May 2021
    My dotemacs is geared towards academic work. You're welcome to take a look.
  • Projectile for research and writing?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 16 Apr 2021
    I use projectile, along with persp-mode, and eyebrowse, to handle all my writing projects. Here's the relevant part of my config
  • tmux-like sessins in emacs
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 9 Mar 2021
    I use a single-frame but multi-project approach via projectile + eyebrowse. You can see the config here. It is partially adapted from code in spacemacs. I had formerly used different frames per project but found this unwieldy. And now I have dedicated "spaces" for terminal, agenda, notes, etc.
  • Spacemacs dilemma (mostly a rant)
    5 projects | /r/emacs | 4 Jan 2021
    I used spacemacs for about a year before giving it up and going my own way based on similar kinds of frustrations. I found it relatively easy to pull out (or use as inspiration) the parts of spacemacs that I liked. You can see the current version of my config using evil and space as leader here. I think Doom is good, but I like maintaining my config and found it unnecessarily complicated for what I needed. YMMV. I'm actually in the process of simplifying my config now with features from nano-emacs and using icomplete-vertical/consult/embark. We'll see how that goes.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing scimax and dotemacs you can also consider the following projects:

.emacs.d - Emacs backup of mine

.spacemacs.d - My spacemacs config files. For spacemacs source, see https://github.com/capsulecorplab/spacemacs

org-roam - Rudimentary Roam replica with Org-mode

doom-emacs - An Emacs framework for the stubborn martian hacker [Moved to: https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs]

citar - Emacs package to quickly find and act on bibliographic references, and edit org, markdown, and latex academic documents.

persp-mode.el - named perspectives(set of buffers/window configs) for emacs

org-thesis - Writing a Ph.D. thesis with Org Mode

org-mode - org-mode fork

org-ref - org-mode modules for citations, cross-references, bibliographies in org-mode and useful bibtex tools to go with it.

org-babel-examples - Examples using emacs org mode babel inline source code with different backend languages

code-cells.el - Emacs utilities for code split into cells, including Jupyter notebooks

frontmacs - Package-based, web-centric, customizable, awesome-by-default, acceptance-tested Emacs distribution