use-package VS emacs-overlay

Compare use-package vs emacs-overlay and see what are their differences.

emacs-overlay

Bleeding edge emacs overlay [maintainer=@adisbladis] (by nix-community)
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use-package emacs-overlay
67 34
4,365 459
- 2.4%
2.3 10.0
3 months ago 5 days ago
Emacs Lisp Nix
GNU General Public License v3.0 only -
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
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.

use-package

Posts with mentions or reviews of use-package. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-29.
  • Use-Package & different key bindings based on host computer
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 29 Jun 2023
    Another way would be to redefine parts of the bind-key macro or its use-package support functions
  • Can't remove Emacs as "cask emacs is not installed"
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 1 Jun 2023
    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.
  • symbols function definition is void: map!
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 22 May 2023
    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.
  • 'org' is already installed (use-package)
    1 project | /r/emacs | 24 Feb 2023
  • Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video
    24 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Feb 2023
    > 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

  • Newbie here! Need Help!
    6 projects | /r/emacs | 29 Jan 2023
    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).
  • Unable to display ligatures in Emacs
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 6 Jan 2023
    I'm using use-package as my package manager and the package ligature for the ligatures.
  • Boilerplate config
    9 projects | /r/emacs | 4 Jan 2023
    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.
  • what is basic alghoritm/logic of installation packages to emacs?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 18 Dec 2022
    ref: https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package
  • Visual code folding?
    8 projects | /r/emacs | 27 Nov 2022
    use-package! is a macro over use-package, and respect its syntax, with a few additions. Useful reference on use-package keywords.

emacs-overlay

Posts with mentions or reviews of emacs-overlay. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-09.
  • Flakes aren't real and cannot hurt you: using Nix flakes the non-flake way
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jan 2024
    The project uses this overlay: https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay

    What that means is if something is broken in Emacs, the community will fix it, and all I need to do is run `nix flake update` to grab the latest commit and then `nix run .#build-switch` to alter my system. Easy.

    Thanks for the heads-up on the 404s! I've fixed those links.

    In re: to org-agenda, I don't use that as much anymore. But I heavily, heavily using org-roam w/ org-roam-dailies everyday to build my own networked graph of notes. For tasks, nowadays I just use simple docs for projects and Asana to keep a catalog of everything.

  • NixOS&(Home-Manager) Flake/Overlays Help
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 31 Jul 2023
    Im a newish NixOS user, Ive used it like 20 times before but always quit because I couldnt debug errors, trying not to give up for the 20th time this time lmao; so Ive been trying to learn how to use overlays & flakes for a couple of days now. The ones I want to use/enable are: - Emacs-Overlay - Spicetify-Nix
  • My First Impressions of Nix
    33 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jun 2023
  • Which package manager should I use?
    5 projects | /r/emacs | 12 Apr 2023
    Nix offers the same advantage through the use of emacs-overlay. Besides, Nixpkgs contains more Linux packages than any other distros. Depending on the user's needs, Nix is another option.
  • It looks like the kellyk Emacs PPA is no longer maintained. Are there any alternatives?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 26 Feb 2023
    You can use this overlay to get the latest https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay
  • Will any emacs package manager let me audit packages before installing them?
    4 projects | /r/emacs | 15 Feb 2023
    Depending on your goals, emacs-overlay is also worth a look.
  • dired navigation without infinite buffers
    5 projects | /r/emacs | 3 Feb 2023
    { pkgs ? import {} }: ((import (builtins.fetchTarball { url = "https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay/archive/master.tar.gz"; })) pkgs pkgs).emacsGit
  • Installing Emacs 29 on Pop! OS
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 1 Jan 2023
    One option is to install Nix and use emacs-overlay.
  • How to use Emacs 29 Tree-sitter?
    12 projects | /r/emacs | 3 Dec 2022
    You can install Nix on your mac and use https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay/, which supports all the existing tree-sitter-based major modes OOB.
  • Emacs 29 is nigh What can we expect?
    31 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Nov 2022
    Its great to see both eglot and tree-sitter being merged. However, I am unhappy about the state of 'emacs configurations/distributions' right now. I have been using Doom Emacs, but the development is pretty much stalled there [0], and I don't think there is any distribution that is keeping up with these cutting-edge features (compared to the NeoVim ecosystem, let's say). Somehow it feels like I was seeing a lot more activity about Emacs configurations two-three years ago.

    > Compile EmacsLisp files ahead of time

    Ooh, this is interesting. Hoping to see a derivation in https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay soon.

    [0] I am not complaining though as Doom was the main author's personal config from the get-go. I am just pointing out a void.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing use-package and emacs-overlay you can also consider the following projects:

leaf.el - Flexible, declarative, and modern init.el package configuration

Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]

straight.el - 🍀 Next-generation, purely functional package manager for the Emacs hacker.

flake-utils - Pure Nix flake utility functions [maintainer=@zimbatm]

nano-emacs - GNU Emacs / N Λ N O - Emacs made simple

lsp-mode - Emacs client/library for the Language Server Protocol

org-super-agenda - Supercharge your Org daily/weekly agenda by grouping items

chemacs2 - Emacs version switcher, improved

melpa - Recipes and build machinery for the biggest Emacs package repo

nix - Nix, the purely functional package manager

emacs-which-key - Emacs package that displays available keybindings in popup

poetry2nix - Convert poetry projects to nix automagically [maintainer=@adisbladis]