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Just dotfiles. Managing most of my systems with Nix ❄️ and now with home-manager too. Parts of the configuration are literate 📜, others are just a hot mess of spaghetti 🍝. Here be dragons. 🐲 (by vidbina)
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nixos-config
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prelude
Prelude is an enhanced Emacs 25.1+ distribution that should make your experience with Emacs both more pleasant and more powerful.
Felt (still am, actually) this problem too. Started with the same approach (Vanilla Emacs) a few years back in order to really learn the ins-and-outs after giving DOOM and others a shot and feeling like I didn't have the faintest what was really going on with all the magic. I somehow did end up falling in love with Emacs again[^1].
Won't lie... there was a fair amount of cursing involved and, despite the love, I wouldn't recommend many to venture down this road[^2].
Now I have gone the literate config way in my dotfiles https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/tree/main/emacs and I jump between Cursor (vscode-based), Neovim and Emacs for different tasks on a daily. I also found dustinlyons/nixos-config (https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/module...) just a few days ago and figured that could be a fun resource when you're building yours up.
Take it as a hobby. There are a bunch of nice things that I picked up from Emacs (a. literate configs, b. comfort around working with LISPs, c. bigger appreciation for parts of the GNU ecosystem, d. more in-depth understanding of how my editor works which helps me debug issues in Neovim or vscode when I see them) but I still think that I'm cursed by wanting to go down this road so badly. Wish I could just vscode my way through live and build dope stuff, unencumbered.
1: Used Emacs heavily in college over 12 years ago when I would boot the Windows + Novell groupware school computers into my own Ubuntu config with my Emacs and embedded dev toolchain from my pendrive.
2: The single-threaded-ness and related ocassional unresponsiveness/hangups still grind my gears.
Felt (still am, actually) this problem too. Started with the same approach (Vanilla Emacs) a few years back in order to really learn the ins-and-outs after giving DOOM and others a shot and feeling like I didn't have the faintest what was really going on with all the magic. I somehow did end up falling in love with Emacs again[^1].
Won't lie... there was a fair amount of cursing involved and, despite the love, I wouldn't recommend many to venture down this road[^2].
Now I have gone the literate config way in my dotfiles https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/tree/main/emacs and I jump between Cursor (vscode-based), Neovim and Emacs for different tasks on a daily. I also found dustinlyons/nixos-config (https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/module...) just a few days ago and figured that could be a fun resource when you're building yours up.
Take it as a hobby. There are a bunch of nice things that I picked up from Emacs (a. literate configs, b. comfort around working with LISPs, c. bigger appreciation for parts of the GNU ecosystem, d. more in-depth understanding of how my editor works which helps me debug issues in Neovim or vscode when I see them) but I still think that I'm cursed by wanting to go down this road so badly. Wish I could just vscode my way through live and build dope stuff, unencumbered.
1: Used Emacs heavily in college over 12 years ago when I would boot the Windows + Novell groupware school computers into my own Ubuntu config with my Emacs and embedded dev toolchain from my pendrive.
2: The single-threaded-ness and related ocassional unresponsiveness/hangups still grind my gears.
> 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.