Dotfiles Alternatives

dotfiles reviews and mentions

• EmacsConf Live Now
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Dec 2023

  Brews coffee... Oh yes, Emacs is my forever editor. It was created before I was born and will (hopefully) join my digitally converted consciousness on humanity's travels to the stars!

  I got tired of switching editors for different languages (PyCharm was too slow for JSX code) and decided to invest in getting Emacs to behave like a decent editor. That took a while :)

  I've programmed in Python, Clojure, Nim, Cython, JS, JSX, and a host of other languages. LSP support is getting REALLY good with three strong contenders: the minimal eglot that is in Emacs core, lsp-mode which is the most complete solution, and lsp-bridge that is super fast.

  The single thing I love about Emacs is that everything is text. I can do a project-wide search (find-file-in-project), turn off read-only mode, use delete-non-matching-lines to remove stuff I don't want, turn on read-only mode and peruse the remaining matches. Then I can turn on wgrep-ag mode in the search results buffer, search and replace changes, and commit them to all the files. It's a powerful concept.

  We are not a single-editor shop, we have Vim, PyCharm, Sublime, etc.

  Extra compatibility is just a package-install away, and the ecosystem is thriving. My must-have utilities are expand-region, iedit, multiple-cursors, whole-line-or-region, pdf-tools, try, find-file-in-project, helm-ag, rg, undo-fu, and the list goes on :)

  It has great workflows for compilation, buffer (file) switching, window management, tiling, and SO much more. For me, at least, every new feature requires a lot of tinkering, but the setup has been extremely stable across Emacs versions. Emacs development is very active and in recent years has been going in a great direction.

  A great book to get excited about Emacs is https://www.masteringemacs.org/. Oh, let's share configs too, here's mine: https://github.com/runekaagaard/dotfiles/blob/main/.emacs.d/... :)