Re: [Emacspeak] Emacs: Hidden Holiday Gems

[Robert Melton <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tim--

Do you have a recommended configuration for confu?  I have tried it a few times, I always end up in a situation where I get a lot of split windows on long completions, I feel like I have a misconfiguration... 

Embark is ... awesome.  I am discovering tons of new things from just reading through the Embark recommendations.

I am not sure if I am slow or what... but trying to get my multiple email accounts working in mu4e and similar stuff is just, incredibly painful.  


> On Dec 15, 2023, at 21:13, Tim Cross (via emacspeak Mailing List) <emacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> A good list to post at this time of the year where people might have the
> space to perhaps look at some of these gems.
> 
> After over 25 years of using Emacs and Emacspeak, I still find new gems
> or get to better appreciate old ones.
> 
> I find it interesting when I've reviewed various 'canned' emacs
> configuraitons like spacemacs, doom, prelude, etc at how often I see
> existing core emacs functionality being re-worked or wrapped in another
> layer for what feels like little actual benefit. Your reference to dired
> is a good example. I see many of these setups using things like treemacs
> instead of good old dired and I often wonder why. If you really want
> something different to dired which is a little more like other file
> browsers, you also have good old 'speedbar' which has been there for
> decades. Likewise, any of the popular navaigation aid packages are
> often just alternate wrappers around existing functionality provided by
> registers and the mark ring. I still recall my first use of wdired. Like
> my first use of ange-ftp and tramp, it was a game changer. 
> 
> I have actually been spending a bit of time recently in streamlining my
> emacs configuration. I've experimented with various package managers
> like straight and elget etc and I've tried out various configuration
> like spacemacs, doom, prelude, purcell's emacs.d, crafted and others and
> now I've boiled it all down to the simplist and easiest to maintain
> setup I can. I have significantly modified how I manage my emacs setup.
> 
> - I now make extensive use of customize. I use to prefer my own hand
>  crafted init files, but now I tend to rely heavily on customize. I do
>  keep my settings in a dedicated 'custom.el' file rather than the
>  default bottom of your init.el, but apart from that, it is pretty
>  standard.
> 
> - I use package.el and have dropped all other package managers. While I
>  really like straight.el and could see some advantages with others like
>  elget, the additonal overheads and maintenance I found with using
>  these alternatives became hard to justify. I do tend to use
>  use-package quite a bit (but leverage off the :custom stanza within
>  that macro to ensure it leverages the built-in custom system). 
> 
> - I setup package.el such that it gives priority to GNU ELPA, then
>  NONGNU elpa, then MELPA. I try hard to minimise my use of melpa, but
>  need it for a couple of core packages, such as magit.
> 
> - I prefer built-in or core emacs packages over external
>  alternatives. For example, I use eglot rather than lsp-mode,
>  project.el rather than projectile etc. It is quite amazing how eglot
>  and the whole LSP stuff has simplified things for configuraiton a good
>  coding environment. 
> 
> - I use both GNUS and mu4e for email. I like them both. I was a VM user
>  for many years, but found it less useful once everything moved to an
>  imap based setup (I always found VM's imap support unreliable and
>  slow). I find the combination of mu4e, isync and smtp.el works well
>  for me.
> 
> - Really enjoying vertico, corfu and embark as the basis for my
>  completions setup. I no longer use company, helm or ivy. 
> 
> - The biggest departure I make from standard Emacs is evil mode. I
>  simply prefer modal editing and love the benefits of having an editing
>  a navigation and a 'visual' mode and all the simplicity that brings
>  with respect to key bindings. Despite many years (decades even) of
>  standard Emacs bindings, I still missed my VI based workflow and now
>  with evil mode, I have it back. It does have its own limitations and
>  quirks, but it works well for me.
> 
> I think that last statement is the core benefit of Emacs. I primarily
> use and love emacs because it can be the editor I want and work how I
> want rather than forcing me to work how it thinks I shold work. However,
> it also encompasses the experiemnce and originality of thousands of
> other users, providing great access to existing wheels we can learn to
> leverage. 
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