Post #4200460

2026-07-29 13:23 UTC

@jpaskaruk@growers.social the readme at https://github.com/doomemacs/core is a pretty good intro! you pretty much install a recent emacs, clone their config into your home directory, run one command, and it boots up. config distros like these are very reconfigurable so you can layer your own lisp on top of theirs fairly easily, so long as you use their recommended mechanisms (all of which are a fair bit easier than the emacs defaults). you also get elisp native compilation and JIT for free. spacemacs is older and slower, but it might be a little easier to start with: https://www.spacemacs.org/ a lot of what’s in Doom Emacs (IE using the spacebar as the main interaction key) was inspired by spacemacs, and it still has better documentation sometimes emacs is also self-documenting, so you can eventually ask it what a key combo does, and both the config distros include pop-up help too. of course the docs are derived from Lisp comment blocks so quality varies but sometimes it’s pretty good

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@zzt@mas.to 2026-07-29 13:30

@jpaskaruk@growers.social anyway re: “the point of the thing”, emacs is a VM that predates the concept of a VM that runs a language specialized for building editors and TUI apps someone used that VM and language to implement vim, then lots of people took the combination and ran with it and played to the strengths of both other people used that same VM to build a really good git interface (magit, included in both config distros, highly recommended), the window manager I use (EXWM), a calculator, a bunch of IDE shit I tend to avoid now but it’s there (emacs without that stuff is just very very fast), tools for mass editing files, tools for treating directories like text files to edit, powerful search I realize vim has some of this stuff too, but emacs is a fundamentally different architecture that I like

Open ##4200459