re: Emacs from Scratch

Like @hedy I started to fiddle with Emacs out of curiosity and to check out something new.

re: emacs from scratch

But as it seems most people start with DoomEmacs or SpacEmacs to begin with. But because I had absolutely no idea about Emacs at all and wanted to learn from the ground up I chose to build up my Emacs from Scratch. I followed the videos from SystemCrafters YouTube playlist:

Emacs from Scratch (SystemCrafters Youtube)

I played two times with Emacs. Once for a month and the last time for around 1 1/2 month until beginning of November.

Emacs surely is a rabbit hole and a lot of fun to tinker with. I built up my configuration mainly from the videos as a base and then added mu4e, elpher, Mastodon.el, Org-Roam and some other little things to have a full Emacs system. I used EVIL mode but some plugins don't support it (like Mastodon.el), which I don't like.

I got a fairly complete system but Emacs still seems to cumbersome for me as a decades long vim user. Vim fits better to my workflow because I'm mainly in the command line and the terminal (never checked Emacs in the CLI) and a TUI editor is simply easier to integrate in my TUI/CLI applications like NeoMutt or tut (Mastodon client for the terminal) and others. So I went back fulltime to NeoVim.

Another thing that bothered me with Emacs is that there are always some kind of problems to solve. I'm not sure how I solved this, but the link completion in Org-Roam don't seem to work all the time for example. I'm still not sure what the problem was.

But as a beginning Emacs user I would advise people to build their Emacs configuration from scratch after some tutorial like the one above to learn all the little gizmos (although it's impossible to learn all of Emacs). Of course you have to dive into elisp a little :)

All in all - Have fun!

-fab-

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