Planning the New Emacs from Scratch

I’ve been foreshadowing this for a while, but now it’s finally time:

I’m going to create a new Emacs From Scratch series to focus on configuring Emacs using only what comes “in the box” while also teaching Emacs Lisp!

The goal here is to show how much better you can make Emacs without even pulling in any community packages (including use-package). Once you learn enough about configuring Emacs using the things that come with it, you’ll be in a much better position to decide whether community packages are worth using!

Today I’d like your help in deciding what features of Emacs we can cover and potentially what order we should cover them in.

Last time I made a few mistakes:

• Copying and pasting from my own config without much testing
• Not preparing adequate show notes
• Not really showing how Emacs configuration actually works

I also recorded all episodes as live streams which were around 1 hour each!

Let’s discuss the topics to cover in this series.

I’m particularly interested to hear the parts of configuring Emacs that weren’t so clear to you at first so that I can make sure to cover them!

• Where init.el lives
• How to re-evaluate configuration snippets as you write them
• How to get help (maybe info system, definitely describe-* functions
• check-parens

• Theme
• Fonts
• Turning off or improving various UI elements

It’s not very hard to make the mode line look better!

• Minimal presentation
• Maybe icons for modes (emoji)

• global-set-key, define-key
• cua-mode

• indentation / tabs
• smart tabs
• completion-in-region (maybe)
• electric-pair-mode
• auto-indent
• dabbrev, hippie-expand, skeletons
• per-file type settings
• hooks (configuring a buffer when a mode is loaded) – also writing functions for hooks
• dir-locals
• spell checking / flyspell
• flymake
• etags / tags files
• xref

• Pick a better completion system
• Look into completion-styles

term-mode / ansi-term and/or eshell?

• eshell as primary, term or ansi as secondary if needed
• configure prompt, history, aliases
• configuring visual commands for eshell for automatic term-mode invocation
• eshell on Windows (shell-mode Windows shells)

Is there anything we can talk about regarding Org Mode or should I make an entire series on that to go really in depth?

• Improving Org Mode file appearance with in-the-box config

What happens when things go wrong?

OK, I know how to config, now what does a well-organized config look like?

• outline-minor-mode?
• Making your configuration work across multiple machines / OSes
• Having a private.el
• Startup performance (loading packages only at the right time, measuring startup performance, etc)
• Compiling your Emacs config to bytecode (even native?) for faster startup (on save hooks?)
• popup management (display-buffer-alist?)

• tab-bar-mode
• desktop-save-mode (session management)

• M-x compile (ansi colors, recompile, functions to call after compile)
• Using gdb within Emacs
• direnv with guix shell
• crdt.el on live stream?
• regular expressions in Emacs (especially rx)
• search and replace
• rectangle editing