Emacspeak discussion list

[Tim Cross <theophilusx AT gmail.com>]

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.