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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This is well written, and I learned stuff (the trailing spaces and end-of-buffer indicators).

Modern Emacs configurations tend to revolve around use-package, which wraps up the package installer logic at the end of this configuration and makes it somewhat declarative. Just going by the standards of r/emacs or places like that, it'd be unusual to see a .emacs that didn't ultimately boil down to a bunch of use-package clauses configuring stuff like LSP, Magit, company, ivy, and yasnippet.

If I was going to add just one thing to this starter configuration, it'd be a single example of use-package, to make it clear how to add and configure a package the user just read about online --- it's just such a big part of how Emacs is used now.

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+1 for use-package being the only thing that's missing. I'm delighted at how nice this guy makes Emacs look and work with only built-ins (ido in Emacs 27, and fido-veritcal in Emacs 28 go a long way to increasing Emacs' ergonomics imo) but since they're reaching for some installed packages, might as well throw use-package in there to foster further growth.

(If I'm not mistaken, use-package almost made it into upstream Emacs, but they're blocked because one company won't give away the copyright for one contributor to use-package to enable it to be added to Emacs. For the larger Emacs community, I hope that happens soon!)

That problem is solved now, it's going to be added to emacs. See:

https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package/issues/282

Great news.

There will also be icomplete-vertical. Maybe not as good as community/userspace solutions, but many built-ins saw tons of usability improvements. Aside from one or two things, project.el now covers most of the important projectile functionalities. And magit is magit, but for simple things vc.el might be enough. Also the amazing Modus themes finally stopped my theme hopping.

In elisp side, the generic seq.el/map.el and new string functions are now almost enough to not need reaching out to "missing stdlib" such as dash.el/s.el etc.

i actually think icomplete-vertical is great—except one thing. the rotation of candidates i find more visually disturbing than what vertico or selectrum does. +100x for modus’ being amazing. cheers to prot on his great work

If I may, my conf https://github.com/Nathan-Furnal/dotemacs uses use-package quite extensively with lots of things I learned along the way. It's a bit large since I have anything from programming to writing in there but it's mine =)

On this topic, I'd like to mention my own "alternative" to use-package, setup.el: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SetupEl. I write "alternative" in quotes, because it is not really the same thing, just a different way to tackle the issue of using a generic macro to simplify a personal configuration. While use-package has a flat, declaraive structure (for some package, these are my hook, this is the code to run before, this is the code to run after, ...), setup provides a few context sensitive macros that get expanded to regular code. That means you can mix in regular logic a lot easier, and the implementation is far simpler.

Also it is avalaible on GNU ELPA, so you don't need to configure MELPA before downloading it.

> to make it clear how to add and configure a package the user just read about online

The how to configure part would be interesting. Because you literaly never know. Perhaps it's a setq? Or an add-hook? Or a function call? Or a major edit mode? Or a minor edit mode? Or perhaps setq-default? Or setting a variable to t, or perhaps to 1, or perhaps to some other value? Or...

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