Emacs Bedrock 2.0

14 hours ago (lambdaland.org)

Very nice presentation and project.

From the README of the linked repo:

"When I started learning Emacs, my dad gave me his .emacs file. (That's what we used back in ye olden days instead of .emacs.d/init.el and stuff.) I used it without modification for many years. Eventually I learned how to write my own functions and customizations. This package aims to give other users a similar experience. When someone comes to me and expresses their desire to learn Emacs, I can point them at this to help them get over the initial hump, but not coddle them so much that they're afraid or unable to change things to their liking."

  • I distinctly remember my dad telling my "my .emacs file is older than you are." I'm 41!

    • People attack Stallman for some things but I guess I'm happy GNU exists and Emacs might be the most visible example

> Remove wgrep in favor of built-in grep-change-to-grep-edit-mode.

TIL! I might be able to remove my wgrep too. I love those highly crafted starter kits, they are full of gems.

Thank you!

Well, I guess I'm at that point in my two-year cycle where I alternate between BBEdit and Emacs as my daily driver...

I am in my 10 years cycle in which I will go back to emacs. Emacs is so powerful but has a different terminology, and vscode was so easy and snappy...so I got accustomed to VSCode, but it is becoming slower and it has a lot of telemetry attached to it.

Is it time to give emacs another try

Thank you for starting the blog post with reminding what the project is.

So many blogs (and newsletters for that sake) assume the reader knows and remembers what they are about

> Bedrock now uses the lexical-binding: t cookie in all its .el files.

This is the right thing to do if you wrote your .el files recently and assumed lexical-binding was true and you understand the implications thereof.

OTOH if your .el files are older and written before lexical binding was possible, it's best to set the cookies of those files to nil. Or go over them with a fine-toothed comb and rewrite them (if necessary) for lexical binding.

  • > and you understand the implications thereof

    Isn’t lexical binding the default in more or less all other programming languages?

    So for people who don’t understand the implications, and wrote their .el files recently, lexical binding is likely less surprising behavior than the alternative?

Isn’t eMacs just a text editor like vim or nano?

  • Hah, is this a troll? It’s a lot older than those editors.

    EMACS started as Eugene Ciccareli’ init file for the TECO editor (which was also a programming language) around 1976. Hence the name (Eugene‘s Macros). It was later rewritten in Lisp for Multics, the MIT Lisp Machine (I worked on one for the Xerox lisp machine as well), and later Unix (in those cases using lisp only as an extension language)

    • > Hence the name (Eugene‘s Macros)

      Interesting, do you have a source for this? I’ve always read that it stood for Editor MACros, are you saying this is a backronym?

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  • > Isn’t eMacs just a text editor like vim or nano?

    For a start it's either spelled "Emacs" or "EMACS", and definitely not "eMacs".

    Then it's closer to an OS than an editor.

    • > For a start it's either spelled "Emacs" or "EMACS", and definitely not "eMacs".

      Everyone knows that, but iOS autocorrects Emacs -> eMacs because Apple used to sell a product called "eMac".