Thanks for the detailed reply! I think most Guix hackers are so used to working directly with a git branch that we forget to cater for "power users" who just want some small edits here and there.

Guix is very hackable as you mention, but with a very different design from e.g. Gentoo, where you can easily override anything in /etc/portage.

I like your 'guix edit' idea; the command already exists, but it opens a read-only copy of the Guix source code by default... It would be really nice to add a tutorial of sorts to it and make it interactive.

Note there is an Emacs 'yasnippet' that fills out part of the commit message: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/guix.html#The-Perfect-S...

I agree that the onboarding story could be better. If emacs-guix could guide a user all the way from 'guix edit' to 'git send-email' that would be nothing short of incredible.

Thanks for your thoughts. :-)