Learn Elisp the Hard Way (2011)

Re:Learn Elisp the Hard Way (2011) by rhaps0dy on Monday January 31, 2022 @11:58AM (#30150249)

I think a distribution is just much more convenient, mostly because of package discovery and the time it takes to set things up. Other people take care of making your editing experience nice, and some things just take a long time to get working otherwise.

That said, it's true that you can in principle do the same thing yourself :)

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Re:Learn Elisp the Hard Way (2011) by reddit_clone on Monday January 31, 2022 @12:23PM (#30150701)

That is my experience as well. I had a messy, ball of mud .emacs file for a couple of decades.

When I found Doom, I dropped my .emacs and it became just a few dozen lines of org/templates config. The rest is all doom.

I even adopted Vi (A lifelong Vi avoider..) and am getting proficient with it.

Sometimes you want to get your hands dirty and configure everything. Sometimes you adopt something that is created and supported by experts and just enjoy it. Both are fine I guess.

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Re:Learn Elisp the Hard Way (2011) by AndroidKitKat on Monday January 31, 2022 @12:13PM (#30150538)

I think if I were to start over learning Emacs (I only really started using it about 6 months ago), I would have decided to choose a distro only for package discovery. I haven't found myself really pining for new functionality, but perhaps I am completely oblivious to things I'm missing. I've only really added magit to Emacs since I hated working with git on the command line.

I still imagine I would have found myself just finding what packages I like and adding them to a "pure" Emacs, since I've done that for the other tools I use on a day-to-day basis.

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