Crafted Emacs

Contents

1. Description - What is this anyway?
2. Philosophy
   1. Goals
   2. Principles
3. Getting Started
4. Contributing
5. Troubleshooting
6. License

Description - What is this anyway?

Crafted Emacs is an attempt to simplify creating a configuration for Emacs. It is not intended to provide all possible configuration for every eventuality. We do envision it being a nice baseline for users who want to create their own Emacs configuration. As a user develops their skill with Emacs Lisp and configuring Emacs in general, we anticipate such a person may end up rewriting their configuration to the point they are no longer using Crafted Emacs. This is an exciting possibility to us, and a journey worth taking!

Philosophy

It is our opinion your configuration is, well, yours! We expect you to own your configuration, but maybe we can help get you started. In the space of “starter kits” for Emacs, we really take to heart the word “starter”, in the sense we help you start your configuration. We aren’t the kitchen sink and we don’t provide every possible configuration. That’s your job. It’s YOUR configuration.

Goals

• No new configuration system, macros, layers etc. Almost everything is straight Emacs Lisp.
• Provide some pre-configured modules to shorten the time it takes to build a nice working configuration.
• Customizations in the modules we provide should be opt-in by default to avoid surprising behavior.
• Not a turn-key/kitchen sink solution. There will be holes the user must fill.
• Fewer packages rather than more; we prefer to stay closer to built-in functionality as much as possible.
• Correctness is important, as we expect people who might be new to Emacs Lisp to learn from what we have written. We prefer customize-set-variable instead of setq for defcustom values as an example.
• Documentation is thorough, complete, and easy to find. There is an info manual for Crafted Emacs distributed with the source.

Principles

Minimal, modular configuration

The core configuration only sets up Emacs to have a cleaner presentation with sensible defaults. It is up to the user to decide which crafted-* modules to load.

Configuration modules depend on other modules and the base configuration as little as possible.

The implication is that someone should be able to install or copy code from a crafted-* module into their own configuration without using Crafted Emacs.

Prioritize built-in Emacs functionality

Where possible, we leverage built-in Emacs functionality instead of external packages. When we choose external packages, we prefer those which are layered on top of existing, built-in, functionality. For example:

• project.el instead of Projectile
• tab-bar-mode instead of Perspective.el, persp-mode, eyebrowse, etc
• eglot instead of lsp-mode (because eglot prioritizes built-in functionality)

Can be integrated with a Guix configuration

It should be possible to customize aspects of the Crafted Emacs configuration inside of a Guix Home configuration so that things like font sizes, themes, etc can be system-specific.

It can also use packages installed via the Guix package manager instead of package.el.

Helps you learn Emacs Lisp

Instead of providing a higher-level configuration system out of the box like other Emacs configurations, we follow standard Emacs Lisp patterns so that you can learn by reading the configuration. We do our best to provide clear comments where necessary to help the reader understand our choices and how the code works.

Reversible

We recognize not everyone will agree with our decisions, so each customization should be easily reversible in the users configuration file.

Getting Started

Generally, getting started with Crafted Emacs is as simple as cloning the project from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs

After cloning the Crafted Emacs repo, to use the modules, you need to add the following to your configuration:

;; This assumes you cloned Crafted Emacs in you home directory, if you
;; didn't, make sure to update the path to correctly reflect the
;; location on your system.
(load "~/crafted-emacs/modules/crafted-init-config")

This adds the crafted-emacs/modules folder to the load-path. If you need to have packages installed, look for modules ending with *-packages.el, if you only want the configuration, then the modules ending with *-config.el will be what you want.

For more detailed examples, see the Getting Started Guide. There are also examples in the crafted-emacs/examples folder.

Contributing

This is a community-run modular Emacs configuration, for which we appreciate feedback in the form of issues and pull requests. Feel free to open an issue prior to opening a pull request if you’re not certain your idea is in the spirit of the Principles.

If you enjoy crafting your computing experience, join the SystemCrafters community!

Contributing Tips for Elisp

• Prefer customize-set-variable instead of setq for defcustom values. This helps make sure constructors or setters attached to the variable are run when the value is set.
• Provide defcustom variables for things we expect the user to modify and make sure it is in the appropriate group.
• Provide verbose doc-strings for defvar, defcustom, defun, defmacro, etc to clearly document what is going on.
• Make sure to follow doc-string guidelines (see Documentation Tips or elisp#Documentation Tips)
• Add comments for blocks of code, especially to describe why the code is present, or the intention. These comments serve as documentation when reading the code where a doc-string is not an option.
• Add or update documentation in the docs folder. Especially for new modules, please provide the info file with your PR. (see Contributing Documentation)
• If your PR addresses an issue, whether it closes or fixes the issue, or is just related to it, please add the issue number in your commit message or the description of your PR so they can be linked together.

Contributing Tips for Issues

We welcome your questions and ideas, please open an issue if you have one!

Pease keep in mind, we only support released versions of Emacs. Development versions of Emacs may have incompatibilities, defects or incomplete features. Trying to support development versions of Emacs is like shooting at a moving target; not impossible, but a lot more difficult than may be expected. Applying changes to Crafted Emacs to accomodate development versions of Emacs may break things for those who use a released version.

• If you feel there is a defect with what we provide, please provide the steps necessary to reproduce the issue. A minimal configuration, a link to your configuration, or a gist/pastebin link or similar is appreciated to help us work toward a solution together.
• If you feel there is a missing feature, please describe your feature in as much detail as possible so we understand your request.
• If you have a question, be as specific as possible so we can understand how to help you as best we can.
• PRs to address any of the issues you might raise are appreciated and encouraged! If you don’t provide one, please be patient with us, it may take longer to fix an issue or provide a missing feature. That being said, please feel free to check on the status of issues from time to time if it has been a while since the last activity.

Troubleshooting

Some tips when things don’t seem to work right.

A package (suddenly?) fails to work

This scenario happened frequently when upgrading to Emacs 28. It also may occur in other scenarios as well. Usually, you will see some message indicating some symbol is void or some function or command does not exist. More often than not, the package maintainer is using a feature from another package which has not yet been released. The new feature is available in the development version of the package however.

Here are some example issues where things went wrong:

• Wrong number of arguments error
• Example config doesn’t start
• there are some bugs in package “helpful”

Here are some strategies:

• Check the code on the package source control page (ie GitHub, GitLab or whatever), and make sure the missing code is present on the master branch.
• Look at the code associated with the released version (you need to look at the most recent tag for this). If the code is missing there, ask the maintainer for a new release. Often, there are years between releases of Emacs packages, but that depends completely on the package maintainer. Some of them release more frequently, others only on request.

Once you have followed the steps above, you can choose to take one of these actions in your configuration:

• Option 1
  • Use M-x package-list-packages to display the list of packages.
  • Find the package in the list which doesn’t work for you, it will have either the installed or dependency status.
  • Press the enter key to get more details on the package an look near the bottom of the metadata, you should see a line with “Other Versions”. Choose the development version - it will have a version number that looks like a date and the text (melpa) next to it. Press enter on this version.
  • Following the step above will take you to the same package but from the MELPA repository, and you’ll see a button at the top labeled Install. Click this button.
  • Optionally you can go back to the list of packages, find previous installed version, press the letter ‘D’ and then the letter ‘X’ to uninstall that version.
  • Restart Emacs
• Option 2
  • Edit your early-init.el file, if you are using one. If you aren’t using one, add the code mentioned next before any calls to package-initialize or package-install-selected-packages.
  • Add a line similar to this to pin the offending package to MELPA (make sure to replace package-name with the name of the actual package):

    (add-to-list 'package-pinned-packages (cons 'package-name "melpa"))
            

  • Use M-x package-list-packages to display the list of packages.
  • Find the package in the list, press the letter ‘D’ and the letter ‘X’ to uninstall that package.
  • Restart Emacs, the package should be installed from MELPA thus using the development version of the package instead of the released version.

Regardless, always feel free to open an issue here and we can help you out. Please be as complete as possible in your description of the problem. Include any stack traces Emacs provides (ie start Emacs with: emacs --debug-init), mention the version number of the package you are installing, and anything you might have tried but which didn’t work for you.

License

This code is licensed under the MIT License. Why? So you can copy the code from this configuration!

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