Newcomers to Emacs and Emacs configurations



I like to look at the Emacs subreddit and something I’ve noticed recently is people asking “should I start by writing my own Emacs config, or should I use this or that prepackaged one?” There is also this new config generator published by Philip Kaludercic. I find implicit in these the idea that one’s init.el is a singular product. To start using Emacs, newcomers seem to think, you need to couple it with a completed init.el, and so there is the question of writing your own or using one someone else has written. I think that an appropriate analogy is certain shell scripts. If you want to burn backups to DVDs you might download someone’s DVD burning shell script which tries to make that easy, or you might write your own. In both cases, you are likely to want to tweak the script after you’ve started using it, but there is nevertheless a discrete point at which you go from having part of a script and not being able to burn DVDs, to having a completed script and now being able to burn DVDs. Similarly, the idea that you can’t start using Emacs until you couple it with an init.el is like thinking that there is a process of producing or downloading an init.el, and only after that can you begin using Emacs.
This thinking makes sense if you’re developing one of the large Emacs configuration frameworks like Spacemacs or Doom Emacs. The people behind those projects are seeking to build something quite different from Emacs, using Emacs as a base, and for many people using that new, quite different thing is preferable to using Emacs. Then indeed, until you’ve finished developing your configuration framework’s init.el to a degree that you’re ready to release version 0.1 of your framework, you haven’t got something that’s ready to use. Like the shell script, there’s a discrete point after which you have a product, and there’s lots of labour that must precede it. (I think it’s pretty cool that Emacs is flexible enough to be something on its own and also a base for these projects.)
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