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Emacs From Scratch
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Don't start from scratch, you'll give up long before you get a half decent config. Instead use a "distro" like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs.
If you really want to, get a copy of Mastering Emacs. Afaik it's the best resource around.
A distro adds extra layers of complexity. If you want to change something you need to know not only how emacs vanilla works, but also specifically how to adapt for your distro.
I found doom fast and pretty powerful out of the box but when I wanted to customize it a bit and saw the mostly unwritten documentation and how it makes everything much more complicated I gave up and returned to my own config.
IMO that's not realistic for beginners.
I don't think a beginner that's just starting to learn a tool is likely to make significant modifications any time soon. I've been using doom for like 10 years and so far I've only needed to make small changes.
And when they try to change anything, they'll search "how to set shortcut in doom Emacs" and immediately get the correct answer. If they search for "how to set shortcut in Emacs" they'll get 50 different methods using 10 different package managers.
And besides that. Learning how to make small modifications to Doom is incomparably easier than building a whole config from scratch. I quit Emacs the first time exactly because of that massive hurdle.
I used emacs for at least as long before I started REALLY using emacs. And you do that with elisp.
@highduc @Shareni doomemacs and spacemacs are just too complicated, they should make use of the simpler configurations.