Many years ago, I was going about my business on some reddit forum or whatnot looking for productivity tips. I stumbled upon the charismatic Morpheus, or was it Morph-e-lisp. He offered me the purple pill and 1000s of hours later I was in deep. I created the perfect IDE, text editor, graphing tool, anything-you-can-think-of swiss-army knife. Perfect, at least, insofar as it met my own needs. I call it tug/emacs.
It has served me well these years, but it needs some performance tuning, housekeeping, and the truth is I just can’t justify the effort any longer when there are such stellar OSS projects like Doom and Spacemacs having so many more eyes and loving hands on them.
This next iteration of my personal emacs is simply the awesome Doom Emacs with some minor config of my own, i.e. this project.
The priorities of this flavour are:
- maintenance to be as light touch as possible
- it should be snappy, performing well enough to avoid reaching for VS Code or gasp Stickies when I need to get something down in a pinch
- it needs to run well on MacOS and Linux
- it should aspire to be as feature-rich as tug/emacs
A work-in-progress, and always will be. Feel free to take all or part of it if you find it useful. Any feedback most welcome.
If you find some or all of this useful, you are welcome to use it. First you’ll need Doom Emacs, follow the documentation there for custom config, you can simply apply the init.el, package.el, config.el from this project, or whatever bits and pieces within that you may find useful.
There are a few “solved problems” from tug/emacs worthy of porting in to this project
- [-] auto-hide on initial launch on MacOS (simulated server behaviour)
- [ ] isolate package config technique (avoids one small package error in init borking the whole emacs setup - this thingy has earned its weight in gold for me over the years)
- [ ] fix gpg hanging the whole system on save on newer versions of Emacs and GnuPG
- [ ] Evil / Emacs insert mode hybrid key binds (just the snappier ones e.g. C-k for kill-line is infinitely kinder on the fingers than the vim equivalent
- [ ] Evil-surround
- [ ] beautify and prettify
- [ ] ledger-mode
- [ ] PlantUML markup for inline / export diagrams
- [ ] Dynamic font/window size based on screen size / DPI
- [ ] aggressive-indent-mode
- [ ] Orgmode save wrapper - on manual save, persist all org buffers and generate agenda in bg
- [ ] pcre2el for perl regular expressions
- [ ] language modes, add as we go probs (rust, swift, typescript, yaml, go, ..)
There will probably be a few more, and hey, maybe we’ll find one or two of the resource hogs that plagued tug/emacs along the way!