A minimal customization that I can borrow

Hi, New to Emacs and not a programmer. I can't invest in learning emacs in entirety at this time but I've begun using org-mode and really liking it. I will invest more as I find time. Currently, only one thing bugs me: Emacs looks terrible. All the customization posts and resources are in-depth. I only want a better look. I don't want anything else, no keybindings nothing. Just regular emacs/org-mode that looks nicer (e.g., a dark theme, some prettier font maybe, etc.). So, I want to borrow someone else's minimal (just better looks) customization. I don't know how to implement it but I hope it's just a matter of replacing a vanilla file with the borrowed one or pasting some code in one of the vanilla files. Believe me I'm trying to learn it all but in my current workload there's like several years before I can get to the point of customizing it myself. Thanks! EDIT: Wow, so many great resources, thank you all very much!

https://github.com/rougier/elegant-emacs

I wrote this for non-programmers https://lucidmanager.org/tags/emacs/

you could start using Doom Emacs, if you want to learn emacs. It already comes pretty awesome out of the box, also, has 82 pre-install themes https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs

Newer versions of emacs have the `modus` themes built in, which I think look very nice (especially for org mode). Here's my setup: dark mode by default, toggle light mode with f5, a few tweaks to the theme options: (progn (setq modus-themes-subtle-line-numbers t modus-themes-syntax '(alt-syntax faint) modus-themes-diffs 'desaturated modus-themes-bold-constructs nil) (bind-key "<f5>" 'modus-themes-toggle) (load-theme 'modus-vivendi)) For the font, I'm on mac and have installed the [SF Mono font](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/) (it's offered by Apple) which I think looks nice, though it is still 'programmer-y'. (custom-set-faces '(default ((t (:height 150 :family "SF Mono")))))

Vanillia Emacs has lots of builtin color themes. My favorite theme is `deeper-blue` which looks nice in BOTH modern terminal (kitty) and old terminal (rxvt). You could `M-x load-theme` and choose `deeper-blue`, or just add one line into your emacs setup, ```lisp (load-theme 'deeper-blue) ```

i didnt realize these were baked in now, time to check em out!

Try M-x customize-theme It'll give you a menu of installed themes, you can try them out by just clicking on them, and enable a theme for future sessions by just saving the buffer (C-x C-s) You can look for and install new themes by M-x package-list-packages, just search the resulting buffer for the word theme (C-s theme). You should add the below to the top of your init.el before doing this though, as the packages are fetched from online package archives and emacs doesn't know about those archives by default. (require 'package) (setq package-archives '(("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/") ("nongnu" . "https://elpa.nongnu.org/nongnu/") ("melpa" . "http://melpa.org/packages/"))) (package-initialize)

You can do this from the menus. You don't even need a config file.

Have you had a look at doom emacs? Or Spacemacs? I am not a programmer and can only just barely do some python scripts. I ended up going with doom emacs (and evil mode) for my needs.

[Ricing up Org Mode](https://lepisma.xyz/2017/10/28/ricing-org-mode/) [Ricing up Org Mode : A Beautiful Writing Environment](https://lucidmanager.org/productivity/ricing-org-mode/) [Prettifying Org Mode](https://irreal.org/blog/?p=9910) [Beautifying Org Mode in Emacs](https://zzamboni.org/post/beautifying-org-mode-in-emacs/) [Org Mode as a Word Processor](http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/orgmode-wordprocessor.html) [Sanemacs a minimal starting point for building your own config](https://sanemacs.com/)

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Do an M-x package-install doom themes (or modus themes) and then M-x load-theme on one of the doom or modus themes. Imo all doom and modus themes look pretty good. Should give you a good starting point for a better look.

Spacemacs isn't a great fit for OP's minimalism request: it adds a tremendous amount of custom functionality and bindings atop vanilla emacs. Doom is a better suggestion: it also contains multitudes, but doom's core APIs are a much thinner wrapper around vanilla emacs in some ways, and it's a lot easier to opt out of features and keybindings until all you're getting from it is some very nice visual styling and a very fast load time.

See my [lambda-emacs](https://github.com/Lambda-Emacs/lambda-emacs) and [lambda-themes](https://github.com/Lambda-Emacs/lambda-themes). They are meant for writing and readability.

https://github.com/rougier/svg-tag-mode is one ingredient, which makes org documents look more fancy. i just tried the following, for the 1st time, on Emacs 29, and it worked: ``` (straight-use-package 'svg-tag-mode) (require 'svg-tag-mode) (setq svg-tag-tags '(;; Replaces any occurence of :XXX: with a dynamic SVG tag displaying XXX ("\\(:[A-Za-z]+:\\)" . ((lambda (tag) (svg-tag-make tag :beg 1 :end -1)))) ;; Replaces any occurence of :XXX|YYY: with two adjacent dynamic SVG tags displaying XXX and YYY ("\\(:[A-Z]+\\)\|[a-zA-Z#0-9]+:" . ((lambda (tag) (svg-tag-make tag :beg 1 :inverse t :margin 0 :crop-right t)))) (":[A-Z]+\\(\|[a-zA-Z#0-9]+:\\)" . ((lambda (tag) (svg-tag-make tag :beg 1 :end -1 :margin 0 :crop-left t)))) ;; This replaces any occurence of :#TAG1:#TAG2:…:$ ($ means end of line) ;; with a dynamic collection of SVG tags. Note the # symbol in front of ;; tags. This is mandatory because Emacs cannot do regex look ahead. ("\\(:#[A-Za-z0-9]+\\)" . ((lambda (tag) (svg-tag-make tag :beg 2)))) ("\\(:#[A-Za-z0-9]+:\\)$" . ((lambda (tag) (svg-tag-make tag :beg 2 :end -1)))))) ``` I suspect u don't manage your packages with `straight.el`, so instead of that `(straight-use-package 'svg-tag-mode)`, u should use `(use-package svg-tag-mode)` (without the apostrophe). other solutions might already use `svg-tag-mode`, in which case you don't want to override their settings with this bare-bones one, so just remove it from your config then.

u/beberuhimuzik I second these settings and also to have a key binding for switching between the dark and light themes! The modus themes are not very exciting, but extremely streamlined to work well with a billion other packages, equally well in both dark and light modes!

as u/redguardtoo mentioned, Emacs comes with multiple great dark themes already. if you install https://github.com/minad/consult , then `M-x consult-theme` should even provide you live preview of the themes. (maybe u also need https://github.com/minad/vertico and `M-x vertico-mode`, to have live preview, I'm not sure)

wow, veeeery nice! i was not aware of this setup. thank you for sharing such a great work!

u/beberuhimuzik i just remembered the simplest way to get the most enhancement! https://github.com/minad/org-modern is exactly what you want probably.

Wow, almost like I asked and they delivered. Thank you!

Thanks! I don't even know what packages are and how to install. I'll probably be using just org-mode in the next 2-3 years to get my life under control. Will hopefully branch out as I find time.

Cool. Where does the code you provided go into? Where should I paste it?

Cool, will try this. Your website looks like a very valuable resource. Thank you!

Yeah, I was worried about some unnecessary complication with these other flavors of Emacs. From my research, I did get the feeling that Spacemacs is not very good. Doom seems better, but at this point, I don't have a good idea what Doom will get me on top of vanilla Emacs. I also don't know who maintains Doom and if it's future proof. So I decided to stick with vanilla until I begin to understand what the hell emacs really is.

Some of that stuff is extremely beautiful. I had done some search but never saw any themes as nice as those. Thank you!

Right, thanks, didn't know there were themes installed and found them on the menus. They mostly seem to change colors, but at least I can use a dark theme now until I figure out how to beautify emacs beyond the colors.

Nice tip, thank you. I am so new that I don't even know how to get to that line where I can type those commands, haha--will figure it out as I keep learning. But I found the installed themes in the menu.

Doom themes is different than Doom Emacs, right? I want to stay in vanilla for now. Thanks!

Shameless plug: [https://github.com/erikbackman/mindre-theme](https://github.com/erikbackman/mindre-theme) Not yet on melpa so you'll have to install it manually. Some aspects of [org-modern](https://github.com/minad/org-modern) can be seen in the screenshot.

Thanks! I did realize there are flavors and that Doom is the one that stands out but Emacs is so confusing to me that I don't really understand what Doom will get me, if it's future-proof, etc. So I started with vanilla. Maybe a poor choice, I don't know.

Cool. Thanks to your github page, I learned the other flavors beyond Doom and Spacemacs. I know Kieran Healy and it was interesting to see he has a social science starter kit. Lots of stuff to explore. Thanks!

I need a bit more experience in emacs to feel comfy trying this but those tags look very pretty and make the shortcuts much more legible. Thanks!

very pretty, will try this, thank you!

At this point I' m like "oh shit you can install packages? what for?" ahahah. But I will come back to this when I figure out a bit more. Thank you!

That page is educative. For instance: "Another popular alternative is org-superstar, which has a more restricted feature set and mainly adjusts headlines and lists. org-superstar relies on character composition, while org-modern uses text properties, which are considered more future-proof." Wow, so even this kinda stuff can affect future-proofness? Also there is a warning that this (org-modern) is in early development and probably buggy. So I'll look at some other options first.

Thanks, all written in Org mode. Feel free to leave a comment if anything is unclear.

`~/.emacs.d/init.el` if you're on linux or mac. I'm not sure what the equivalent for Windows is.

hmm... yeah I'm on win and there are two files that have "init.el" in their name but longer names. I will figure out, thanks.

Looks nice, thanks! There is only one color set, right, i.e., you can't have this as a dark theme?

Use the customize interface (M-x customize RET) then you don't need to worry about things like this. It should do The Right Thing TM.

Thanks! Correct, no dark :)

The doom themes are the themes that Doom uses, but can be used in Vanilla. I personally use both the doom themes and the doom modeline as I believe they look very nice but I use vanilla Emacs. That's why I recommended them.

if you start with vanilla you will died

Yeah?

Thanks for the explanation. I will try doom themes in my vanilla emacs.