Is there a good eMacs from scratch guide?

I’m annoyed at how slow spacemacs is to start up. Should I start a fresh install of emacs and manually set everything up? Should I try doom emacs instead? I use evil mode and mostly live in org-mode.

If start-up time is your problem, by all means use Doom. It takes under 1s to load 170+ packages on a 10yo laptop.

Step 1: stop calling it eMacs. It's not SystemD either.

https://youtu.be/74zOY-vgkyw Side note: startup time doesn’t really matter. Most people just open up emacs once and then live in it. If you are closing out of it a lot then use the emacs daemon

even worse: eMacs existed: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple\_eMac

I blame my iPhone keyboard sorry!

maybe try using emacsclient. doom emacs is also pretty good.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7bBJ4ZO7BXjSZ

I started with spacemacs a few years ago and eventually went vanilla. Honestly the best way to go about it is to look at many different sources for your problems. There are a billion ways to set up a workflow In Emacs and I’ve personally never found a single resource which is even close to comprehensive. Try browsing some of the recent posts here or searching for Emacs blogs to see what people are using as a jumping off point. Mastering Emacs and SystemCrafters are also good resources. As far as startup time goes, you could run Emacs as a server via systemd or try byte compilation.

> ... use Doom. It takes under 1s to load 170+ packages ... not on MS Windows and not on WSL2, but this is a MS Windows issue

So \*that's\* the culprit. I was wondering why I kept seeing that misspelling among people who actually use the software. I'll stop being so judgmental now.

my impression is that various degrees of non-instantaneous startup times is fairly common in emacs depending on how many packages you have loaded. the standard solution to this is to launch it as a server and then every subsequent launch just connects to that server. I run doom emacs and love it (had a lot of frustration with spacemacs), but i've got enough packages loading that startup isn't as fast as i want it. I switched to running emacs as a server and now my initial startup is "too slow", but every subsequent time i launch it is _very_ fast. my typical workflow is to launch a new emacs window (os "window" not emacs "window") for each project from the command line. I dunno if doom will fix any of your startup speed issues, but I've read posts from folks who seem to know what they're talking about, suggesting that the doom implementation is way more inline with how emacs stuff "should" be implemented and that there are a number of positive follow-on effects from that. The doom community has been very helpful and nice and the implementation seems _very_ good in my opinion.

Best thing to do create step by step your own config and learn elisp/lisp along the way. With that you can easily understand ins and outs of emacs and create your own functions and macros with ease. You can always look famous emacs distros or packages in order to understand how they did it.

I’ve used spacemacs for 3 years but never written emacs that way until today! Damn keyboard!

If you are looking for a guide, the most updated one I’ve found it is [Mastering Emacs](https://www.masteringemacs.org). You can read for free the first three chapters and it’s definitely very well written. I see the value in it since you’ll get a condensed-by-experience structured guide, but to be fair I didn’t buy it since I find it a bit overpriced considering the wonderful free courses by [System Crafters](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7bBJ4ZO7BXjSZ) and the fact that it lacks totally Evil Mode and distribution like Doom or Spacemacs.

Do you know about the interactive tutorial? That is enough to get hooked.

Number one: it's not eMacs. It's emacs. Number two: you'll have access to lots more guides and videos if you use the vanilla build and add evil yourself. Number three: come back in a couple of years and let us know how it's going :) Seriously, I've been using emacs almost every day for most of my work since 1988. gnu, xemacs, terminal, GUI, Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux, jail-broken iPad, mail app, terminal. I'm not a programmer (ASIC design) although I do program (including some elisp functions) so it's sometimes hard to find what I need. With all of this, I probably know about 25% of what it can do. At least once a year I find some amazing new feature - that's usually been around at least a decade. I still can't believe how long it took me to discover ediff and tie it into version control (and no, I don't use git - which also makes life frustrating. Anyway, good luck.

My iPhone has done this forever. I'm really unsure why.

I second system crafters. Not only does he go through setting up the standard emacs config. He also has videos to show you how to basically set up EVERYTHING on your desktop in emacs.

A shameless plug for [emacs-groundup](https://gitlab.com/public-repositories/emacs-groundup) - easy to get started with, and easy to hack when you're ready !

Because there was once an Apple product called eMac.

This config is inspired by doom emacs and spacemacs, except that it is clunky and written by an elisp quasi-illiterate Haha! This made me chuckle

> This config is inspired by doom emacs and spacemacs, except that it is clunky and written by an elisp quasi-illiterate the fun thing is (at least) Doom was started by a person whose elisp wasn't perfect either. > Disclaimer: I am not an elisp ninja jedi guru aficionado buzzword-guzzler. https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/commit/8a6f973c3ed63f4abf73ef21e2173ddc602b524d

> ... many users simply use emacs as a tool and learn the bare minimum elisp they need to get by (or, like me, they adopt an elisp learning curve with an excruciatingly large time constant in the order of 10s if not 100s of years). :D

Yep, the Emacs From Scratch series from System Crafters looks excellent, and definitely a good starting place. Other good starting places is looking at existing configs which are a bit simpler than doom or spacemacs which have their whole systems/frameworks. [Emacs Prelude](https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude) is one such config. And potentially [my config](https://github.com/jimeh/.emacs.d) too which was inspired by Prelude. Both have very little magic/custom systems, and are more or less just plain emacs lisp. Or there’s even simpler things like [ap.el](https://github.com/alphapapa/ap.el).