Bowmansarrow

Sometimes, real life gets in the way of progress. That has happened to me, unfortunately, so I'm late on posting progress on the Crafted Emacs rewrite. I have made a bit of progress to get the project more polished and ready for a “beta” release, and I think I'm almost there.

Since the last update, I have been working more on the documentation side of things. I have rewritten the project README file, I have added a “Getting Started” guide (which is still incomplete), I have updated the Info manual, I have removed a lot of “old” stuff that won't be making it into the next “version” of Crafted Emacs.

I had moved to a Guix virtual machine for development purposes, I thought that might be an interesting experience as well as give me an opportunity to test integration using guix-home to install Emacs packages and configure them with Crafted Emacs. That turned out to be more frustrating for me and I have since abandonded that virtual machine. I went back to my trusty Vagrant configuration. On the way I found out the compat library isn't built-in enough to Emacs, so I had to add code to make sure it gets installed before I start using it. The crafted-init-config.el handles that now. Another odd behavior I ran into, it seemed like the list of selected packages was not being saved in the custom-file. I added a hook to handle that after Emacs finishes initialization. That might be a little fragile as I'm using an internal package.el function, however that function, when called, will put itself in the after-init-hook, so I feel less bad about it. Another tweak, setting the load-prefer-newer was added to crafted-default-config.el; still baffled why this needs to be set to t at all, I feel like it should be the default. I'm sure the Emacs maintainers have a good reason though. And I started work on some examples as well. Over time, I'm sure I'll think of other examples to include there as well. For the moment, there is just one, and it matches what is in the startup guide.

If you are feeling adventurous, or are running Emacs 29 and want to use the new --init-directory command line to test Crafted Emacs V2, your feedback would be welcome. Please read through the documentation as a lot has changed. Also, I'm still making changes, so no guarantees I won't break something – it is still alpha level code at the moment.

I feel like I keep saying this, but more to follow next month. And, I do feel like I'm getting closer to something I could turn into a beta, just not yet.

Happy Crafting!

#emacs