Short update today, we renamed the Rational Emacs project to Crafted Emacs. Originally, the name was chosen because it sounded cool. However, after thinking about it, it seemed a bit elitist, as if this project was suggesting the only, well, rational way to configure Emacs, which was not the intent. There are many really good ways to configure Emacs, in fact the way you are configuring Emacs is one of them! Turn-key solutions like Prelude, Doom or Nano are also really good.

You might recall, in my last post I hinted this might happen and suggested a possible name: Crafted Emacs. This the new name. This name represents the project better in the following ways:

• It doesn't sound elitist.
• It fits better with the ideals of the System Crafters community.
• It is closer to the intent, a good starting point to craft your own configuration.

During his stream today David Wilson started the process of merging the crafed-rename branch to the master branch. Unfortunately, there were some merge conflicts, so, while he went on with his stream, I managed the merge, resolving the conflicts and pushed the result to the master branch. David renamed the project in GitHub shortly after, and now the former project Rational Emacs is retired and the new project Crafted Emacs has taken its place!

If you happened to be using Rational Emacs, thank you for giving it a try! You may want to pull the changes to sync up with the new project name going forward. Git should work out just fine for you, but if you want to rename the remote to match the project name in GitHub, here are the manual steps:

From the command line:

• git remote -v This will list the remotes so you can see the URL used. You'll want to copy that in a moment.
• git remote rename origin rational
• git remote add origin https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs or, if you happen to be using ssh: git remote add origin git@github.com:SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs
• git pull origin master This just sycs the branches and tracking going forward. If you have already done a pull before, this should report everything is up-to-date.
• git remote remove rational This optional step just removes the redundant remote from your list of git remotes for this project.

Update: 2022-07-16

The user Trout_Tickler on reddit helpfully pointed out this command to reset the git url: git remote set-url origin git@github.com:SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs which should replace all the above with a single command. Thanks!!

From Magit:

• Press M for Remote
• Press r to rename the remote, you will be prompted for the new name, type one (for example rational) and press enter.
• Press M for Remote again, then press a to add a new remote. You will be prompted for a name, type origin and press enter. The url is presented for you, change it if you wish, or just leave it alone and press enter again.
• Press M for Remote again, then press k to remove a remote, and choose the rational name (or whatever you named origin to earlier).
• Press F to fetch updates, then either p or (my preference) u which should be listed as origin/crafted-emacs

To update your configuration, please see the section in the README which talks about it. I provided an Emacs script, you can run it with the following command:

emacs -Q --batch -l rational2crafted.el

And it should help. It makes a copy of your current config folder (ie ~/.config/rational-emacs/) and then updates the configuration from the new location. It doesn't work with chemacs2 configurations however. For those of you using chemacs2, you'll have to manually transition your configuration. That being said, read through the rational2crafted.el source, you can probably use some of the code from there to craft your own transition script. BLUF, it just renames rational to crafted everywhere. If you just want to do it manually, dired is your friend.

From Dired:

• Open your crafted-emacs folder, maybe with this from the *scratch* buffer: (dired crafted-config-path)
• Press %g and type “rational” to mark all the files having the word rational in them.
• Press Q (yes, shift and the letter q) to replace rational with crafted (you'll have to type in those words), then repeatedly hit ! to change all occurences in each file.

There might be other ways to use dired to handle this situation, but that was the easiest way I could think of quickly.

So, there you go, brand new Crafted Emacs is now available for you to use to craft your own Emacs configuration!

Shameless Plug

If you enjoy configuring Emacs and tweak yours often, you might consider giving Crafted Emacs a try. I'm sure you'll find some rough edges, and when you do, I invite you to open an issue, or submit a pull request. Or, maybe you won't find any rough edges and this will be just the thing you need. I'm not holding my breath on that just yet.

If you enjoy crafting your computing experience, from hacking on Emacs, your Linux/Mac/Windows configuration, maybe your Guix or NixOS home configuration, or whatever it is… consider joining the SystemCrafters community!

Tags: #emacs