Another month gone, this update is rather shorter than the last one with only 3 closed pull requests and 4 new issues raised. Probably the most interesting thing from this month was the stream by David Wilson on the System Crafters YouTube channel where he spoke about the initial goals of the project and wrote his configuration based on Rational Emacs live. Here is a link to the stream beginning where he is talking about the goals and intentions for the project. To summarize his comments, Rational Emacs was intended to be a minimal set of configuration “blocks” to use when writing your own configuration. It might be enough to use without further configuration, but the expectation is some additional work would be needed to completely customize Emacs for your workflow. But, watch the video, he says it better than me.

What's coming next for Rational Emacs? Helper macros? More granular modules? Principles updates? David talks about this topic in his stream, including the potential for a new name! (Crafted Emacs anyone?)

Pull Requests

• Customization groups were added to provide better organization when using the Customization UI from within Emacs. Customization options now appear in groups according to the module to which they belong.
• A rational-lisp module was added to provide a base configuration for the Lisp family of languages: Common Lisp, Clojure, Scheme, and Racket.
• A fix for the Doom modeline configuration.

New Issues

• An issue was raised about where transient and other state files for Emacs should live. Currently, files like the bookmarks, and diary files live in the Emacs home directory rather than the Rational Emacs path. There is a PR in draft form to resolve this issue.
• An issue was raised related to the friction caused by adding documentation when modules are added, specifically that the process is not quite straight forward. Some suggestions were made, especially to make use of GitHub actions, but no work has been made to configure those yet.
• A discussion was started about not having the yasnippets package included and how that left the experience incomplete, especially as several packages provide snippets based on yasnippets.
• A suggestion for naming modules was raised, specifically to follow a pattern of classifying modules by placing them into a hierarchy of folders, for example language based modules might go in the modules/languages folder. This was also a topic brought up on the recent stream by David Wilson.

Help Wanted!

There are still plenty of modules and documentation which need to be addressed. We'd love to have your pull requests for anything you see to make Rational Emacs more complete. Need ideas? Reach out to me or file an issue and we'll help you out!

Shameless Plug

If you enjoy configuring Emacs and tweak yours often, you might consider giving Rational 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