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Comment by forvelin | Hacker News Reader

Some screenshots could be nice, probably most people are not tend to try it out until they see a screenshot.

Anyway, I am a simple man. I see people using Emacs and I become happy.

I will (almost certainly) never switch from my current configuration to use any of these all-in-one package bundles, but I do like looking through them for ideas.

Same here. My Emacs is always on configs of my own, but I do mine other peoples' configs for ideas like crazy.

Yeah, me too. I also love watching people use emacs. There's always something neat that I haven't seen before. Unfortunately that is a very rare pleasure for me. I've only seen emacs in the wild a few times and mostly they were old professors using it with the standard configuration.

Maybe we should make this a thing on twitch

I had a configuration that I was nursing along for several years, but after seeing Prelude [0] I realized that it would be much simpler for me to let the community to most of the work for me. Now I have a consistent environment for most languages and I am able to make small tweaks on top.

[0]: https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

Yes, me too. I can always learn something new by reading others' configs.

Hi forvelin! I'm one of the devs that helped create frontmacs. This is a great idea and something I generally like doing. I do it on my own emacs config: https://github.com/Robdel12/.emacs.d

Judging from the comments we didn't do a very good job at messaging that while this is a starter pack, it's also meant for you to build on top of and customize. My config does not use the default theme and tweaks a couple of settings.

We intended frontmacs to be something _like_ prelude but make updating the core packages easier (rather than pulling in the changes from upstream & solving merge conflicts). We wanted nice defaults that you could then build on top of.

Agree! I am not a developer or an overly technical person and I recently started using Emacs because of an article here (using ido and org mode). I like it but I'm not fluent enough, or know enough of what it does to switch to it for everyday tasks - but there's a beauty in navigating file systems, creating files, switching windows all with your keyboard.

Does anyone know if you can actually write code on Emacs, like HTML/CSS/Javascript?

If you mean using emacs as your code editor then yes, that's the main purpose of emacs for most users. However there's other hidden eastereggs such as M-x pong, M-x tetris or why not try M-x doctor if you're feeling a bit down.

> M-x doctor if you're feeling a bit down.

Yeah. M-x doctor is really helpful, especially when you are depressed. For example, if you say the doctor that "I'm going to suicide", it will guide you the right way.

Actually this link is all about write front code in Emacs, that's why it's named `frontmacs` I guess. Yeah, currently I am write frontend code inside emacs. Nothing special. I just used few major modes. js2-mode/web-mode/css(sass)-mode, there is typescript mode. Only for syntax highlighting. I don't use auto-complete thing.

Does anyone know if you can actually write code on Emacs, like HTML/CSS/Javascript?

Do you mean modifying Emacs while it is running?

If you switch to the "* scratch * "[1] buffer and type one of these and after each of these either press «Ctrl-J» or «Alt-x eval-print-last-sexp»:

  (message "Hello, World!")

  (setq cursor-type 'hbar)

  (setq cursor-type 'box)

  (setq indicate-empty-lines t)

  (setq show-trailing-whitespace t)

Is this what you meant?

[1] I have no idea how to get a normal asterisk on HN.

Your question seems to confuse some, do you mean run elisp interactively or edit HTML/CSS/JavaScript? If so I want to say yes to both.

> Does anyone know if you can ... on Emacs?

Yes.

Same here. I always feel a bit disappointed when I see an Emacs package without a screenshot or a gif.

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