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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Reading through the description of the project I see what its aims are but I don't see a list of specifics of what it changes from baseline emacs.

As a long-time emacs user (dear god, it's been 28 years?!), I'd like a more concrete description before considering trying it. Exactly which curated third party packages and UX? Or at least list the major ones.

Otherwise, nice effort. IMHO baseline distrib of emacs has made some odd choices that I think put some people off who might have given it a try.

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I'm not sure that I would recommend Prelude for someone who's already got a memory stick with their emacs config files in their pocket. On the other hand, I do recommend it for people who are new to Emacs, especially those who want to see what a well-tuned personal setup can do for you (especially compared to the out-of-the-box product.)

I'm at around a quarter-century with emacs, too, but I tried Prelude a few years ago when I was looking to integrate magit into my workflows better and became interested in projectile.el. I ended up changing a few of the initial defaults, but I must say that I found Batsov's set up very clean and logical. I ended up adopting some of his choices even on packages I'd already set up for myself. The thing that had always irritated me about things like Evil and Spacemacs, even CUA-mode, was the attempt to make emacs something it wasn't--Prelude, on the other hand, felt like emacs properly tuned.

I've moved on to my own curated set now, but quite a few bits migrated from Batsov's work into my own, and I still look at the source for Prelude if I'm looking at incorporating some package into my personal setup.

Prelude includes and sets up the automatic activation of helm, projectile, ido, magit, and a fairly standard set of modules for languages like ruby, python, c, rust, js, css, html, xml, shell, scheme, (haskell, latex, erlang... etc etc)

If you have these set up already, and like the way you have them set up, don't switch. Instead, consider whether you'd benefit from crux, which is where they moved all the formerly unique-to-Prelude stuff:

https://github.com/bbatsov/crux

Thanks. I've been wondering if I should invest the time to learn magit. It looks compelling, but deep and complicated.

You should definitely give it a try. The point of magit is to improve the git experience, not make it more complicated.

Cool. With my remote work situation I've had to give up on local IDEs etc. and am back to emacs (with LSP for C++) so I am going to try to spend some effort to get it to a place where I'm more productive in it.

There's surprising little time you need to invest before magit starts paying back by decreasing the time you would have previously spent looking at the git documentation for the operations you don't use very often.

Agreed. magit is one of the best pieces of software that I've encountered. Well-deserving of the "porcelain" moniker. Very intuitive, and you can always fall back to CLI if you need to.

All you really, really need is to run magit-status (bind it to a key for convenience) from any `cwd` in your project, and you get a snazzy overview of your outstanding commit. Then hit ?. Should be reasonably clear from there, at least to get started.

If you get confused just go back to the CLI: it's easy to go back and forth, no magic.

Great feedback about the bundled packages - I've mentioned a few of them on the homepage. Unfortunately I haven't had much time for OSS lately and I never got to writing proper docs. Future goals! :-)

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