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Comment by susam | Hacker News Reader

I published this project a few minutes ago and I was about to do a "Show HN" for this project here. As soon as I submitted my "Show HN" post, my submission got redirected to this post and I realized that todsacerdoti beat me to it by a few seconds! In any case, thank you, todsacerdoti, for posting this here!

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Thank you for the line-by-line explanation! That’s incredibly helpful for new users and helpful even to moderately experienced users.

This. I learned a bunch from the why of a lot of the settings. Very nice!

Do you have advice about installing emacs without package manager/ compilation tools into the linux system that currently cannot have those and probably will not have those. I am looking for the easiest and safest way to do it . I do not want to break or brick the running arm based linux system. I do not want to interfere with it's main function but still want to be able to try emacs there. What is the best way to achieve minimal dependency setup?

I am still relatively new to gnu/linux and I understand that I can unpack package let's say debian package and install each lib. manually but it seems like a big headache, is there any easier way? I am looking for something like copy everything into one directory without a need to register each lib in the system?

If you're experienced you'd download and install all the dependencies, perhaps via "/opt", where a local package-manager would not interfere.

But honestly? If you're new to using Linux then you should use the supported approach by your system. If you're running Debian, for example, "apt install emacs". If you're running CentOS "yum install emacs".

Trying to do things outside the confines of the package-manager seems like an odd-constraint. I can appreciate it might make some sense, but when there are so many dependencies installed - fetching/building/installing them all one at a time is going to be very fiddly and annoying, even for a somewhat-experienced user.

>But honestly? If you're new to using Linux then you should use the supported approach by your system. If you're running Debian, for example, "apt install emacs". If you're running CentOS "yum install emacs".

Thank you for your advice. The system doesn't have package manager and installing one doesn't seem like safe option at least until I'll be fluent with what exactly package manager does. On debian machine I did what you've suggested. This is not debian nor CentOS. It's embedded solution. In such case it seems like easier to install only emacs. I've already installed some custom application with libs and it was a headache. I wrote my own custom application for it and there I just link statically everything I need to have less trouble with installing.

If you have SSH access the best solution would be to install emacs on your client and edit remotely. Tramp allows you to edit remote files transparently. Setup key based auth if you can, add an entry for you device in client's .ssh/config, then editing is as easy as opening "/ssh:hostname:/path/to/remote/file" with C-c C-f

I think a good starting point is to look at the wiki https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BuildingEmacs but Emacs should run on ARM, I've heard of people using it on a Raspberry Pi

If your goal is to try out emacs on that system by working on files that you have inside it, you could install emacs on something else and then use the built-in TRAMP functionality to work on that system remotely, as if it was local. It works transparently over SSH.

Might be an easy way to do it without changing too much on your restricted linux box.

Thank you vary much I'll try to explore TRAMP functionality and what it would mean in my case.

Maybe Portacle, a portable Emacs + Git & Magit + nice extensions (+ CL dev tools) ? https://portacle.github.io/

I agree with everyone else that usually you won't want to install this on a system without a package manager.

However, I also hate it when I want to do something and everyone just tells me not to do it. So the general way to do it would be to get the source code and build it yourself. You will run into issues with versions of libraries being wrong, and this will be hard to fix. Here is a stack exchange story on the topic: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/472989/how-to-build...

If you try this, you will learn to appreciate package managers more.

Could you not inhibit the startup screen? I get wanting to have a "clean" setup but if anyone is using this there is a good chance they don't know emacs all that well already and links to the tutorial are good for them.

Sure! This is addressed in the line-by-line explanation where it mentions:

> (setq inhibit-startup-screen t)

> If you are a beginner to Emacs, you might find the startup screen helpful. It contains links to tutorial, manuals, common tasks, etc. If you want to retain the startup screen, comment this line out.

I think the point of a template is that you can change everything yourself, it is not a library you install with a package manager and are expected to leave alone. Given the good explanation of what is going on, I think disabling the about page is a fair decision.

You can also

    (use-package dashboard 
      :ensure t 
      :config 
      (dashboard-setup-startup-hook))

To replace the startup screen with a list of recent files, bookmarks, and Projectile projects you've recently visited.

Remember, though, that just like this document describes, a big part of Emacs is not running it repeatedly, but rather starting it just once and keeping it alive basically forever; you're only rarely going to see the startup screen if you're doing orthodox Emacs.

Assuming a person already has use-package or projectile installed is part of a larger problem tbh.

In the sense that use-package should pretty clearly be bundled with Emacs by now, sure. You don't need Projectile installed to use dashboard (I barely use Projectile, and have it turned off in my dashboard thingy).

Hi!

Thanks a lot for this.

I have an issue (on MacOS, not Linux) with trying to read pdf files from Firefox, as it only lets me set packed apps (.app) as commands to run for specific downloads. I have tried and tried and no solution is completely satisfactory (unlike linux, where I just set emacsclient and it works). Do you have any configuration for this on MacOS?

Just in case. Thanks again!

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