Re: Interactive guide for new users

[Okam]

On 9/23/20 9:32 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> 
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> 
>    > Everyone with a .emacs file has a configuration, but that's not what
>    > Doom, Spacemacs, etc. provide. In a sense, they forked Emacs, without
>    > forking the core code, instead providing a patch-set in Elisp form + a
>    > DSL.
> 
> I keep receiving different descriptions of what those things consist
> of.  I don't know which description is correct, but I can suggest a
> term for each one.


I haven't used Spacemacs in a while, but I want try to add some information, if 
it hasn't been said already.

In the case of Spacemacs, it consists of groups of packages, which they call 
"layers", based around certain general features like spell-checking or a 
particular programming language. For a programming language, a layer might 
include packages for things like syntax highlighting, error checking, and 
expanding snippets of text specifically for that language.

When a user enables/disables a layer, they are enabling/disabling the collected 
packages that the Spacemacs developers think provide a good user experience. To 
facilitate working with so many packages, the Spacemacs developers have put a 
lot thought into the loading, interaction between, and configuration of said 
packages.

Here are a few examples:
- They have tried to create standard keybinding layouts, so that, for example, 
"SPC m s" is generally the keybinding used to launch any programming language 
REPL that has a corresponding layer. This sort of consistency is helpful to new 
users.
- They set up some form of package rollback for when a package update breaks 
the 
configuration.
- They have tried to create a repository containing of all the packages needed 
for any layer, that they have decided is a safe version. This should hopefully 
reduced problems caused by packages changing function names, etc.
- They ask users to keep their personal configs in a "~/.spacemacs" file, to 
better work with the deferred loading of packages that they have set up.

All of these things can be done by a user of regular Emacs, because Spacemacs 
is 
indeed another Emacs config, but it would be a hassle for a normal user 
(especially a new user) to do it at the scale/breadth the Spacemacs developers 
are attempting.

They are not running their own version of Emacs, so calling it an "Emacs 
distribution" is odd, but thinking of it as just a config file that people copy 
from doesn't really capture the effort of their work, I think, particularly 
with 
projects like Spacemacs and Doom creating their own sort of configuration 
system.