Ask HN: Where to begin with "modern" Emacs?
55 comments
·November 1, 2025xenodium
Welcome to Emacs!
- I write about Emacs things fairly frequently: https://xenodium.com
- I started making Emacs videos recently: https://www.youtube.com/xenodium
- For aggregated Emacs blogs, check out https://planet.emacslife.com
- For aggregated Emacs videos, https://emacs.tv
- The Emacs subreddit can be handy too https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs
- If on the fediverse, follow the #emacs hashtag
- Sacha Chua's Emacs News are great https://sachachua.com/blog/category/emacs-news
With respect to "modern", maybe these two posts could be of interest:
- Visual tweaks: https://xenodium.com/my-emacs-eye-candy
- macOS tricks: https://xenodium.com/awesome-emacs-on-macos
Enjoy the ride!
kevstev
I saw what was possible with emacs via systemcrafters: https://systemcrafters.net/emacs-from-scratch/
And I should note I have been using it for about 25 years, and was mostly in the dark about what it was capable of, though many of those years were in environments where I was using versions 5-10 years out of date, and completely locked down/out of things like melpa.
As far as keeping up with whats latest and greatest, I think the real answer is there isn't a good online resource. There are emacs meetups and conferences and some are virtual, and you can ask around other power users and see what they are doing. I even find emacs packages to be pretty poor at selling themselves on why you should use them.
As an example, Ivy and Counsel are kind of game changers to the UI, but I don't think you get any idea of that from their manual or main github page: https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper
omnicognate
Vertico and Consult are the successors to Ivy and Counsel. They're more cleanly integrated with the native capabilities. I've found them a big improvement.
Systemcrafters have a video on moving to them, but I haven't watched it.
MkLouis
+1 from me aswell.
I personally started with SystemsCrafters and after I started to grok Emacs I went to use DoomEmacs. I found DistroTubes literate DoomEmacs Config a good starting point to see whats possible. https://gitlab.com/dwt1/dotfiles/-/blob/master/.config/doom/...
Karrot_Kream
If you don't want to use a distribution like Doom (which I don't fwiw and I've been using emacs for 20-something years), then I'm a big fan of minimal-emacs [1] a compact init.el and early-init.el that configures vanilla emacs into a good, default state. From there I would pick and choose which packages I'm interested by going through the Systemcrafters's community [2] as others have mentioned and Reddit's r/emacs community. While Systemcrafters is a fun community I'm a bit reluctant to spend too much time there because it's more of a tinkering community than a day-to-day-usage focused community. Fine if you want to tinker all day with your config but not the best for getting work done.
One thing I urge you to remember is that unlike neovim, Emacs isn't about just enabling and disabling plugins. Emacs is a Lisp environment. It really comes into its own when you program it. To that effect, I would read through the GNU Emacs info manual. Emacs ships with its manual in its inbuilt info reader and you can also find it in HTML [3] by GNU. Try not to think of your emacs as a constant soup of plugins and instead a codebase that you manage. The environment is very amenable to introspection, and there's inbuilt commands like `describe-key` and `describe-function` that pull up documentation for elisp. I'm a fan of the `helpful` package which I find to be a better version of `describe`.
[1]: https://github.com/jamescherti/minimal-emacs.d
I_complete_me
IANAD I am not a developer.
I got into vim because it made total sense to me as a way to transfer thoughts to words, I loved it , I lived it and I love it and live it. Then I heard about emacs org-mode – after trying for ages to find the "software to organise my life" (pick your poison).
I found it to be totally workable, initially, via doom-emacs.
Then they said "You won't believe Magit".
I didn't leave my wife, instead I invited everyone into my world.
True, I had been fooling around looking for a wife. I hit on vim. She was perfect. In her world there were people who knew all about perfection – no surprise – until I met her beautiful sister. I fell in love with her. Then I met a relation of hers (her name was Magic, also beautiful) and I invited them all back to what became their place where I am now welcome too.
ashton314
I maintain a pretty popular Emacs starter-kit called Bedrock. [1] I suggest starting with it, or at least taking a look at it to get some ideas!
Bedrock differs philosophically from Doom et al. in that Bedrock is meant to be as simple as possible. There's no magic, no extra package management system (looking at you Doom) to break or confuse. By default, it doesn't install any 3rd-party packages—it just sets better defaults. Recent versions of Emacs can do a lot, but the defaults are painfully outdated. Bedrock fixes that. It's basically a vanilla Emacs experience without some of the cruft carried over from the previous century.
Bedrock also comes with a curated set of packages to enhance Emacs beyond better defaults. You can load these into your config as you begin to need them. List here: [2] If you are looking for a set of "modern" packages, this is it. I do pretty well keeping up in this space, and a lot of these (esp. Vertico, Consult, Corfu, etc.) seem to be accepted as the de-facto best replacements for older packages like Helm, Ivy, etc. (That said, I should add some config for Casual—very neat package to help with seldom-used features of Emacs.)
Bedrock is meant to be understandable: clone it once, and then tweak from there. You'll find a lot of forks of Bedrock on GitHub as people have forked it and then built their own config on top.
I'm working on updating Bedrock for Emacs 31. There won't really be that many changes, so like, don't wait for 31 to start your Emacs journey, but know that Bedrock is actively maintained and that the packages I've curated for it are the best I could possibly find. :)
Oh, also, if you search "best Emacs packages", my blog post [3] will come up on the first page on basically every search engine I've tried. ;)
Happy hacking!
[1]: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock
[2]: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock#extras
[3]: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2024-05-30_top_emacs_packages/
scott01
I’ve recently rewrote my configuration and used Bedrock as a new starting point. It’s great, thanks very much for making it!
weakfish
Great, thank you! I will definitely reference this.
defanor
I think the usual advice is to try the vanilla Emacs, maybe use better-defaults (either directly or just for inspiration), as it is a relatively light customization. The setups people use tend to be quite different, as do their opinions on packages, so I doubt there is a single satisfactory and agreed upon "source of truth". Others' setups may be useful to check out, possibly pages of emacswiki.org, chatter on the #emacs IRC channel at libera.chat.
Edit: As for heavily customized versions (Doom, spacemacs), I have not tried those myself, but occasionally saw people having issues with those, and others not being able to help them, since it was not clear what sort of magic is going on there. So I would not recommend those to new users, at least not if you would like to learn the basics and get a better hang of it, to be able to debug it, though some seem to be happy with those.
tammer
I will second the recommendation to start with vanilla emacs. That isn't to disparage releases like spacemacs & doom. I simply found those to be more useful once I fully understood the power that comes with a fully reprogrammable editor. There is a learning curve and there is also a mental model to adopt, and I think that adopting the mental model is easier when starting raw and building up from scratch. Once you feel comfortable maybe try spacemacs or doom to see if they offer advantages for your workflow.
I also highly recommend the resources at https://www.masteringemacs.org
SoftTalker
Another vote for vanilla, learn the basics and then add packages for what you need.
I have spent my entire career using vanilla emacs with a few other packages. A lot of things, including org-mode, are included by default in modern emacs.
The problem with learning heavily customized distributions like Doom is that they won't be installed elsewhere and if you have to use emacs on another system you won't have what you're familiar with. Weigh that relative to how often that happens in your work.
pfortuny
Yes, before playing football, children just mess around with a ball. The thing is to end up using the ball properly, not to play as Messi.
weakfish
I think that's the route I'm gonna go, I want my configuration to be transparent and built so that I can understand it top-to-bottom. I've tried Doom, but it felt too magical.
hommelix
I'm a vim user, using orgmode. I've noticed the blog of Sascha Chua. She posts Emacs News and in these posts there are some orgmode gems. But she is posting more on Emacs. Maybe interesting to look these posts up: https://sachachua.com/topic/
Aidevah
A lot of modern packages which began outside emacs have now been gradually been merged into the main emacs tree and come pre-installed (use-package for clean per package configuration, eglot for LSP support, tree-sitter, which-key etc). So you just need to learn how to configure them.
The most important packages which make emacs feel "modern" that are still outside the emacs tree for now are the ones which makes completion better, both in the main buffer and also in the minibuffer (what others may call your "command palette"). They are
- consult: search and navigation commands, provides candidates for...
- vertico: vertical display of candidates in the minibuffer
- marginalia: annotations for the candidates
- orderless: orderless fuzzy match for candidates
- embark: right mouse context menu for candidates
Getting these setup would make your whole journey onwards much smoother.
scott01
I second this approach. After setting these ones up, together with lsp-mode and company-mode (I like experience better than eglot), my configuration stayed mostly the same. I also kept adding new shortcuts for functions I needed (like symbol rename or function list), and am currently at a point when Emacs became a very efficient editor for me personally. I also moved most of these shortcuts over to yyIntelliJ editor at work where Emacs is not very practical due to lack of convenient debugger (C++, Unreal Engine).
null
tmtvl
Start by just opening it up and clicking on 'tutorial'. After that check out Options->Manage Emacs Packages and see if anything interests you. After that check out Melpa (<https://melpa.org>). Finally you can check out what other people do, for example Prot (<https://protesilaos.com/emacs/dotemacs>), you can look at Doom's source,...
You're basically about to go on a journey to a country you've never been, so my recommendation is to just read up about it and see if you find some things you want to experience.
spit2wind
Open Emacs and press <return> to read the tutorial. This gives you the basics to be productive.
Understandably, some people complain that it shouldn't need a tutorial or the defaults are bad. There's validity to that angle. There's also validity to Emacs pre-dating GUIs, the IBM keyboard, and the x86 instruction set. Once you get past the history of windows and killing, you can explore. The history is also super interesting!
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs?EmacsHistory
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3386324
After you've read the tutorial, go wild. Try stuff out. Break things. Fix them. Learn your limits. Learn that there are very few limits imposed by Emacs itself.
Hands down, the best resource for Emacs is Emacs itself. Especially, the Emacs manual and the Elisp manual. The "An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp" is also excellent if you're not familiar with Lisp. Learn to read Info files and learn the help system (basically C-h f and C-h v)
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/
Emacs really is a flagship of Freedom, with all its pain and glory. It lets you exist at the threshold of your zone of proximal development. Every bit you put into Emacs, you get a return on investment.
Welcome to the Emacs community! It's full of weirdos and wizards, as well as regular folk. Stick around and I'm sure you'll make friends in no time.
e40
You didn't say which platform you're on. For Linux, just use the emacs that comes with the distro. For Windows, download the official build for Windows. For macOS, I used to use emacsformacosx.com's version but now I use Homebrew's emacs-plus. It has a native-compiled version and is hella fast.
I use the regular package manager for emacs (package-install).
Been a user since the first version of GNU Emacs, back when RMS was trying to reproduce Gosling's emacs (which I used for a couple of years). That was the early 80's.
sinker
I recommend starting with vanilla Emacs and just adding things as you find the need for them. Emacs comes with a lot of things OOTB. After a decade, my only essential package addon-ons are magit and yasnippet.
I have other packages installed, but they're esoteric for my own purposes.
Hi all,
I’m a longtime Neovim user who’s been EMacs-curious. The hold up for me has been that I’ve been unable to find a source of truth for what’s top-of-the-line as far as plugins are. With Neovim, it’s a safe bet to look at what folks like Folke are doing, but I have struggled to find a similar figure in the Emacs community who gives insight into what’s-what. I know Doom exists, but I want to fully “own” my config and not over complicate it.
Thanks!