HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
purcell
emacs.d
Emacs Lisp2016–2017
purcell / emacs.d

emacs.d

An Emacs configuration bundle with batteries included

2Distinct people
2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An Emacs configuration bundle with batteries included

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month2 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-01-05 00:06:24 UTC to 2017-11-11 20:55:52 UTC.

012016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsJan 20162016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsDec 20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsNov 2017

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Jan 20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Feb 20162016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20162016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20162016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20162016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20162016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20162016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20162016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20162016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20162016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20162016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20162016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20172017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20172017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20172017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20172017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20172017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20172017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20172017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20172017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20172017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20172017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

2 sources
IMHO out of the box experience does not matter that much from a point-on, because configuring emacs with an existing configuration is very easy. You just need to save your .emacs.d folder and every config you've accumulated over years is there. The nice thing about emacs is the extensibility, you can very easily write your own modules load it etc. I understand the same argument could be made for VS Code, but I think emacs is here to stay, because Electron can never be as responsive as a native application. On the other hand it's true that installing emacs packages and getting them working is cumbersome. Maybe, as a community, we need to prepare modular dot files. For example, are you a Go developer, go install Go Emacs. Or are you a web developer Go install Web Emacs etc. Having a set of prewritten configs would benefit Emacs's popularity
Read the rest
. For example my init.el in .emacs.d consists of a couple of lines loading my modules: (package-initialize) (load-file "~/.emacs.d/melpa.el") (load-file "~/.emacs.d/golang.el") (load-file "~/.emacs.d/readability.el") (I see now that there are some prepared configs such as https://github.com/purcell/emacs.d)
In 10 years of love for Emacs undone by a week of VSCode
I've been using Emacs for the past decade and I switched to Spacemacs after declaring my second .emacs bankruptcy sometime last year after it got support for regular Emacs keybingings, (setq-default dotspacemacs-editing-style 'emacs). First one was four years ago, my configuration was rendered completely useless after starting to use OS X and I didn't know where to start, so I forked https://github.com/purcell/emacs.d and rebuilt my config on top of it. Second one was because every time I take a break from a language like Clojure and Haskell for three months and then get back to it my config for the relevant modes get obsolete. Spacemacs has a big community that continuously adapts language layers to the changes on upstream and provides the best experience for development behind a few flags like "(haskell-enable-ghc-mod-support t)". After
Read the rest
switching to spacemacs my configuration went from 2023 lines of code in the original config I forked + 1005 lines of my own to a .spacemacs.d/init.el file that's 243 lines long (without comments). It provides 90% of stuff I want out of box, and provides many more features I never discovered/configured and most importantly it takes the burden of maintaining stuff I only occasionally use from my hands. If you are not happy with some stuff fundamental to Spacemacs such as Helm I don't recommend it but otherwise give it a try, it is really easy disable Evil integration if you are used to regular Emacs keybindings.
In Spacemacs 0.105.0 released

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.