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radian-software
straight.el
Emacs Lisp2018–2026
radian-software / straight.el

straight.el

🍀 Next-generation, purely functional package manager for the Emacs hacker.

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Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
19Distinct people
22Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

🍀 Next-generation, purely functional package manager for the Emacs hacker.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

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

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

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 year22 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-03-10 18:44:13 UTC to 2026-03-10 13:32:57 UTC.

0123452018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

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
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

22 sources
otsaloma¡Mar 10, 2026
> Partly because I wanted my config to survive without breakage across Emacs releases. Partly because I was tired of dealing with package repositories, mirrors going down in the middle of the workday, native compilation hiccups, and the inevitable downtime when something changed somewhere upstream and my job suddenly became debugging my very long (at the time) config instead of doing actual work. Picking on this detail, what I've found works nicely is that when a new major Emacs version flows into my Debian, I also update all packages to their latest versions and then freeze those versions until the next major Emacs release. And those versions are locked in my emacs.d git repo, so I have a reproducible Emacs at home and work both. There's a little iteration to adapt to changes in Emacs and packages, but after that, it's stable and reliab
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le for a year or two. https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el
In Two Years of Emacs Solo
siraben¡Jul 11, 2023
Purely functional programming in package management and system configurations is next-level.[0] When your package installation scripts no longer are represented as actions from one state to another but as a state that is either realized completely or not, things become a lot more deterministic, manageable, and compositional. In Nix, a package is a pure function that takes in inputs and produces outputs. Given the same inputs, we have the same outputs, and so caching becomes easy, for instance, along with extensive sharing. As an active user and package maintainer I can't count the number of times I've decided to rebuild an old project that I haven't touched in years and it still working, while in the same session working on another project using up to date libraries. There's also straight.el for Emacs[1] which has finally made Emacs confi
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g maintenance far better for me. [0] https://nixos.org/ [1] https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el
In Ask HN: When is pure functional programming beneficial?
ashton314¡Feb 23, 2022
Yeah… I should probably set up the daemon sometime. I just tweak my config so much (it's Emacs, c'mon) that it's just been simpler for me for some reason to just launch it fresh for forever. native-comp doesn't do anything for start up. Good tip though—I've been running bleeding-edge Emacs for a while now. ;-) I ran `esup` and figured out most of the slowdown is from the otherwise excellent straight.el [1] package manager. I put (setq straight-check-for-modifications '(check-on-save find-when-checking)) in my init, and now everything is really speedy! [1]: https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el#my-init-time-got-slo...
In Bringing the Framework Laptop to more of the world
ashton314¡Aug 23, 2021
I tried Rudel a little while ago, and I just had some troubles. Probably my fault. I wasn't nearly as well-versed with Emacs back then. I just tried crdt.el[^1] and holy crap that's cool. I love that it's all built in Emacs, like, there's no special server I have to run to get this to work. I'm blown away. I use straight.el[^2] and use-package[^3] for package management; if you want to give crdt.el a whirl, just use this: (use-package crdt :straight (crdt :type git :repo "https://code.librehq.com/qhong/crdt.el")) A fun alternative if you're in the terminal is tmate[^4], which is a fork of tmux. That one uses a central server to negotiate the connection though, I believe. [^1]: https://code.librehq.com/qhong/crdt.el [^2]: https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el [^3]: https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package [^4]: https://tmate.io
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In Collaborative Editing Options for Emacs
robto¡Mar 10, 2021
In addition to nix and guix, which have been mentioned, you can also use straight.el[0]. It's a functional package manager for emacs, so you'd use it instead of package.el. It checks out the git repo for each package and maps package name->commit hash in a nice little file, which you can then commit to git. Then, on a new machine, it will check out that specific rev for all your packages. It even has nice use-package integration, so if you're already using that you likely won't have to change all your config. [0]https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el
In Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook (2017)
sirn¡Sep 11, 2020
I would suggest a step further: start with Spacemacs/Doom, but if you decide to stick around, try to build your own Emacs configuration based on the part of Spacemacs/Doom that you like. Thanks to the amazing use-package[1] macro (which Spacemacs/Doom also uses) most configurations are self-contained to a certain extent. Searching for use-package in GitHub[2] will yields plenty of results which can be mostly be taken as a reference for your own liking. It should be relatively easy to port part of Spacemacs/Doom to vanilla use-package, e.g. starting with this (which sets up use-package alongside with evil): (require 'package) (setq package-enable-at-startup nil) (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/")) (package-initialize) (unless (package-installed-p 'use-package) (package-refre
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sh-contents) (package-install 'use-package)) (eval-when-compile (require 'use-package)) (use-package evil :ensure t :config (evil-mode t) (use-package evil-leader :after evil :ensure t :config (evil-leader/set-leader "<SPC>") (global-evil-leader-mode t)) To add Magit, one could take a look at Spacemacs's git/packages.el[2], search documentation on what each package does, and proceed on porting configuration, only the part that you actually uses, e.g.: (use-package evil-magit :ensure t :after (magit evil)) (use-package magit :ensure t :config (evil-leader/set-key ("gs" #'magit-status)) Since most configurations based on use-package are self-contained, when stuck I also like to use GitHub search to look on how other people configure a certain package[3]. In most cases the configuration should be reusable as-is. Finally, use-package is highly extensible. There is straight.el[4] which adds extension to use-package to fetch from Git and pin a version in a lockfile, which adds reproducibility to Emacs configuration. There's also el-patch[5] from the same author that allows patching package on the fly without the need to maintain separate forks. [1]: https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package [2]: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/d46eacd83842815b2... [3]: https://github.com/search?l=Emacs+Lisp&p=4&q=use-package&typ... [4]: https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el [5]: https://github.com/raxod502/el-patch
In Magit – A Git Porcelain inside Emacs
robto¡Jan 23, 2020
I use straight.el[0] for a reproducible package list. It basically clones the packages and stores a map of package->commit, so you can freeze your packages and reproduce them on another machine. You could also use the Guix package manager[1] or the Nix package manager[2] to achieve a similar effect. Reproducible software is much more stable! [0]https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el [1]https://guix.gnu.org/#guix-in-other-distros [2]https://nixos.org/nix/
In My Emacs Productivity Tricks/Hacks

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