My Emacs eye candy

The title is "my emacs eye candy", not "my emacs eye candy is the best emacs eye candy", there are definitely better "eye-candy" emacs setups out there than OP's, but it doesn't matter as it's not a competition, OP's emacs is still eye candy, good enough for some people. Thanks for pointing the others though

Especially regarding org mode I am always surprised about how most users use so little typography. Using the same settings for writing and coding seems counterintuitive yet most org modes I see in screenshots look pretty code-editorisch to me, and the styling options you mentioned are pretty much the only ones I know (missing Olivietti mode [1]) Most other note taking apps surpass here… [1] https://github.com/rnkn/olivetti

I think it's worth it, if you are a tinkerer and if you look at that kind of software as a "Personal Development Environment" a phrase I first heard in this video[1]. So, yeah the focus is on creating software that is tailored to your requirements. If your requirements are that someone else has to be able to use it, because you do a lot of pair programming, then that's something to consider.

I've tried a lot of editors over the years... Currently I'm using neovim. It's been pretty nice--after some major adjustments. I like altering my configs and changing what's not working for me. Would I use it exclusively? No, but it's a nice tool to have in my toolbox. And with some effort it also can look very pretty.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMVIJhC9Veg&embeds_euri=http...

You can try Doom Emacs if you want a solid starting point. (https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs). Emacs is so idiosyncratic compared to a lot of modern stuff people are used to, starting with a base like this may be a little easier than trying to do it from the ground up.

People generally don't pick Emacs to get eye candy. If that's why you went for it, it will be painful ride.

Is that a criticism of “candy looking setups” or emacs more generally? Your comment feels needlessly derisive.

> eventually, you have something that works and that only you can use

This criticism doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. You do a lot of keyboard sharing? Who else needs to use Your editor?

The extensibility and customizability of Emacs typically means that bad UX is user error. There is a barrier to entry, but if you don't want to go past that, it's no big deal. I'm not sure that's the editor's fault though.

Spacemacs has decent defaults, is easily extendable, and looks pretty good too.

I work with Emacs. I also find that magit and org mode are great examples of doing things better than other tools. Biffer management is another thing. I find it to be superior to handling tabs. vterm and shell are also incredibly helpful. vterm for when you need ncurses or self updating output, shell when you do not and want to easily copy paste from output. Vterm can copy paste too but needs a key combination to switch between modes.

There is at least editorconfig for sharing config with other editors a little.

Do not underestimate the usefulness of the context-based menu bar. It will save you an apropos on many occasion, and open your mind to new actions that you missed on the first skim of the package methods.

Upvote to the "skinny guides" (thin vertical lines) feature linked from your TODO: https://github.com/preservim/vim-indent-guides#screenshots

Even better if you make it single pixel wide, something I like from VSCode. This way, it works nicely with rainbow colors in dark mode too.

And while we're at it, rainbow color the related opening and closing brackets too: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/09/29/bracket-pair-...

EDIT: applying the grayscale color to the background would be another direction, it also looks nice: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=leodevbr...

I don’t find colors that helpful. A little goes a long way, and it’s easy to go overboard IMO.

Cool! I like the monochrome gradient variant!

Now make it appear only when you're compiling something.

Would be great when working on a C++ project.

A little less zany but still fun font is https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans, previously known as Cosmic Sans Neue Mono.

Comic Neue has a monospaced font.

Edit: not comic neue, but related:

https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans

I haven't tried it recently, so it's quite possible it's broken but this package has an autohide behavior for the echo area: https://github.com/honmaple/emacs-maple-echoarea You might be able to adapt it.

He did say "a bunch of tweaks". 150 lines of tweaks for the theme alone: https://github.com/xenodium/dotsies/blob/790465b1824481b81bf...

I've had some success asking it to write me basic elisp functions to perform basic transformations of data or do stuff for window management. It starts hallucinating when I involve 3rd party packages, though.

You have to fill in some gaps (and occasional paranthesis) but it’s pretty darn good at writing elisp for improving your config. I find it’s helpful enough that you can take on medium hanging fruit that you wouldn’t attempt otherwise.

For example, I wrote a minor mode for centering text, an org-export backend for Notion, and some plumbing for chatgpt-shell.

https://notes.alexkehayias.com/using-chatgpt-with-emacs/

GPT-4 is generally excellent. If you have errors, you can often ask it to fix them. GPT-3.5 is not so good.

I recently asked GPT-4 to write an elisp function that would automatically query GPT using an openai client and insert a docstring written by GPT for any Python function under the point. It worked on the first try!

Not true, I use it every day.