An Experiment: The Emacs Configuration Generator

It seems to me that when someone claims to be interested in Emacs, they are given two paths they are given two paths to choose from:

1. Start with nothing but an empty init.el and built up
2. Start with a “Framework”, “Starter-Kit”, “Distribution”¹ or however you want to call it, and try to understand what is going on.

Some call the former approach “Vanilla Emacs”². The latter have a number of choices.

I have never been a fan of the latter, for me or for anyone. All in all I do believe it hinders more than it helps – at least in the long term. I don’t want to go into that debate right now, but that being said, it obviously fill a niche. For a while now I have been wondering if a different approach could be taken to solve this problem, a compromise/combination of sorts.

Having some spare time on my hands, I wrote a little proof-of-concept to configure Emacs by deciding what you are interested in and being given a template of a configuration that you can use as a starting-point. It is appears to work, it is hack and it is accessible here:

In a certain sense, this is a kind of reverse-literate configuration. I have previously argued that literate configurations are mostly a waste of time and effort, especially given the self-documenting nature of Emacs. In this situation, the requirements have changed and good explanations as to what each option, mode, hook, etc. does are essential.

To emphasise my previous point, this is a proof of concept. As such it is by far not complete or in any reasonable sense coherent. The design is pretty 90ish/rudimentary³, hasn’t been tested for mobile use beyond adding a certain meta tag, the server-side is wonky⁴ the package selection is limited⁵, who knows how many typos there are and the output is not as clean as it could be.

If there is interest in making this a more serious thing, any and all input is appreciated. Best send it to my public inbox ~pkal/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht, or ping me via IRC.

A few ideas going forwards might be:

• Allow users to pick a configuration macro like use-package or Setup to use when generating the configuration.
• Optionally allow Popcon-like logging to collect a better image of what features people are interested in, which could be used as a empirical foundation (albeit not perfect) when discussing trends among Emacs users.
• A system to filter out what detail of information you are interested in. Someone just starting with Emacs won’t care too much about the differences between Fido and Vertico. Someone coming back after a while might.
• More author attribution, when referencing packages.
• Allowing for a configuration to be encoded in a URL so that it can be shared and used as a starting point. E.g. https://emacs.amodernist.com/conf/31242141 might be useful for embedded development, but https://emacs.amodernist.com/conf/8098562 has a good foundation for working with LaTeX. Note that these would link to the form, with certain options filled in and perhaps highlighted, not a finished configuration file.
• Specify the content for the generator (questions, code-generation, …) externally to the web server, so that it can be reused in other applications, such as a built-in wizard for Emacs ⁶
• Ask and make use of the operating system (or operating systems) the user intends to use.