Plurrrr

Sun 26 Apr 2020

Learn X in Y minutes: Emacs

Emacs started its life as “the extensible, customizable display editor” and grew over the years into a full-blown ecosystem. Many tasks, usually relegated to a diverse set of tools can be accomplished from within Emacs in a consistent, familiar interface. Examples include directory management, viewing PDF documents, editing files over SSH, managing git repos,… (the list is quite long). In short, Emacs is yours to make of it what you will: the spectrum of users varies from those who use it to edit text files to extreme purists who use it to virtually replace their operating system.

Emacs is extensible via a specialized dialect of Lisp known as Emacs Lisp (Elisp) which has a lot of macros geared towards editing text and managing text buffers. Any key (combination) you use in Emacs is bound to an Emacs Lisp function and may be remapped to any other function, including ones you write yourself.

Source: Learn X in Y Minutes: Emacs a contribution by Joseph Riad.

My NixOS Desktop Flow

NixOS is built on a more functional approach to package management called Nix. Parts of the configuration can be easily broken off into modules that can be reused across machines in a deployment. If Ansible or other tools like it let you customize an existing Linux distribution to meet your needs, NixOS allows you to craft your own Linux distribution around your needs.

Source: My NixOS Desktop Flow, an article by Christine Dodrill.