My Emacs Journey 2021

As some sort of experiment I have tried to reduce the amount of plugins and custom code as much as possible to see if I can live without them. This gives me an opportunity to find ways that work with either vanilla Emacs or with tools that are already installed through plugin dependencies.

All of my custom keybindings are accessible using the <apps> or <menu> keys. <f5> is used as a fallback for keyboards which don't have either of these keys. The major change to last year is that I have switched from the hydra package to transient, which is already installed if you are using magit. This change reduced the overall packages I need to install while also making my custom menus look really nice.

Ivy, counsel and swiper were some of my most used packages. They have some quirks, but the overall feature set is just fantastic (thanks abo-abo!). Over the last few months several people have tried to use some of the newer completion frameworks, which made me curious. I'm now using a combination of vertico, orderless, counsel and embark. While the number of packages has increased, the overall amount of code was reduced. Out of all these packages, embark is the one with the most unused potential in my setup. I miss ivy's minibuffer actions and I haven't grokked embark enough to re-implement them.

I have tried (and failed) to rewrite this blog using org-publish. You can find a dozen of tutorials on how people migrated their blog to org, but for some reason I just can't get it to work the way I want. This frustration makes you wonder if you should write your own static blog generator, but the world already has enough of these custom generator projects.