Protesilaos Stavrou

Start by just opening it up and clicking on 'tutorial'. After that check out Options->Manage Emacs Packages and see if anything interests you. After that check out Melpa (<https://melpa.org>). Finally you can check out what other people do, for example Prot (<https://protesilaos.com/emacs/dotemacs>), you can look at Doom's source,... You're basically about to go on a journey to a country you've never been, so my recommendation is to just read up about it and see if you find some things you want to experience.

Mickey Peterson's blog/book Mastering Emacs is where I wish I had started. https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/beginners-guide-to-emacs Sacha Chua maintains a blog roll with a huge part of the Emacs community represented, also: https://planet.emacslife.com/ Also everything Prot writes is great, here's his getting started guide: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-11-28-basic-emacs-configuration/

My Emacs wouldn’t be the same without Prots modus themes[1], which I found to be a great foundation to build my own theme on top of. I am grateful for all the work he did for the Emacs community. I also enjoy watching his videos where he talks about various philosophical topics from a very clear, pragmatic and down-to-earth perspective. My impression is that he is a really kind and humble person and that he lives by his philosophical insights, without bragging about his lifestyle or judging about how other people live their lifes. [1]: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes

Oh, also, for new users who want to quickly smooth over a few papercuts, there's: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-11-28-basic-emacs-configuration/ Also, a small point, you'll be thrilled to hear that an excellent "light/dark mode" is included in stock emacs since the modus-themes were beamed up into the mothership, which was several years ago at this stage.

unfortunately i cannot edit the previous post anymore. another _excellent_ resource is this article/video from "mr protesilaos stavrou" : https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-02-08-emacs-window-rules-display-… he goes by the moniker 'prot' and has tons of very very good emacs information (both on his website, and youtube). always worthwhile to check them out ! as someone would say, if you like that kind of thing, this the is kind of thing you will like :o)

The Modus Themes, which are included with Emacs, are great. These are high contrast themes adhering to WCAG AAA. They have been ported to Vim and VSCode, but IDK about JetBrains. https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes https://github.com/ishan9299/modus-theme-vim https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Binx.modus-vivendi…

Hi all, author here. Thanks for all the comments. I was not expecting to get on the front page with this little thought I had in the shower this weekend! Someone reached out to me with the following links, and I thought they'd be good to share: - https://amodernist.com/texts/emacs-unix.html - https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2021-09-22-live-stream-emacs-unix/ - https://tilde.town/~ramin_hal9001/articles/emacs-fulfills-the-unix-phi… I haven't watched the video by Prot yet, but I felt like these all belonged here to add to the conversation.

Protesilaos Stavrou seems to be facing serious financial troubles and has reached out for help. Prot is most well known on the inter webs for his contributions to Emacs and I’d be surprised if a significant number of people on Hacker News did not know him from that work. I also imagine a good number on HN have benefited directly from his contributions. He’s not asking for money, just employment advice and leads. There’s a link on his web site with the details. https://protesilaos.com/

Following the theme, this is my favourite colorscheme, what I found to be most readable after all those years: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes

Since this is an Emacs article I recommend checking out https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote

One thing made by Prot that has made a big difference to me is his high-contrast light theme Modus Operandi, which has made working on my laptop on Emacs outside in bright sunlight a cinch. It's comprehensive in terms of the modes it supports, and he chose colours based on WCAG AAA standards. Like Denote, it's excellently documented. Highly recommended. https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes

Looks nice as a simple zero-dep setup. That said, I would recommend one of the modus themes[0] as an alternative when Emacs 28 comes out, since they're built in to that version. They're amazingly thorough and accessible. [0] https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes

Prot's literate emacs config[1] is easily the most informative that I've seen. I would follow his advice and not try to copy it verbatim, but rather view it as an excellent contribution to the Emacs documentation ecosystem. [1] https://protesilaos.com/emacs/dotemacs

I'm a real fan of Modus Themes[0]. They are only officially for emacs, but I've seen some ports for other programs (like vim). All the colors are very specifically chosen for contrast and accessibility. It's my favorite light theme out there. I do wish the dark theme background wasn't pure black. Both of these themes now ship with emacs 28, which is a nice bonus. 0. https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes

If this is a theme thread then the Modus themes by Protesilaos are the best emacs themes for me by far. https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes

If you are looking for a solution to managing files and are an emacs user try emacs bongo mode. There is a great introduction video https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2020-08-06-emacs-bongo-extras/

I'd like to make some points more explicit about my philosophy. 1. Yes, everything has a maintenance cost. Some choices have less. For instance, electing to choose Todoist instead of org-mode for my todo list means I no longer have to worry about syncing, merge conflicts, or whether the mobile app I've chosen fully conforms to the spec (well, whatever attempt at creating a spec existed at the time). Of course, I am paying a very literal cost for convenience, and offloading maintenance to the Todoist engineers. 2. Emacs is a cool piece of software, and I am glad others have figured out how to leverage it, in such a way they have a configuration for life. I spent a lot of time marvelling over the set up that Protesilaos had for his writing [0]. It just wasn't for me. 3. For Emacs, if I want to use it like I wanted to, I have a couple of options. Install a package like Doom Emacs, which gives me most of what I want, with a whole lot of cruft I don't. And I have to keep that up-to-date, and worry about random community plugins breaking. Or figure out what set of plugins (after first picking a package manager) to incorporate. Or figure out the Elisp to do it myself. And my writing config would differ from my software engineering config. No shade on the people who want to do this, but I just... don't? I can use Zed, or VSCode, and I'm 90% of the way there. Install (or configure) the Evil mode equivalent, and I'm happy. 4. One of the smartest engineers I worked with couldn't…

Protesilaos in this piece https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2019-08-11-why-emacs-switch/ has the following closing paragraphs: "The gist is that you should be learning by doing. It takes patience and dedication. Study and reuse other people’s code, but do not blindly copy-paste things: patterns of behaviour you do not understand will quickly accumulate, resulting in a potentially fragmented, frustrating experience. The key is to not expect instant gratification. I know, this is how most of the world works these days. Thankfully, Emacs runs contrary to the zeitgeist: it caters to the user who cares deeply about the quality and functionality of their tools." From my reading of the computer history books, it seems like there was a time when this sort of dedication to taking things slow and investing time into your tools and moving steadily towards mastery of all aspects of your craft were seen as de rigueur, part of the game. Moments like this, you want to imagine that some people will turn back to that. I guess when the next big thing comes along with the hype and marketing and "ease-of-use", we'll be off on the same cycle again, though.

I grew up on green CGA, goldenrod Hercules monitors and grayscale mono VGA ones. Indeed, for the past decade I also prefer the light themes, though I find these dark themes pretty usable too: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-pictures As I've noticed, the main problem with dark themes is the low contrast usually. These modus themes were designed scientifically, to meet the contrast ratios recommended by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Also, back in those days mono-monitor days, people just kept the brightness at the same level they used during the day and complained how tiring is it for their eyes to "use the computer for so many hours". My eyes never got tired, because I was constantly adjusting the brightness to match the ambient lighting and I've drastically lowered it, when I was coding in dark. I've noticed that dark-theme users (eg during live streaming) crank up their brightness/contrast to compensate for the low-contrast dark themes, then they are surprised to be blinded when they open a webpage, which is extremely likely to be light themed and they keep complaining about light themes...

Take a look at EmacsConf talks and count how many talks are not programming related. Start delving into the speaker's backgrounds as well. Hang out at the Emacs subreddit and you'll see a similar trend. Follow Sacha's weekly Emacs news and you'll see a similar trend. Some of the authors of very well known Emacs packages don't do programming for a living - in fact quite a few learned programming just so they could improve Emacs for their own needs. Protesilaos is practically a legend these days. He went from no programming or Linux knowledge to expert level in a very short time.[1] His background is in philosophy, law and economics. The author of helm, one of the most popular and possibly the most powerful completion package in Emacs, is a ski instructor. Although I learned Emacs primarily to code, I myself did not use it primarily for programming for the first 5 years. I was using it for email and org mode, and did my programming via Visual Studio. The number of people who primarily use it for org mode is huge. There are plenty of people who code in anything else (vim, VSCode), but use Emacs just for magit. [1] https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2021-04-16-emacs-moral-lessons/

I use gptel[0] with my denote[1] notes, and a tool that can search/retrieve tags/grep/create notes (in a specific sub folder). It's been good enough as a memory for me. 0: https://github.com/karthink/gptel 1: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote

My advice is to use a LLM for that - they are often surprisingly good at producing decent elisp. Maybe not in "publish on ELPA/MELPA" quality, but it can absolutely cover user needs. I know the ecosystem and can read elisp as a coincidence of playing with common lisp - it is enough for glueing things together. The most complicated code I have is around org agenda and export of org tasks - there I needed some LLM help, but I was able to identify and fix performance bottlenecks in some packages and write a config from scratch on my own. Prot has an intro book on elisp[1] which I want to go through, because some specifics of text processing and buffer usage are a bit unique - it is a lisp for a text editor, after all! But it is still just a lisp, and it even has a lot of common lisp functions in cl-* namespace! [1] https://protesilaos.com/emacs/emacs-lisp-elements

He also offers 20EUR/hr eMacs coaching. For those jumping in or graduating to a new level. https://protesilaos.com/coach/

Very nice to see him using eshell, which is a highly underrated shell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xLeqwl_7n0 With time, I find myself relying less and less on tmux and scripts, while increasingly using Elisp macros, Eshell, and Emacs-based applications more generally. Those who see Emacs as a mere editor or as the ancestor of VS Code may also want to read these: - https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-04-24-re-what-keeps-you-emacs/ - https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2019-12-20-vlog-switch-emacs/ Emacs provides a highly hackable and open TUI framework for digital sovereignty. Somehow, it embodies the spirit of free software. Just M-x your way through and shape it to your needs.

- https://satyrs.eu/ - https://brainbaking.com/ - https://brianlovin.com/ - https://www.joshwcomeau.com/ - https://css-irl.info/ - https://protesilaos.com/ - https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/ - https://publicdomainreview.org/ And, more for content than design (though I do like the look) - https://www.newyorker.com/ - https://www.theparisreview.org/ - https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/

https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-pictures i like these, though i failed reproducing this in my doomemacs setup. i'm still a rookie

It would definitely be nice to see more color schemes targeted at users with color vision issues. Prot recently developed two emacs themes targeted at users with deuteranopia and tritanopia: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/ef-themes

prot’s ef-deuteranopia-dark, usually. https://protesilaos.com/emacs/ef-themes otherwise, some solarized variant.

Again, I started with solarized but moved onto other themes. I think it was one of the first themes that was implemented almost everywhere. It was nice to have my browser, IDE, window manager etc all themed up the same way. I also appreciate the work he went into to set the color scheme up. I feel the same spirit with the Modus themes[1] for emacs [1] https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes

Are there any color palettes like this or solarized specifically aiming at various types of color blindness? I think the Emacs "modus" themes allow for this[1], but I've rarely seen something that's "optimized" for some type of color blindness instead of not just being completely unreadable. [1]: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2021-02-25-modus-themes-diffs-deuteran…