Michael Ashley wrote to tell me that System Crafters has released version 2 of their Crafted Emacs configuration. Irreal readers will be familiar with System Crafters from David Wilson’s System Crafters video series that I’ve written about many times.
It turns out, though, that they also produce the Crafted Emacs configuration, which can be described as a sort of Emacs starter kit with the emphasis on starter. Their idea is to provide a simple but effective Emacs configuration that can serve as a starting point for users to build their own bespoke configurations.
The base configuration is designed to provide reasonable defaults that result in a usable Emacs. They add a few packages to that base configuration but mostly leave the development of the configuration to the user. They believe that the end configuration should be uniquely the user’s and that Crafted Emacs is merely a jumping off point.
If you’re like me and already have a highly customized configuration, it’s still worthwhile taking a look at the repository to see the defaults they chose and some of their implementation strategies. For example, I learned that you can specify priorities for your ELPA repositories so that you get your packages from your preferred repositories, whatever they are. I was also impressed that they used customize-set-variable instead of setq for defcustom values.
If nothing else, you should take a look at their README to see what the project is about and their philosophy. It’s comprehensive but worth a few minutes of your time. I see lots of people wanting to migrate off, say, Spacemacs or Doom and develop their own configuration. Crafted Emacs is an excellent way of getting started.