Some time ago, I installed Embark but I never got around to learning it and it has sat unused ever since. Then I saw this post by Bozhidar Batsov and decided to take another look. The problem with Embark is that it’s hard to understand and the documentation is long and complex. Too long, I discovered, to read and understand in one sitting.
I approached the problem by reading a section at a time and trying out examples in my Emacs. Even so, it still took some experimentation to completely figure things out. The process is ongoing but I’m making progress.
All of the above sounds pretty negative but I actually think Embark is a real win. Once you figure things out it’s really useful. For example, one of the things I’ve never been able to get working reliably is following a link in an arbitrary buffer to its target. Embark does that easily and if you use embark-dwim it’s a single keystroke. I use Hyper+. for embark-act and Hyper+, for embark-dwim. I have Hyper bound to the right ⌘ Cmd key so it’s very easy to invoke either of those commands.
Batsov is all in on Embark. He and I often share preferences and this is an example of that. The more I find out about Embark, the more I like it. The commands that work on a group of files can be difficult to grok but once you do they’re very powerful. I’ve resigned myself that learning Embark is an ongoing process but I think it’s worth it.