Three years ago, I wrote about the Bedrock starter kit for Emacs by Ashton Wiersdorf. Now Wiersdorf has issued a new major release of the kit. It’s mainly an update for Emacs 31 and requires that version to run. I liked his announcement and description of Bedrock 2.0 and decided to write about it on Irreal. To be honest, I’d forgotten that I’d already written about Bedrock and didn’t discover that I had until I chose the obvious name for the post source file (bedrock.org) and found that such a file already existed.
You should read what I wrote before; everything from that post applies to the new version. The TL;DR is that although I don’t generally care for starter kits, I do like Wiersdorf’s because it mainly concerns itself with simple variable settings rather than configuring a bunch of packages that a user may or may not want1. His init.el is well commented to explain what everything does and some items are commented out with an explanation of why you might want to enable them. You can see the file here.
If you’re looking for a simple, minimal configuration for Emacs as a starting point or you know a n00b who is, take a look at Bedrock.
Footnotes:
There are, as with the original version, some auxiliary files that bring in some packages that Wiersdorf finds particularly useful.