Bozhidar Batsov has just announced the release of Prelude 1.0. Don’t let the 1.0 version fool you. Prelude is over 9 years old and a very mature product. Batsov expects work on Prelude to continue but doesn’t envision major changes.
In case you don’t know, Prelude is an Emacs “starter kit” that provide users with a prebuilt configuration for their editor. A lot of people think of them as mostly useful for n00bs but many experienced users have built on the starter kit foundation and that foundation lives on in their current configuration.
Batsov addresses the question of why anyone would bother with Prelude in this age of Spacemacs and Doom. He explains that explaining the core philosophy of Prelude:
- simple
- easy to understand and extend
- stable
- a foundation for you to build upon, as opposed to some end-user product that you’re supposed to use as-is
It’s an approach that is, I think, completely in accord with the Emacs philosophy: start with a bare bones functionality and build on it to get an editor that suits your needs. There’s nothing wrong with distributions like Spacemacs or Doom, of course, but if you want to understand your configuration and have your Emacs built just the way you want it with nothing extra that you don’t need, there’s a lot to be said for the Prelude approach.