dot

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  The Dot installer script

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  Then Dot lets the user set up a supplemental personal configuration.

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  Dot then offers to fetch the configuration from GitHub

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  Dot detects that it is missing some dependencies and prompts the user to install.

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  Dot tells the user what packages it wants to install.

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  After everything is set up, which usually takes less than 30 seconds, Emacs can start up in less than 2 seconds.

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  An example of autocompletion

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  The editor displaying a beautiful Git GUI called Magit

Inspiration

Emacs, a fairly mature text editor, has a very poor configuration by default. Many people build small configurations on top, but these usually end up being pretty slow and sucky. Our project seeks to solve this by modularizing everything and taking full advantage of Emacs' built-in feature management.

What it does

Components of a configuration are separated out, and we provide the tools to quickly load certain key parts of your configuration, reducing load times and making everything more dynamic on the whole. The entire setup process takes about 30 seconds.

How we built it

We started by combining some of our personal configurations and making them into something that we feel is far better. (and pretty bad-ass tbh)

Challenges we ran into

We had to resolve different ideas about how the text editor should work and distill our many thoughts about various features down to a concentrated, potent set of core features which make Emacs the most valuable it can be.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a pretty great installer script, and the project is very easy to set up. Personal configurations can be loaded dynamically through an internal clone of a GitHub repository, so you can have your own configuration on top of ours if there is something you don't like.

What we learned

Emacs has a lot of great, lesser-known features that one can leverage to make their experience as light and nimble as possible.

What's next for dot

We'll continue expanding it and adding functionality. It's open source, and we're looking to make it as great as possible.

Built With

• emacs