corgi-emacs / corgi

Unbundled Emacs configuration aimed at Clojure developers
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Where to put "snippets"? #17

Open plexus opened 2 years ago

plexus commented 2 years ago

Corgi is meant to be a complete but minimal base install. Out-of-the box using the sample config you should have a comfortable editor experience that you can totally just use as-is, but it's not going to have every bell and whistle.

Most people will add several, perhaps dozens, more packages, and includes snippets from left and right to make their config their own. This is how people in Emacs land have always done it, and part of the goal of Corgi is to promote that again. To take the boilerplate out of your emacs config, so that was is actually there is useful stuff that you put there yourself, and that you can understand and own.

But as a new user who arrives at that point it can be unclear what kind of things they can even put in there. Ideally there would be a place where they can find "the next steps", common packages, settings, tweaks, bindings, that people in the community have personally found helpful.

I'm really not sure what the best place or format for that would be. I don't think I want it inside the official manual, as that means we are now in the business of curating and vetting these snippets. It turns us into a gatekeeper. Generally any approach where a single person curates I think is not suitable, since then it comes down to a single person's taste again.

On the other hand curation, or at least some kind of filtering system, is essential, otherwise we might as well just point people at the emacs Wiki.

So in mind the ideal would be 100% open, with no gatekeeping, anyone can add things to the collection. There should be a way to discuss, so people can say "I'm using this too", or "this doesn't work for me", or "I prefer to do something similar but slightly different". And there should be a way to vote/endorse, so you can find the things that actually are widely used/endorsed. It should also be slow moving/timeless, I don't want it to be like reddit or the announcements channel on clojurians, where you need to check every day or things drop off the page and you missed them.

Maybe we make a Corgi topic on ClojureVerse? People can post and discuss as they like, and vote with likes or emoji reactions, and the ones that reach a certain threshold we pin to the top of the channel.

theophilusx commented 2 years ago

A topic on clojureVerse might be good, though I do get a little frustrated at how fractured clojure community stuff seems i.e. some projects like cider using discord, some using slack, some using clojureVerse etc. I'm also an old dog who stil misses NNTP and and laughed at by my kids for not being up on IM!

A middle ground which might not be too onerous to maintain would be to perhaps add a contrib section to the manual which just adds links to github/gitlab/sourceHut/whatever repositories containg corgi-whatever extensions. New/updated entries could be added via PRs and we could back things up with a Writing Modules section in the manual.