I’m trying to put together a #lang javascript that would allow programmers to write JS as s-expressions (using urlang from soegaard). But it’s not there yet and I don’t have a lot of time to work on it.

@greg I would genuinely appreciate a curl \| sh install for racket-mode

@samth How about emacs --batch -no-site-file -q -eval '(progn (add-to-list (quote package-archives) (cons "melpa" "<https://melpa.org/packages/>")) (package-initialize) (package-refresh-contents) (package-install (quote racket-mode)))'

yes

put that in a script on http://racket-mode.com\|racket-mode.com and put the curl \| sh command at the top and you’re a modern software project

where “modern” = people pipe any old shell commands from teh interwebs ? :smile:

(not that trusting MELPA or AUR or whatever is necessarily much better)

But seriously: I don’t really get the motivation for this? Not that I know “all Emacs users”. But it seems like most people are in one of two camps. One camp manually M-x package-installs things one by one. Another camp adds (use-package X :ensure t :config ___) to their init.el.

I hadn’t heard of this third camp.

(I’m not disputing it exists. I want to learn more.)

Agree, I’m on the second camp - I’m curious about the use case for curl \| sh install for Emacs packages (I understand to a certain degree for other things)

I just had to do all the steps on the install instructions on a new machine and my personal convenience would have been improved by curl | sh

@samth I heartily recommend having your init.el explicitly install just one package: use-package. Then the rest of your init file can be use-package forms. When you use (use-package :ensure t ___) it will install that package if necessary. That way you can take your init.el to another machine, start Emacs, and you’re rocking.

In fact I hardly ever M-x package-install anymore. When I want to try a new package, I add a use-package for it to my init.el, do C-M-x to eval the form, and save the init.el.

(If it turns out I don’t want a package anymore, I just delete that use-package from my init.el. I might M-x package-remove, but space isn’t usually a concern so I usually don’t even bother.)

Just wanted to say thanks Greg for Rackjure and your macro tutorials, wouldn’t be the same experience using Racket without! :slightly_smiling_face:

@sydney.lambda You’re welcome.

@samthI can heartily second @greg’s approach to Emacs config. Makes it so much easier to maintain. In the worst case, if things go wonky, I can just remove ~/.emacs.d/ completely, check out a clean copy from github, and start Emacs. It will automatically download/install all packages. use-package is awesome: https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

If you need some examples, feel free to look at my config: https://github.com/zzamboni/dot-emacs/blob/master/init.org