My Emacs configuration seems to have more or less settled down again after a flurry of changes, so it's time to update my previous list of Emacs packages that I use , so that I can come back to this entry later and see how things have changed over time. A bunch of things haven't changed since last time so I'm going to put the unchanged stuff at the bottom.

Currently I'm using Emacs 30.2 everywhere so some of the things I'm mentioning here are now built in, which is why I'm not restricting this to third party packages. As before I'm going to exclude dependencies that are automatically installed by the Emacs package system (since I don't use them, I just have them around in the background).

In no particular order:

• In text-mode, I use Flyspell ( although there's a gotcha there ). I've turned off Flyspell's default binding to M-TAB, because I find Flyspell basically useless for actually correcting words. Almost all of what I use Flyspell for is simply marking words it thinks are misspelled or mistakes so I can spot them (and then fix them by hand).

• I now use Eglot as my LSP server environment , which is built in to GNU Emacs. I use LSP servers for Go , Python , shell programming, and to some degree with C (and technically I have YAML and Rust stuff installed, but I don't really work with either in GNU Emacs).

  (I'm not sure a LSP server is all that useful for shell programming, or at least the LSP server I have .)

• For programming diagnostics, I primarily use Flycheck but I also have a Flymake configuration . My Flycheck configuration has flycheck-eglot for integration with Eglot, and also flycheck-golangci-lint (for Go) and flycheck-mypy (for Python) as supplemental linters that I turn on when I want them. For Flymake, I've installed flymake-shellcheck and flymake-flycheck (for when I want to throw the kitchen sink at something in Flymake).

• For Go programming I use go-mode . These days I no longer use supplemental packages for diagnostics; instead, all of that is handled through my fly* package setup , which primarily means the diagnostics provided by the gopls LSP server.

• For completion, I use a whole collection of packages with their own sets of configurations . The current list of main packages is the more or less standard-ish stack of vertico , marginalia , orderless , consult , and corfu , plus completion-preview-mode .

• After a significant amount of wrangling, I managed to get Tramp set up for my unusual environment (see my notes ). I'm using it for more things than I entirely expected.

I have three partially used packages for displaying diagnostics and other things in code buffers to make them more visible:

• flyover is a package I just discovered today as my best Flycheck substitute for Flymake's ' flymake-show-diagnostics-at-end-of-line ' setting, which I like as an option for shoving diagnostics in my face when I want to be sure I see them all.

• I've installed sideline and supporting packages sideline-flycheck , sideline-eglot , and sideline-flymake in case I some day decide I want a noisy programming mode environment (Eglot or otherwise) that shows LSP code actions, diagnostics and so on all over the place, as lsp-ui could be set to do.

  (I'd like some easy way of filtering Eglot's LSP code actions in sideline because otherwise it's too noisy most of the time.)

• I also have flycheck-inline installed because it's a less obtrusive version of what sideline gives me in Eglot buffers (where the full sideline experience would show me all code actions as well).

Packages that I've carried over unchanged from the previous late 2023 edition are:

• embark , which is in theory a great way to do all sorts of things with a few keystrokes and in practice I mostly use as a handy way to do 'reflow this region' when writing email. I have embark-consult installed as well.

  (I feel as if I should learn more about embark and how to use it well, but there's always so much to learn and remember about GNU Emacs and my configuration.)

• Magit for creating basically all of my Git commits. I mostly don't use Magit for other Git operations, but I consider it essential for easy and flexible Git commits (for example, selective commits ). I'll sometimes start Emacs purely to make Git commits with Magit.
• git-timemachine to let me step through historical versions of Git-controlled files in Emacs.

• diminish to turn down the noise level of Emacs' modeline. I configure and use it through use-package so I usually don't think about it.

• backward-forward for easy, web-browser like jumping backward to where I was when I follow a reference to something in lsp-mode. I wrote an entry about jumping backward and forward .

• which-key , which gives me a prompt of what my next options are in multi-key sequences; I find this very useful for things I don't use regularly enough to have memorized or wired into my fingers already. Which-key is now built in to GNU Emacs.

• vundo to give me an easy way to navigate backward through Emacs' sometimes unpredictable undo stack . I know that there are more elaborate packages, like undo-tree , but vundo is quite simple and meets my desires.

• smartparens to make it less error prone to write and edit Lisp (I no longer have it enabled for Python because I found it too irritating). Smartparens isn't perfect for Lisp, but it's broadly better than trying to do it by hand. I don't use any key bindings for it or any of its smart commands (or its strict mode), I just let it automatically insert closing things for me. Some of its rearrangement commands might make my life easier, but life is full of Emacs things to learn.

  (One area of Lisp where smartparens falls down is single quotes, which in my Lisp are most often not paired but instead used to quote symbols. So every time I write "'thing" in Emacs Lisp I have to remove the trailing quote afterward. I'll live with it, though.)

• try , a handy way to try out an Emacs package without going through the effort to add it and then remove it again.

Things I'm not really using but still have installed (both carried over from last time ):

• expand-region is a little package to expand the Emacs region out to cover increasingly big things. I use it partly for exactly that, but also partly as a way of seeing where, for example, Emacs considers the current Lisp s-expression or defun to end; if I expand the region to the entire s-expression, I can just look. I have this bound to C-=, which maybe I'll remember this time around.

  (In theory this is useful, in practice I keep forgetting I have it.)

• fold-this seemed potentially useful and I put together some bindings for it, but in practice I don't seem to touch it. I was planning to use it in conjunction with expand-region (as a quick way of selecting a region to fold).

  Folding feels like something that might be useful for navigating files or seeing an overview of their structure if I can figure out how to use it. But I'm not currently convinced it's the best option for this for me, instead of things like consult-imenu (although I'm not using that either).

I used to have evil installed but I removed it because I wasn't using it at all, partly due to its clash with my Emacs reflexes .

Some of these packages are probably out of date or not ideal, since I set a number of them up some time ago.

(Most of these packages are installed from MELPA , which means I'm generally getting frequent updates on the ones under active development and more or less the latest development version. So far this hasn't been a problem.)