# minimal-emacs.d by James Cherti

6 Hacker News commenters recommended minimal-emacs.d by James Cherti and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it as a compact starting config that sets vanilla Emacs to a good default and teaches you to understand and change your own setup.

## Why people recommend it

- Teaches you to understand and own config (2 comments): "Gives you the lesson of building a config, knowing what's in your config, and then being fluent in changing it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45784429)) "is a great starting point for owning your config" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45783901))
- Good starting point for vanilla Emacs (2 comments): "a compact init.el and early-init.el that configures vanilla emacs into a good, default state" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45784591)) "is a great starting point for owning your config" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45783901))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Doom Emacs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/doom-emacs.md): 60 recommend
- [Spacemacs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/spacemacs.md): 24 recommend
- [Emacs Bedrock](https://hackerapproved.com/p/emacs-bedrock.md): 21 recommend
- [Emacs Solo](https://hackerapproved.com/p/emacs-solo.md): 7 recommend
- [IDEmacs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/idemacs.md): 6 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "minimal-emacs.d by James Cherti", https://hackerapproved.com/p/minimal-emacs-d/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).