Top all-time · #992
Bozhidar Batsov
Personal blog · batsov.com/articlesprogramming
Bozhidar Batsov writes (think), a personal blog at batsov.com about programming. Since 2011, 66 different Hacker News readers have linked it 110 times, most often “An out-of-the-box Emacs bundle for programmers”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (26) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Bozhidar Batsov's (think) blog on Emacs, Clojure and Ruby tooling, and browsers. Commenters link his Emacs setup and language posts, and mention his Prelude, RuboCop and CIDER projects.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Called a great Emacs-on-OS-X intro and helpful Emacs 24 look; liked the Firefox take; suggested for package management.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 26 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Bozhidar Batsov’s personal blog
Most-linked posts?
- An out-of-the-box Emacs bundle for programmers7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2012-06-10
- Who Needs Modern Emacs?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-06-01
- Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-11-29
- RuboCop – A Ruby static code analyzer3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-03-07
- macOS No Longer Ships with Emacs3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-01-12
- Die EmacsWiki, Die3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-03-20
- Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-03-09
- A Note About Recruiters2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-03
- Supercharging Claude Code with the Right (CLI) Tools2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-30
- Modern Emacs: Redux2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-06-09
What Hacker News says?
> It might be great but for now refuse to support anything that further strengthen Googles grip on the market. The question then becomes: "What else even is out there?" Because if you're looking for something that's even remotely feature complete for browsing the modern day web, the majority of the current browsers out there are indeed based on Chromium, as expressed in this article, "Firefox is the Only Alternative…
Comment linking /articles/2021/11/28/firefox-is-the-only-alternative/
on “Chrome users beware: Manifest v3 is deceitful and threatening”Submitted Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony as a story · 1360 points
HN discussionIt's worth mentioning that BBatsov, the creator of CIDER, maintains a practically zero-config Emacs distribution, Prelude. A novice interested in Clojure could install Prelude, and start coding Clojure and other popular languages using pre-configured packages in, let's say, 15-30 minutes. The difference from Spacemacs is that Prelude is much simpler, does not mess with Emacs defaults, is close to vanilla Emacs, and…
Comment linking /prelude/
on “A History of Clojure [pdf]”Submitted Why F#? as a story · 447 points
HN discussionWhile the most practical employee 7 installs Prelude[1]: 1. Install Prelude 2. Work [1] http://batsov.com/prelude/
Comment linking /prelude/
on “Making Emacs Popular Again”Submitted Why Emacs: Redux as a story · 270 points
HN discussionIt was a long time ago, but I got a book "Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition". Its a shame that there isn't better documentation to get past the navigation stuff. There were some short video tutorials I used too (I can't find right now...) The story linked here has a bunch of resources. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3492804 ( https://batsov.com/articles/2011/11/30/the-ultimate-collecti... ) its old but emacs has…
Comment linking /articles/2011/11/30/the-ultimate-collection-of-emacs-resources/
on “Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?”Submitted The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop as a story · 270 points
HN discussion> While firefox may be a better choice than the other two, that's not saying much and Mozilla is very sleazy. Rather than take such statements at face value, here's an example of one such instance that probably hurts its credibility: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html Also, they're not exactly a world apart from Google in some respects either, for example: https://killedbymozilla.com/ vs https://killedbygoogle.com…
Comment linking /articles/2021/11/28/firefox-is-the-only-alternative/
on “Google Chromium, sans integration with Google”Submitted OCaml at First Glance as a story · 267 points
HN discussionThis means that I can finally try out Emacs Prelude [1]. Fantastic! I've been wanting to check it out for a while, but I haven't been brave enough to run a non-stable release of GNU Emacs. http://batsov.com/prelude/
Comment linking /prelude/
on “GNU Emacs 24.1 released”Submitted Why Emacs? as a story · 169 points
HN discussionOCaml[1] and Scala[2] have had this too. [1] https://batsov.com/articles/2024/01/16/learning-ocaml-verify... [2] https://www.scala-lang.org/api/current/scala/annotation/tail...
Comment linking /articles/2024/01/16/learning-ocaml-verifying-tail-recursion-with-tailcall/
on “Misconceptions about loops in C”Submitted The Second Golden Age of Emacs as a story · 126 points
HN discussionI consider LinkedIn full of crap and marketing stuff. I hate the newsfeed and all the fake stuff that people post there. Messages are bloated with random recruiters, search is a pain and the algorithm is totally unclear. Indeed or similar are so basic that if you're lucky you will get an email reply from the company. Is less noisy than LinkedIn. I hope one day the process will be simple and without recruiters in the…
Comment linking /articles/2021/11/03/a-note-about-recruiters/
on “Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?”Submitted RuboCop – A Ruby static code analyzer as a story · 125 points
HN discussionPrelude[1] is a great way to start with emacs. I don't have any experience with evil, though. http://batsov.com/prelude/
Comment linking /prelude/
on “Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors”Submitted A Peek at Emacs 24 as a story · 109 points
HN discussionGNU Emacs doesn't provide it directly, but rather provides the tools to enable it. For instance, http://batsov.com/prelude/ https://ergoemacs.github.io/ or CUA-mode. I haven't tried any of these so can't speak to the experience, but the idea is that a custom layer for various users can be built on top and distributed to desired users (so it's almost out-of-the-box). Spacemacs is also a good example targeting VIM use…
Comment linking /prelude/
on “Emacs 25.1 RC1”Submitted Django 1.3 vs Rails 3: A not so final showdown as a story · 103 points
HN discussionSeems to lack some form of 'package control'. I'd suggest checking the following before implementing tough: https://sublime.wbond.net/ http://batsov.com/articles/2012/02/19/package-management-in-...
Comment linking /articles/2012/02/19/package-management-in-emacs-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/
on “Show HN: Codebox - Open-source cloud and desktop IDE”Submitted The Ultimate Collection of Emacs Resources as a story · 90 points
HN discussionhttp://batsov.com/articles/2011/06/19/django-vs-rails/ appears to give a quick breakdown, but also misses some key features in my opinion. I've worked with rails for about 5 years and Django for a little over 16 months now. There's some things I do and don't like respectively for each framework. I suggest testing each out and see which you prefer. Ruby and Python are similar languages but different enough that you'l…
Comment linking /articles/2011/06/19/django-vs-rails/
on “Django 1.5 beta release notes”Submitted Java.next() - Clojure: The Return of the Lispers as a story · 79 points
HN discussionWorking link to the real thing http://batsov.com/rubocop/
Comment linking /rubocop/
on “RuboCop – A Ruby static code analyzer”Submitted Getting Started with Emacs 24 as a story · 75 points
HN discussionAfter a long time of maintaining my own configuration I took the decision a few years ago to outsource it to people who really care about this stuff. I started with the Emacs Prelude ( http://batsov.com/prelude/ ) which introduced me to some great tools. I recently switched to Vim bindings (evil-mode) and a week ago switched to Spacemacs ( https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs ) which integrates better with evil-mod…
Comment linking /prelude/
on “Making Emacs Work for Me”Submitted Die EmacsWiki, Die as a story · 69 points
HN discussionI was persuaded to try prelude: http://batsov.com/prelude/ never looked back.
Comment linking /prelude/
on “Making Emacs Work for Me”Submitted The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II as a story · 69 points
HN discussion
