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Lisp (and especially Emacs Lisp) isn't harder than other languages. I'm not a professional programmer either, but I've dabbled in languages from BASIC to bash to PERL, JavaScript, and Python. In my experience, Elisp has been the easiest of all of them.

Once you wrap your head around how lists work in Lisp, it all comes together pretty quickly. And Emacs's self-documenting nature makes learning it that much easier.

The syntax is more consistent than any other language I've come across. It's lists all the way down.

Just do "C-h R eintro RET" and start learning. Do "M-x find-library RET" to read the code of your favorite package and figure out how it works.

I live in that world by outsourcing article fetching to external services and storing all messages/articles locally. The basic setup is this:

Emails:

• Offlineimap syncs 2 Gmail accounts and connects directly to...
• Dovecot as an IMAP server. Dovecot, stores the emails in Maildir format and Gnus's nnimap backend gets them from the local Dovecot server.

RSS/Atom feeds:

• A program called Feed2exec saves RSS and Atom feeds in Maildir format. Dovecot monitors those folders and serves them to nnimap along with the emails. There is at least one other program that fetches newsfeeds to Maildir, but Feed2exec is in debian.

All 3 of these services do their job regardless of whether Emacs is running, and nnimap is super fast when the server is local.

I don't read actual newsgroups anymore. If I did, I'd install Leafnode for them. But I wonder if the nntp backend would benefit to the same extent that nnimap does.

You can use the `setopt' macro, which is also new in Emacs 29.1.

(setopt package-archives
        '(("gnu" . "https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")
          ("nongnu" . "https://elpa.nongnu.org/nongnu/")
          ("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/")))

In CUA mode, you can use C-S-c and C-S-x as the prefixes and then only use C-x and C-c for cut and copy.

There is nnreddit.

There is also the RSS feed (add ".rss" to a subreddit's url). But that only has the posts, not the comments.

One approach would be to use the ace-isearch package or a custom keybinding and function (like the one shown here) to use isearch first and its "C-w" binding to yank the words, and then switch over to consult-line using the same query.

What clicked it for me was realizing how simple the configuration could be. You only need to change a single line in the dovecot config to get it working (not including a bit more for the search plugin).

There were some old guides online with the dovecot command to include in the Gnus config, but that has changed, so I had to figure out the updated command to use. I can post that later if you like.

Nnmaildir works great for archives, but when I tried using it for my inbox and other folders, it didn't work out very well. Can't remember exactly what the problems were right now though.

I ended up installing dovecot, along with one of the search engines it can use for server side imap searching. It works really well, is really fast, and didn't require setting up user databases or any of that stuff.