It’s basically an emacs with preconfigured packages. To run it, you don’t need emacs or .emacs.d configured. It comes as a standalone application.
From the website:
Portacle is a complete IDE for Common Lisp that you can take with you on a USB stick. It is multi-platform and can be run on Windows, OS X, and Linux. Since it does not require any complicated installation process, it is set up and running in no time.
It lends itself very well both to absolute beginners of Lisp that just need a good starting point, as well as advanced users that want to minimise the time spent getting everything ready.
What I’m wondering is that would anyone be interested in a similar solution for Org-Roam? I have something similar set up on my own desktop because I want to avoid mixing my regular Emacs for coding and Emacs for note-taking. I have called it “RoamEx” for now, better name suggestions would be appreciated.
I think there is a sizable audience for such a solution for Org-roam.
My experience has been that many people who are new to Emacs are interested in getting Emacs and Org-roam up and running very quickly and start using Emacs/Org-roam.
For example, see my humble guide named Zero to Emacs and Org-roam: a step-by-step guide on Windows 10. It has 1.1k clicks on the link to my GitHub repo – if you look at the link to the chapter “Set up Org-roam (including sqlite3)”, there are 1.3k clicks. The guide was origianlly for v1 of Org-roam. Updating it for v2 has been slow but I still get stars regularly on my repo (now has more than 500 stars).
In addition, you might like to have a read of this post: The State of Org-Roam for Actual Beginners. It has been viewed by many people on this forum (with 9k views, the 4th most viewed of all time). It’s a very candid assessment of the author’s experience and frustration in trying to get into Emacs and Org-roam, ultimately deciding to move away from it. The subsequent exchange of comments might also inspire such endeavor as “RoamEx” – that is, if you are looking at beginners as its target audience.