Recently I’ve been working on documentation sites for a couple of my more prominent Emacs packages - CIDER and Projectile. When I got to the point where I needed to register some domains for the sites I realized that picking the right domain is just as hard as naming things.1

Most open-source projects typically have .org domains and you’d see here and there the use of .net or (more recently) .io. Those are all great domain options, but they have one slight problem - because they’re super popular there aren’t that many free names to choose from if you decide to use them. That would have forced me to go with domains like emacscider.org or emacsprojectile.org, which are OK, but nothing more. I don’t know about you, but I really hate prefixing domain names!

After struggling with this for a while an unexpected solution presented itself to me. I was on a short business trip to Mexico and I noticed that the country’s top-level domain is .mx. .mx just like in M-x, Emacs’s most iconic keybinding!2 Needless to say I immediately registered cider.mx and projectile.mx. Such a perfect fit!

I think that every Emacs projects deserves a Meta-X domain, so get one for your project right away, while there are still plenty of free names to choose from!

  1. OK, nothing is quite as hard as naming, but that’s pretty close. ↩

  2. One can also argue that M-x sounds a lot like Emacs. I’m reasonably sure the choice of M-x was not accidental. ↩