A reasonable Emacs config
This is my emacs configuration tree, continually used and tweaked since 2000, and it may be a good starting point for other Emacs users, especially those who are web developers. These days it's somewhat geared towards OS X, but it is known to also work on Linux and Windows.
Emacs itself comes with support for many programming languages. This config adds improved defaults and extended support for the following:
- Ruby / Ruby on Rails
- CSS / LESS / SASS / SCSS
- HAML / Markdown / Textile / ERB
- Clojure (with Cider and nRepl)
- Javascript / Coffeescript
- Python
- PHP
- Haskell
- Elm
- Erlang
- Common Lisp (with Slime)
In particular, there's a nice config for autocompletion with company, and flycheck is used to immediately highlight syntax errors in Ruby, Python, Javascript, Haskell and a number of other languages.
Supported Emacs versions
The config should run on Emacs 23.3 or greater and is designed to
degrade smoothly - see the Travis build - but note that Emacs 24 and
above is required for an increasing number of key packages, including
magit, company and flycheck, so to get full you should use the
latest Emacs version available to you.
Some Windows users might need to follow these instructions to get TLS (ie. SSL) support included in their Emacs.
Other requirements
To make the most of the programming language-specific support in this config, further programs will likely be required, particularly those that flycheck uses to provide on-the-fly syntax checking.
Installation
To install, clone this repo to ~/.emacs.d, i.e. ensure that the
init.el contained in this repo ends up at ~/.emacs.d/init.el:
git clone https://github.com/purcell/emacs.d.git ~/.emacs.d
Upon starting up Emacs for the first time, further third-party
packages will be automatically downloaded and installed. If you
encounter any errors at that stage, try restarting Emacs, and possibly
running M-x package-refresh-contents before doing so.
Important note about ido
This config enables ido-mode completion in the minibuffer wherever
possible, which might confuse you when trying to open files using
C-x C-f, e.g. when you want to open a directory to use
dired -- if you get stuck, use C-f to drop into the
regular find-file prompt. (You might want to customize the
ido-show-dot-for-dired variable if this is an issue for you.)
Updates
Update the config with git pull. You'll probably also want/need to update
the third-party packages regularly too:
M-x package-list-packages, then U followed by x.
You should usually restart Emacs after pulling changes or updating
packages so that they can take effect. Emacs should usually restore
your working buffers when you restart due to this configuration's use
of the desktop and session packages.
Adding your own customization
To add your own customization, use M-x customize and/or
create a file ~/.emacs.d/lisp/init-local.el which looks like this:
... your code here ...
(provide 'init-local)If you need initialisation code which executes earlier in the startup process,
you can also create an ~/.emacs.d/lisp/init-preload-local.el file.
If you plan to customize things more extensively, you should probably just fork the repo and hack away at the config to make it your own! Remember to regularly merge in changes from this repo, so that your config remains compatible with the latest package and Emacs versions.
Please note that I cannot provide support for customised versions of this configuration.
Similar configs
You might also want to check out emacs-starter-kit and prelude.
Support / issues
If you hit any problems, please first ensure that you are using the latest version of this code, and that you have updated your packages to the most recent available versions (see "Updates" above). If you still experience problems, go ahead and file an issue on the github project.
-Steve Purcell
