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Chemacs
Chemacs is an Emacs profile switcher, it makes it easy to run multiple Emacs configurations side by side.
Think of it as a bootloader for Emacs.
Rationale
Emacs configuration is either kept in a ~/.emacs
file or, more commonly, in a
~/.emacs.d
directory. These paths are hard-coded. If you want to try out
someone else’s configuration, or run different distributions like Prelude or
Spacemacs, then you either need to swap out ~/.emacs.d
, or run Emacs with a
different $HOME
directory set.
This last approach is quite common, but has some real drawbacks, since now packages will no longer know where your actual home directory is.
All of these makes trying out different Emacs configurations and distributions needlessly cumbersome.
Various approaches to solving this have been floated over the years. There’s an Emacs patch around that adds an extra command line option, and various examples of how to add a command line option in userspace from Emacs Lisp.
Chemacs tries to implement this idea in a user-friendly way, taking care of the various edge cases and use cases that come up.
Installation
Clone the Git repository, and run install.sh
$ git clone https://github.com/plexus/chemacs.git
$ cd chemacs
$ ./install.sh
OK Creating symlink ~/.emacs -> /home/arne/chemacs/.emacs
The install script will symlink ~/.emacs
to the Chemacs script. If you
already have a ~/.emacs
you need to move it out of the way first
$ ./install.sh
WARN chemacs can't be installed, ~/.emacs is in the way
By symlinking you can easily update Chemacs with a git pull
. Chemacs is not
available on ELPA/MELPA because its special position in the Emacs boot process
would cause a chicken and egg problem.
Usage
Chemacs adds an extra command line option to Emacs, --with-profile
. Profiles
are configured in ~/.emacs-profiles.el
. If this file does not exist
Chemacs will create it with a default profile pointing at ~/.emacs.d
.
If no profile is given at the command line then the default profile is used, so
if you currently have your emacs configuration in ~/.emacs.d
then Chemacs
will, by default, use your existing configuration.
$ emacs --with-profile my-profile
.emacs-profiles.el
This file contains an association list, with the keys/cars being the profile names, and the values/cdrs their configuration.
The main thing to configure is the user-emacs-directory
(("default" . ((user-emacs-directory . "~/.emacs.d")))
("spacemacs" . ((user-emacs-directory . "~/spacemacs"))))
Chemacs will set this to be the user-emacs-directory
in use, and load
init.el
from that directory.
Other things you can configure
custom-file
: The file where Customize stores its customizations. If this isn’t configured, and thecustom-file
variable is still unset after loading the profile’sinit.el
, then this will get set to the profile’sinit.el
server-name
: Sets theserver-name
variable, so you can distinguish multiple instances withemacsclient -s <server-name>
.env
An association list of environment variables. These will get set before loading the profile, so they can influence the initialization, and they are visible to any subprocesses spawned from Emacs.
Store .emacs-profile.el
together with your dotfiles. If you’re not yet keeping
a version controlled directory of dotfiles, then check out
connect-the-dots
for a helpful script to do that.
Changing the default profile (e.g. for GUI editors)
Where it is not possible to use the --with-profile
flag, the default profile
can be set using a ~/.emacs-profile
file.
If your ~/.emacs-profiles.el
file contains the following:
(("default" . ((user-emacs-directory . "~/.emacs.d")))
("spacemacs" . ((user-emacs-directory . "~/spacemacs")))
("prelude" . ((user-emacs-directory . "~/prelude"))))
you can create a file called ~/.emacs-profile
, containing the name of the
profile you’d like to be used when none is given on the command line:
$ echo 'spacemacs' > ~/.emacs-profile
This will set the default profile to be the “spacemacs” profile, instead of “default”. You can change the default by simply changing the contents of this file:
$ echo 'prelude' > ~/.emacs-profile
If this file doesn’t exist, then “default” will be used, as before.
Spacemacs
Spacemacs is typically installed by cloning the Spacemacs repo to ~/.emacs.d
,
and doing extra customization from ~/.spacemacs
or ~/.spacemacs.d/init.el
.
This makes it tedious to switch between version of Spacemacs, or between
different Spacemacs configurations.
With Chemacs you can point your user-emacs-directory
to wherever you have
Spacemacs installed, and use the SPACEMACSDIR
environment variable to point at
a directory with customizations that are applied on top of the base install.
(("spacemacs" . ((user-emacs-directory . "~/spacemacs")
(env . (("SPACEMACSDIR" . "~/.spacemacs.d")))))
("spacemacs-develop" . ((user-emacs-directory . "~/spacemacs/develop")
(env . (("SPACEMACSDIR" . "~/.spacemacs.d")))))
("new-config" . ((user-emacs-directory . "~/spacemacs/develop")
(env . (("SPACEMACSDIR" . "~/my-spacemacs-config"))))))
DOOM emacs
You can add an entry similar to the following to your .emacs-profiles.el
In the following snippet ~/doom-emacs
is where you have cloned doom emacs.
(Depending on when you read this) DOOMDIR
support is only in develop
branch of doom emacs. Check commit history of master
branch of doom emacs
("doom" . ((user-emacs-directory . "~/doom-emacs")
(env . (("DOOMDIR" . "~/doom-config")))))
Please refer to this discussion for details.
LICENSE
Copyright © Arne Brasseur 2018-2019
Distributed under the terms of the GPL v3.