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 (via nrepl)
Javascript / Coffeescript
Python
PHP
Haskell
Erlang
Common Lisp (with Slime)

In particular, there's a nice config for tab autocompletion, and flycheck is used to immediately highlight syntax errors in Ruby, HAML, Python, Javascript, PHP and a number of other languages.

Requirements

Emacs 23 or greater (note that Emacs 24 is required for some functionality, and will likely become the minimum required version some time soon.)

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.

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.

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)

Alternatively, fork the repo and hack away at the config to make it your own!

Similar configs

You might also want to check out emacs-starter-kit and emacs-prelude.

Support / issues

If you hit any problems, please file an issue on the github project

-Steve Purcell