My Emacs Settings

“GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more.” as they introduce it to the readers on the official site of GNU Emacs.

Actually it’s an old thing still in use today. But it’s no wonder so many people like it even now, since it’s flexible, configurable and extensible. It’s built around some powerful core ideas about buffers, editing and so, and provides a LISP dialect the Emacs Lisp to it’s users to extend and configure it’s features. It’s worth to mention, that the modern versions of GNU Emacs comes with a package system, and there are package repositories containing tons of useful packages to choose form.

Side note. The fact Emacs Lisp is a dynamically scoped language might surprise you, since almost all modern programming languages are statically scoped today. Before you would throw a rock on it, you would like to consider that there are cases when it can come in handy. Eg. You can make other parts of the code behave temporary different, without the need to pass arguments around all the way down in the call stack. The dynamic binding is the default in Emacs, but you may opt for lexical binding if needed on a per file basis.

;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-

(defun make-adder (x)
  (lambda (y) (+ x y)))

To me it’s a versatile platform for doing many text related operations. Starting from source code editing, through project- and file management, to actually testing REST APIs interactively in a minimalist and easy to use style.

There are many awesome repositories on GitHub hosting Emacs settings and configuration for individuals. There were some attempts to provide a minimalistic, standard common ground with enhancements compared to the bare setup a freshly installed Emacs comes with, that fits everyone. Actually it’s a difficult task to do, since what fits all? Probably the most well known example is Technomancy’s Better Defaults for Emacs.

Based on these influencing examples by Technomancy, Magnars and Bodil, I assembled my minimalistic version that fits me well.

I find hosting my Emacs settings on GitHub to be a good idea, because when I move to a new machine, I only need to install Emacs and check out the repo and start Emacs up. And that’s all. All the packages I need are automatically downloaded and installed during the first start.

For my personal Emacs setup, I didn’t like the idea to depend on external, non-standard libraries to be able to install external and non-standard packages. One reason is that these libraries can be installed and updated through the package system and I didn’t like the git submodule binding for this.

Therefore I choose Bodil’s approach to use exclusively pure core Emacs Lisp code to perform this “bootstrapping”.

;; Install packages if not present
(dolist (pkg '(flx
	       flx-ido
	       flycheck
	       markdown-mode
	       paredit
	       projectile
	       restclient))
  (install-package-if-not-installed pkg))

I must also mention that on a Mac, it’s a bit tricky to setup properly to have the user environment settings from the shell right. But don’t worry. It’s not a big deal really. There is a package to the rescue.

;; Are we on a mac?
(defvar is-mac (equal system-type 'darwin)
  "Boolean indicating if we are on a mac")

;; Setup environment variables from the user's shell.
(when is-mac
  (install-package-if-not-installed 'exec-path-from-shell)
  (exec-path-from-shell-initialize))

I like the idea to have the customisation in a separate file. Therefore I put the following code in my init.el file.

;; Keep emacs Custom-settings in separate file
(setq custom-file (expand-file-name "custom.el" user-emacs-directory))
(load custom-file)

Then it’s in a separate file, the custom.el.

(custom-set-variables
 ;; custom-set-variables was added by Custom.
 ;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
 ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
 ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
 '(js-indent-level 2)
 '(projectile-find-dir-includes-top-level t)
 '(projectile-switch-project-action (quote projectile-find-dir))
 '(scheme-program-name "guile"))
(custom-set-faces
 ;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom.
 ;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
 ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
 ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
 )

Are you considering using GNU Emacs?

Pros

• Powerful and productive environment for text related tasks
• No need to move your hand between the keyboard and the mouse all the time
• Many packages for tons of tasks
• You can modify, bend, and extend it to serve your needs best

Cons

• Hard to learn all the funny keystrokes
• It can be hard to learn LISP
• Steep learning curve

GNU Emacs is an extensible text editor and can be customised to meet individual needs.

To see the the complete code to my Emacs settings, visit my GithHub repo!