Emacs Prelude

Prelude

Emacs is probably the best text editor in the world. However, the process of coming up with a useful Emacs configuration is long and difficult. It's this process that separates you from truly taking advantage of Emacs's power. I like to refer to this process as the Prelude. The Emacs Prelude has the goal to ease the initial Emacs setup process and to provide you with a much more powerful and productive experience than that you get out of the box. By using Emacs Prelude you're basically getting a "Get me out of the Prelude, I just want to use Emacs" card.

Emacs Prelude is compatible ONLY with GNU Emacs 24. While Emacs 24 is not yet officially released it's a rock solid piece of software more than suitable for everyday work. There is no good excuse not to use Emacs 24!

Fast Forward

Assuming you're using an Unix-like OS (*BSD, GNU/Linux, OS X, Solaris, etc), you already have Emacs 24 installed, as well as git & curl you can skip the whole manual and just type in your favorite shell the following command:

curl -L https://github.com/bbatsov/emacs-prelude/raw/master/utils/installer.sh | sh

You can now power up your Emacs, sit back and enjoy Prelude, forgetting about the rest of this manual.

Getting Emacs 24

Obviously to use the Emacs Prelude you have to install Emacs 24 first. Here's a few tips on doing so:

OS X

Obtaining Emacs 24 on OS X is really simple. There are two popular ways to do it. The first is to simply download a pretest (or a nightly build) from Emacs for OSX. My personal recommendation would be to get the latest pretest (which is ironically the first pretest as well) from here.

That was really easy, right?

The second easy way to obtain Emacs 24 is via homebrew. Just type the following incantation in your shell and you're done:

$ brew install emacs --cocoa --use-git-head --HEAD
$ cp -r /usr/local/Cellar/emacs/HEAD/Emacs.app /Applications/

The second step is optional, but it's recommended if you like to start Emacs from the launchpad or from Spotlight. Personally I prefer to start Emacs in daemon mode (emacs --daemon), so that I could share a single Emacs instance between several Emacs clients (emacsclient -c/t).

Chances are good you have an older version of Emacs installed by default with OS X. I suggest you to remove that older Emacs version to avoid conflicts with the new one. Do this:

$ sudo rm /usr/bin/emacs
$ sudo rm -rf /usr/share/emacs

That's all folk! You may now proceed to the configuration section.

Linux

Given that Linux is more or less the home os of Emacs it presents us with the most installation options. Of course, we can build Emacs from source on every distribution out there, but I rarely bother to do so. Using the distribution's package manager is a better idea for many reasons - you don't need to install a build chain and lots of dev libraries, you get updated versions when they are released and you get automated dependency manager, just to name a few.

That said, few distributions include in their primary repositories builds of Emacs 24. Luckily there are some unofficial repos that come to the rescue.

Debian/Ubuntu users should look no further than the amazing emacs-snapshot APT repo. You'll find installation instructions there for all the relevant Debian and Ubuntu versions out there. High quality, highly recommended builds! After you've added the repo you can install Emacs 24 with the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot

Gentoo users have even less to do, since Emacs 24 can be obtained via the emacs-vcs package in portage, as noted in the official Emacs on Gentoo page.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to find prebuilt Emacs 24 packages for any of the RPM distros (Fedora, SUSE, Mandriva, etc). Since, I'm Debian user I have to admit that I didn't look that far, but the source installation is not particularly hard and is always an option.

Windows

There are several ways to obtain precompiled Emacs 24 binaries if you're a Windows users. The most popular are EmacsW32, Emacs for Windows and of course the official Emacs Windows builds. I've ,personally, never used any builds other than the official ones. The unofficial builds usually include installers and various patches that might be of use to some users.

Since I rarely use Windows I cannot give you any more advice on the choice of a binary vendor.

Enhanced programming experience

The following list will be expanded greatly in the future.

Additional programming languages support

• Clojure
• CoffeeScript
• Erlang
• Groovy
• Haskell

Additional markup languages support

• Markdown
• Sass
• Haml
• Yaml
• LaTeX

Enhanced configuration

• C
• Clojure
• CoffeeScript
• Common Lisp
• ERC
• JavaScript
• Python
• Ruby
• Scheme
• XML

Enhanced productivity

• Projectile
• yasnippet

Bundled packages

• auctex (LaTeX editing)
• clojure-mode
• coffee-mode
• deft (note taking)
• gist (snippet sharing on github.com)
• groovy-mode
• expand-region
• haml-mode
• haskell-mode
• magit (enhanced git integration)
• markdown-mode
• paredit
• projectile (project management mode)
• python.el (improved Python mode)
• sass-mode
• scss-mode
• yaml-mode
• yari (ri frontend)
• yasnippet

Installation

Automated

You can install Emacs via the command line with either curl or wget. Naturally git is also required.

Via Curl

If you're using curl type the following command:

curl -L https://github.com/bbatsov/emacs-prelude/raw/master/utils/installer.sh | sh

Via Wget

If you're using wget type:

wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/bbatsov/emacs-prelude/raw/master/utils/installer.sh -O - | sh

Manual

$ git clone git://github.com/bbatsov/emacs-prelude.git path/to/local/repo
$ ln -s path/to/local/repo ~/.emacs.d

You'd do well to replace ~/.emacs.d with the value of user-emacs-directory for your OS. You can check the value by doing C-h v user-emacs-directory inside Emacs.

You might have to install the make and makeinfo packages if you don't have them already, since the build of some packages obtained via el-get might require them.

Running

Nothing fancy here. Just start Emacs as usual. Personally I run Emacs in daemon mode:

$ emacs --daemon

Afterwards I connect to the server with either a terminal or a GUI client like this:

$ emacsclient -t
$ emacsclient -c

You'd probably do well to put a few aliases in your .zshrc (or .bashrc):

alias e=emacsclient -t
alias ec=emacsclient -c
alias vim=emacsclient -t
alias vi=emacsclient -t

The last two aliases are helpful if you're used to editing files from the command line using vi(m).

Getting to know Prelude

Certainly the best way to understand how Prelude enhances the default Emacs experience is to peruse Prelude's source code (which is obviously written in Emacs Lisp). If you're intimidated by the source

• do not despair. Prelude includes a prelude-mode minor Emacs mode which collects some of the additional functionality added by Prelude. It also adds an additional keymap that binds many of those extensions to keybindings.

Color Themes

Emacs 24 ships with a new theming facility that effectively renders the old color-theme package obsolete. Emacs 24 provides a dozen of built-in themes you can use out-of-the-box by invoking the M-x load-theme command. Emacs Prelude adds two more popular themes to the mix - Zenburn and Solarized (I'm the maintainer of the Emacs ports included).

Zenburn is the default color theme in Prelude, but you can change it at your discretion. Why Zenburn? I (and lots of hackers around the world) find it pretty neat for some reason. Personally I find the default theme pretty tiresome for the eyes, that's why I took that "controversial" decision to replace it. You can, of course, easily go back to the default (or select another theme entirely).

To disable Zenburn just put in your personal config the following line:

(disable-theme 'zenburn)

Or you can use another theme altogether by adding something like:

(enable-theme 'solarized-dark t)

Personalizing

If you'd like to change some of the setting in Prelude (or simply add more) the proper way to do so would be to create Emacs Lisp files under the personal directory in prelude-dir. They will be loaded automatically be Prelude on startup.

Avoid modifying the Prelude config itself (unless you're not intimidated to maintain a personal fork on GitHub)- this will make it hard for you to receive automatic updates in the future.

Caveats & Pitfalls

Marmalade error on initial startup

If you get some http connection error related to the Marmalade repo just do a manual M-x package-refresh-contents and restart Emacs afterwards.

No arrow navigation in editor buffers

This is not a bug - it's a feature! I firmly believe that the one true way to use Emacs is by using it the way it was intended to be used (as far as navigation is concerned at least). That's why I've disabled all movement commands with arrows - to prevent you from being tempted to use them.

If you'd still like to use the arrow keys just invoke M-x prelude-restore-arrow-keys to enable them for the duration of your current Emacs session or add (prelude-restore-arrow-keys) to your personal Emacs customization to enable them permanently.

Windows compatibility

While everything in Prelude should work fine in Windows, I test it only with Linux & OSX, so there are Windows related problems from time to time. This situation will probably improve over time.

Known issues

Check out the project's issue list for that. :-)

Contributors

Here's a list of all the people who have contributed to the development of Emacs Prelude.

Bugs & Improvements

Bug reports and suggestions for improvements are always welcome. github pull requests are even better! :-)

I'd like to include a nice variety of Emacs 24 themes into Prelude - so if you've developed (or simply found) one - give me a shout and I'll take a look at it.

Cheers,
Bozhidar