____           _           _
|  _ \ _ __ ___| |_   _  __| | ___
| |_) | '__/ _ \ | | | |/ _` |/ _ \
|  __/| | |  __/ | |_| | (_| |  __/
|_|   |_|  \___|_|\__,_|\__,_|\___|

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. 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 Prelude you're basically getting a "Get me out of the Prelude, I just want to use Emacs" card.

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/prelude/raw/master/utils/installer.sh | sh

You can now power up your Emacs, sit back and enjoy Prelude.

There are two environment variables you can use to control the source repository and the installation directory. To change the installation directory:

PRELUDE_INSTALL_DIR="$HOME/.emacs.d" && curl -L https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/raw/master/utils/installer.sh | sh

To change the source repository:

PRELUDE_URL="https://github.com/yourname/prelude.git" && curl -L https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/raw/master/utils/installer.sh | sh

Note that the installer will back up any existing .emacs file or .emacs.d since it will unpack Prelude's code in .emacs.d. If you're doing a manual install make sure you don't have a .emacs file or back up your existing .emacs.d directory manually.

Would you like to know more?

Check out the Prelude's project page for all the gory details.

If you're looking for more info on Emacs in general - consult WikEmacs.

More goodies

The Prelude Modules project contains a lot of additional packages for Prelude (install-able via the package-list-packages command) - enhanced programming mode configs, latex config, erc config, etc.

Known issues

Check out the project's issue list a list of unresolved issues. By the way - feel free to fix any of them and sent me a pull request. :-)

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! :-)

Cheers,
Bozhidar