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init.el | ||
README.md |
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
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