Your humble correspondent's personal Emacs configuration - because Emacs loves all its users.
Every Emacs user's .emacs.d will inevitably grow until they find it unwieldy, at which point the sensible thing to do is to tear it down and rebuild it.
My old .emacs.d (preserved on github) is one such case. Some things wrong with it:
- Use of vendored packages, mostly for old shit that used to be on Melpa from EmacsWiki but got taken down.
- The separation of code into files was, while a good idea, unintuitive and in some places illogical.
- There were all sorts of language files, many for languages I don't use and am
not actively planning to learn.
- Among these were language files that used to be on Melpa but aren't any more, some of which I never got round to vendoring.
- Many of these also had program requirements that I just didn't have lying around on all my machines and were occasionally a pain to install.
- It was full of old stuff from my old workplace.
- There was a lot of hacking to get it to avoid using TLS to work around Marmalade's shittiness - despite me hardly using Marmalade.
- Helm's author seems to be experiencing burn-out, and may in the future exit Emacs development: here's the issue I saw on this; apparently it's damaging to the maintainer's family, too. Ivy seems more my speed, so I'm trying it out now (I never used any advanced helm features anyway, just used it as a completion engine).
And the main one: My desire was a .emacs.d that you could just clone into your home directory and forget about. I even set up some of my scripts to do that. However, the instability of the setup just didn't allow that - packages kept getting deprecated and removed and I only discovered so when installing it on a new machine. As a result of this hack-and-fix approach there are now slightly different versions of my old .emacs.d on all my various installs, and I really don't want to commit any of the monkey-patches in case they all break each other.
So, in the proud tradition of other Emacs-heads before me, I am tearing down and building up my .emacs.d from scratch. While I never keep these READMEs up to date, here's some of the features, anti-features, and design goals:
- Use Ivy rather than Helm - as above. I loved Helm's fuzzy-find, but the package sorely lacked intuitivity, even for someone used to Emacs bindings. I think it's better that I learned how to do things in a very slightly tweaked Emacs (such as using C-x C-b to kill multiple buffers) rather than learning Helm's baroque way of doing such things. Also, have you ever accidentally entered a Helm buffer? Yikes.
- Don't vendor things unless absolutely necessary. It's the package maintainer's job to get things into Melpa or Elpa. Nothing against packages that aren't, it's just so sketchy copying and pasting in a source file, especially when a better alternative exists.
- Don't copy the behavior of Spacemacs. I'm still fond of that distro for getting me into Emacs, but if I wanted to use it I would use it. So stuff like the dashboard (jank as fuck) or the rotating theme switcher (only ever used to go back to snazzy) are out.
- Just put everything into init.el. I really liked the work that Sacha
Chua did, where her .emacs.d was a
literate programming exercise, but it just doesn't work for me. If one
.vimrc was
good for me back during my penance, one init.el should be good for me now.
- I really don't have enough clout that anyone but me (and perhaps you, dear reader) will ever care about my .emacs.d :P
- Try and keep stuff workplace-independent. Inevitably stuff from work will seep in (back then it was Groovy, and now it'll probably be protobuf) but ricing Emacs specifically to integrate with workplace systems is probably a recipe for disaster.
- Keep all the cool uemacs/emacs-mode bindings that I now love. C-u and C-z in particular are my babies.
- Keep chameleon-prefix on F5 because it's burned into my fingers now.
- Snazzy uses a nice readable color for comments rather than a diminished one. Why? Because I read an article ages ago that changed the way I think about comments.
For the most part, the main difference someone who switched from the old to the new would notice is that now there's Ivy instead of Helm and the Snazzy theme is the default and only one.
Some dependencies are external to Emacs and will need some manual attention.
- https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher#installing for dumb-jump.
- A spellchecker; Ispell on Linux and Mac, hunspell on Windows - see below.
You'll need hunspell and dictionaries. The easiest way to get dictionaries is to install LibreOffice. The easiest way to get hunspell is to use ezwinports, as described here. Presumably at some point though, you'll be able to use winget (which is my personal favorite way to get the Silver Searcher installed, by-the-by).
GPLv3 or, at your option, any later version.