As is apparently tradition, I'm sharing my configuration of Emacs.
I've gone a step further and used emacs' org-mode to document the file. The technique is borrowed from Ryan Thomson's repo dotemacs. He uses different packages, so if you're interested I urge you to check it out also.
(Another good source for configuration info: Emacs From Scratch.)
I strongly suggest you use this as a guide, and don't just replace your init.el file. I'm loading a number of packages that I find personally useful. It's unlikely you want them all.
If you're an Emacs beginner I especially recommend starting with "stock" Emacs and adding packages, if you want, one at a time. I hope this repository helps you solve some of the issues you'll run into as you start addding them.
Inclusion of a package in the configuration does not mean it's bug-free, of course, but it does mean I find the package useful.
Rather than put startup code directly into emacs startup files init.el and early-init.el, I've set up files with org-mode, which has a subsytem called babel. This allows me to intermix text, with formatting and editor support, and source code, also with formatting and editor support.
I'm finding this to be a great way to set the code up for several reasons:
- It makes for a very clean way to explain the code as I go, for other programmers.
- It results in more consistent and complete docs for my own understanding, next month or next year.
- It improves organization of code, and reduces the number of comments actually needed in the code.
As mentioned above, this system takes advantage of Emacs' Org mode. This is a complete personal information manager that works directly with text files &emdash; no back-end database, no online system to keep your information locked in its system.
Org mode is built into Emacs. However, there's usually a more recent version that can be installed with more features, bug fixes, etc. I want to use this latest version, but it means the two config files need to be produced differently.
The code in the early-init.el file gets executed before packages are loaded, including org-mode. So to write it in org-mode format, it would have to use the built-in version of org-mode, which is not what we want. So, the process for that file is distinctly old-school: you write code in the early-config.org file, then execute the emacs command org-babel-tangle to produce an early-init.el file with only the elisp code, which runs normally.
In contrast, in the init.el file we can initialize the package manager, load the latest version of org-mode, then produce source code from config.org directly and run that, with no manual step needed.
As you add packages to Emacs, your Emacs config directory ends up with a lot of extra directories and files.
To keep this repository clean, it's designed to be added as a subdirectory of the emacs config directory, named "my_emacs". My actual init.el and early-init.el files in my emacs home directory are just links to the same filename in the my_emacs/ directory. (Windows users will probably need to create a separate file, which does nothing but load the versions in this directory.)
This repository includes several elisp packages as submodules, so if you clone it you'll need to do
git submodule init
git submodule updateI would love to hear your comments and suggestions on this repository. I intend to set up a semi-formal contribution procedure soon. Right now, go ahead and create an issue or submit a pull request. And if you do, thank you!