Emacs Configuration Rewrite

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I am in the process of rebooting my GTD workflow. Since I do most of my work in Emacs, I decided it was also time to refactor and improve my Emacs configuration. What was wrong with my configuration?

  • I was living in the past (Emacs 23) and wanted to live in the future (Emacs 24).
  • My configuration file was not under version control. And, because of the differences between Fedora and OS X, the configuration on my work laptop and personal laptop had drifted significantly.
  • My .emacs file was poorly structured and easily broken.

I’ve documented my work on my Emacs configuration here, mostly as a means of reminding my future self what I did. Overall the experience was pleasant. Emacs 24 brings many long-needed features to Emacs.

The end result can be seen below.

Installing Emacs 24:

On Fedora, I installed directly from git:

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# Install Dependencies
sudo yum-builddep emacs
sudo yum install
# Get source
cd ~/src
git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/emacs.git
cd emacs
# Install
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

On my Mac, I installed Emacs 24 via Homebrew:

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brew uninstall emacs
brew install emacs --cocoa --use-git-head --HEAD
ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/emacs/HEAD/Emacs.app /Applications/

Rebuilding My Emacs Configuration

A number of high-quality, pre-built Emacs configurations are available online, including:

A few Opscoders use configurations based around Emacs Starter Kit. However, since I have fairly simple configuration needs, I decided to borrow a few ideas from each and forge ahead on my own. The result can be found in my emacs-config repository. It is still very much a work in progress.

I’ve structured my new .emacs.d directory as follows:

.
|-- init.el
|-- modules/
|-- snippets/
|-- themes/
`-- vendor/

  • init.el: The main entry point of the Emacs configuration. I’ve taken a bit of code from the README of Emacs Starter Kit that automatically installs packages from ELPA.

  • modules/: This is the heart of my emacs config. Any .el files in this directory are automatically loaded.

  • snippets/: Used to store snippets for yasnippet. Currently empty.

  • themes/: Color themes.

  • vendor/: Any 3rd party Emacs packages that are not yet distributed via ELPA.

The auto-installation of packages is great for sharing my configuration between workstations; but, it can be brutally slow the first time you run it.

Highlights

The majority of my emacs configuration consists of minor customizations to popular, pre-built packages. The following are the packages that I use on a daily basis:

  • ido-mode: I honestly don’t know how I used Emacs before discovering ido-mode.

  • org-mode: Org-mode is my go-to application anytime I need to take notes in a meeting, outline a new project, or author a simple document.

  • ess: Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS) is a must-have for any user of R and Emacs. Kieran Healy has created a repository for ESS, making ESS easily installable via Emacs 24’s package management features.

  • auctex: AucTeX provides a number a features useful to those who love LaTeX. If you haven’t fallen in love with LaTeX yet, I highly recommend trying it!

In addition to the tried-and-true packages above and a handful of popular programming modes, I added the following packages to my standard configuration:

  • Gist: I use Github’s gists all the time; I can’t believe I didn’t look for this before.

  • Deft: Deft allows you quickly create, edit, and view plain-text notes. I’ve configured it to use org-mode as its default text-mode and hope to use it to easily collect tasks throughout the day.

  • hippie-expand: I previously used predictive-mode extensively, but eventually found it too slow to use productively. So far, hippie-expand has been filling the auto-completion void that I’ve been feeling since remove predictive-mode.

All of these packages are either shipped with Emacs or available as packages using the new package management features in Emacs 24. I was initially skeptical of the package management features. However, I’ve found that a large amount of the complexity in managing my previous configuration was the result of manually managing packages. With this complexity removed, moving to Emacs 24 was relatively painless.

I was also pleased to see improvements to clipboard integration. My old .emacs file had a number of ugly workarounds for properly interacting with the clipboard on multiple platforms. I’ve found this completely unnecessary in Emacs 24.

The only problem I encountered during this transition was finding a suitable color theme. Low-contrast color themes such as zenburn seem to be in vogue at the moment. I prefer higher-contrast themes. In Emacs 23, I used dark-laptop, but it appears that this theme has not yet been ported to Emacs 24’s built-in color theme support. My current theme is a small color theme based heavily on dark-laptop.

Deploy!

I’ve deployed my new configuration to all of my workstations via a simple git pull. My hope is that a few weeks of real-world use will find the rough edges that remain. Comments and suggestions welcome!

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