After 7 years, I’m finally doing the dirty dead: jumping off the Vim ship, into the [adjective], [adjective] something [noun] that is emacs. There follows a brief description of the process so far.
![Gnu by Dean Gugler at flickr CC BY-NC] (https://farm7.staticflickr.com/6173/6169267550_753ebd220b.jpg)
Install a recent version of emacs
My version of OS X has emacs 22.2 installed, which is way out of date. To install the most recent version, I used homebrew.
So, first step, brew install emacs. There are a few options (which
you could see with brew options emacs) that make it possible to build
a cocoa version amongst other things.
emacs’ little MELPA
One of my aims was to create a configuration from scratch that I could understand, and that matched the functionality of my Vim set-up.
I created a fresh init.el throwing out the old .emacs.d directory I’d
been experimenting with, and added the MELPA repository as described
here. The standard repository is
a bit of a bare cupboard compared with MELPA. The configuration
to add a repo is a simple few lines of elisp which could go in an
init.el file:
{% highlight lisp %} (require ‘package) (add-to-list ‘package-archives ‘(“melpa” . “http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/") t) (package-initialize) {% endhighlight %}
then restart emacs and M-x package-list-packages. I poked around for a
while and came up with a short list of packages I thought might be useful.
elisp-p?
I haven’t written anything useful using lisp up to now, which was actually one of the attractions of using emacs. I plan to use emacs on a couple of machines, and I want to be able to check my configuration repository out of github, start emacs and have all my packages install automagically. The following achieves this:
{% highlight lisp %} (defvar packages ‘(busybee-theme git-commit-mode git-rebase-mode google-c-style ido-ubiquitous markdown-mode markdown-mode+ rainbow-mode undo-tree ))
(defun packages-installed-p (packages) (if (not packages) t (if (package-installed-p (car packages)) (packages-installed-p (cdr packages)) nil)))
(defun install-packages (packages) (mapc ‘install-package packages))
(defun install-package (package) (unless (package-installed-p package) (package-install package)))
(defun install-missing-packages () (unless (packages-installed-p packages) (package-refresh-contents) (install-packages packages)))
(install-missing-packages) {% endhighlight %}
When packages are missing, they are installed; there’s no automatic cleanup, so installed packages which aren’t listed are ignored rather than deleted.
The remainder of my installation is arranged like this:
.emacs.d/
|- custom/
| |- packages.el ;; manages packages
| `- editor.el ;; contains editor settings
|- elpa/
`- init.el ;; sources files from custom/
I’m working at the moment to configure a modern environment for large C projects, which will doubtless lead to another tedious post in the near future.
My emacs directory, which might serve as some kind of modest example to the completely and utterly uninitiated, is here.