Emacs

It's kind of old school. But it's still a great text editor.

Installation

Some systems come with emacs already installed. This is rare. Usually you'll need to install it. On linux systems, it's available through your package manager. For example:

sudo apt-get install emacs

Link to your configurations:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:charlesbrandt/public.git
cd
rm .emacs
rm .emacs.d
ln -s ~/public/system/editors/emacs/.emacs .emacs
ln -s ~/public/system/editors/emacs/.emacs.d .emacs.d

Sometimes emacs will create a configuration directory if it is run and one doesn't already exist. (dangerous! make sure you don't have any old configurations here!)

rm -rf .emacs.d/

Running

emacs

to ensure the editor runs in the terminal and does not launch a gui version

emacs -nw

Close Frame / Unsplit Window

To close an unexpected frame in a window, it can be difficult via a terminal if Alt-0 or C-x 0 doesn't have an effect.

M-x delete-window

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5360028/emacs-unsplit-a-particular-window-split

Configuration

Settings are stored in .emacs and .emacs.d directories.

Settings and configurations accumulate over time. The ones I use are available in this directory. I'm aiming for something that works reasonably well with other editors.

I like Ergo Emacs to keep cut-copy-paste operations in line with other editors.

I map the action key (typically ctrl-x) to alt-a Overlaps with Select-all on many applications, but for the rare times that I use select all, I don't mind calling it manually.

Lisp

Emacs is built on a language called lisp.

Custom commands can be written in lisp.

I've written some of my own in this repository. See also moments.el / .emacs.d/moments.el

Themes

;; themes and start up settings 
(load-file "~/.emacs.d/editor.el")

Not all themes are created equally. Considering all types of syntax highlighting is important. A good source of inspiration:

https://emacsthemes.com/popular/index.html

Melpa

Milkypostman’s Emacs Lisp Package Archive

https://melpa.org/#/ MELPA https://melpa.org/#/getting-started Getting Started - MELPA

Interact with:

m-X package-list-packages

" If you run into a problem installing or upgrading, you may need to go into your ~/.emacs.d/elpa/ directory and delete packages that are installed multiple times. This can happen when the install times out."

Keymaps

One of the first things to do is to set up some sane key bindings. Yes, I know the default ones in emacs are optimized for efficient hand movement. I've had them burned into my muscle memory. But they're really non-standard, and they get in the way when switching to just about any other typical computing platform.

In my configuration, custom keymaps definitions are in: .emacs.d/keymaps.el

It looks like many of these may be configured as part of the ergoemacs package: https://ergoemacs.github.io/

Make sure you have at least emacs version 24.1: M-x emacs-version via: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19393538/get-emacs-version-from-within-emacs

Trying it out first:

cd .emacs.d/
git clone https://github.com/ergoemacs/ergoemacs-mode.git

If it works, be sure to include the module as a submodule in this repository:

cd ~/public
git submodule add https://github.com/ergoemacs/ergoemacs-mode.git editors/emacs/.emacs.d/modules/ergoemacs-mode

via: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules

Then, when cloning this repository, you can get the latest version with:

git clone --recurse-submodules -j8 git://github.com/foo/bar.git

via: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3796927/how-to-git-clone-including-submodules