Overview

Emacs without any configuration

Emacs without any configuration

To call Emacs a text editor would be like calling a smartphone a pocket calculator. While Emacs can edit text but it can also do so much more, from browsing the web to answering emails, from playing tetris to offering counseling.

Emacs is often affectionately referred to as “an Operating System lacking a decent text editor” due to all the different programs that have been written for it. At its core Emacs is essentially an interpreter for a Lisp dialect called ELisp and people over the years have written programs that just happen to be good at manipulating text making Emacs suitable for text editing.

It has its drawbacks though Emacs users are often struck down with a case of “Emacs Pinky” which is essentially RSI from having to use the Control key so often to issue commands. Thankfully there are ways to remedy this, if you are familiar with the [Vim][vim] editing style there is a fantastic vim emulation package called evil-mode which when combined with evil-leader brings a workflow to Emacs where you can quite easily forget about the Control key entirely.

Starter Kits

Emacs with a custom configuration, using the Spacemacs starter kit

Emacs with a custom configuration, using the Spacemacs starter kit

With great power comes great responsibility and configuring Emacs to your liking can be an entire project in itself. For example here is my old settings file which weighs in at over 400 lines of code and even then many features that I wanted weren’t working properly or missing entirely. Thankfully the community has created many starter kits or configuration frameworks which allows you to crowd source your configuration leaving you to concentrate on other things.

Some popular starter kits include:

  • Prelude: A starter kit focused on bringing saner defaults and a large suite of popular Emacs packages to kickstart your editing experience. Focuses on the default editing style of Emacs

  • Spacemacs: Mainly focused on the Vim editing style, Spacemacs brings you many of the popular Emacs packages packages wrapped with mnemonic, discoverable keybindings.

  • emacs24-starter-kit: This starter kit is written in a literate style where all code is surrounded by the documentation explaining it.

Getting Started

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Tutorials

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