Ask HN: Emacs starter kit? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Emacs starter kit?

11 pointsnewsisan6 comments

Which one should I use?

https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit https://github.com/topfunky/emacs-starter-kit https://github.com/eschulte/emacs-starter-kit

If you can't make an absolute recommendation, could you explain some of the differences so I can decide? It is a bit over my head as I am very new to emacs.

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I don't know of any particular "starter kits". Generally speaking, the way I (and most people I know) got started was either by copying a friends .emacs file or just googling for something when you realize you need it. The latest versions of (at least GNU) emacs ship with a lot of language major modes.

If you're on debian/ubuntu, the emacs-goodies-el is a good package to grab, as it has a bunch of useful packages including color-themes.

http://www.emacswiki.org/ tends to be fairly helpful to get started, as is the included manual (although its only ~3.5 years after I started using emacs that I'm starting to abandon the arrow keys in favor of the builtin movement chords)

I think as you use emacs, you realize "I really want feature X", then you google for it and find it exists and you're happier for it. After a while you get more comfortable with your .emacs file you start adding your own keybindings, macros, etc.

The echulte one is the one I use because it has a _fantastic_ literate add-on that inlines org-mode into your startup scripts. Actually, it's the other way around now I think about it - you write org-mode files and inline your elisp customisations :) My personal init.org looks like this:

  Writing
  Programming
  Game dev
  Settings

and so on. All my settings for all my packages are in here - I just tab to change the visibility. At startup the package generates the correct elisp files from the org file. But the defaults are all sensible too if you're just getting started.

Thanks for that, I used org-mode previously so went with this one. Can you briefly explain the literate org-mode addon and your init.org? Thanks

Sure. Your init files are actually .org files so you can arrange your customisations in logical order by sections. The actual code is encapsulated between #+begin_src and #+end_src tags and the init file will generated the proper .el files for you. here's an extract:

  Personal customisations

  * Settings
  ** Paths

  #+begin_src emacs-lisp

  ;; PATH settings

  (setenv "PATH"
    (concat
     "/bin" ":"
   ;; and so on
    )

#+end_src emacs-lisp Colors Abbreviations Misc

So your .emacs becomes an org file with all the goodness, organisation and layout friendliness that implies. No need to split all your settings and elisp stuff across different files to keep it tidy - just stick them under another bullet!

Don't worry about it too much. It's just a way to configure your Emacs with some niceties while you're busy learning the editor. I've spent a bit of time digging through the starter kits and learning how everything is configured for the languages I care about. The keybindings mods and additions are much better than the Emacs defaults.

I use technomancy's, I'd assume the differences are negligible and great changes make their way back to technomancy.

Topfunky's report is a fork of technomancy's. Eschulte's fork contains modes for most programming languages. Both topfunky's and eschulte's fork contain a lot of modes and are well maintained.

I use the topfunky fork. These starterkits contain instructions on how to add more modes so just choose something that has most you want and the rest :)

Welcome to emacs.

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