Welcome to my Emacs Configuration directory!

I spend a lot of time in Emacs, so my configuration matters a lot to me. In order to make sure it is readable, understandable, and maintainable, I have made it into a series of self-documenting Org-Mode files. Every Org-Mode file in this directory is run through Babel, and all the Emacs Lisp code within it is evaluated. Each Org-Mode file is a sort of "module", which configures one aspect of my Emacs experience. These modules declare which packages which they depend on, and configure all my personal preferences. Plus, since the modules are written in Org-Mode, I can write good explanations for my configuration choices using Org-Mode markup, which can even be browsed on GitHub.

Another interesting benefit of my configuration style is that it is almost completely "self hosting." That is, you can plop it down onto a new Emacs installation, and it will install almost all packages and set up an Emacs that is identical to my configuration.

There is a little bit of code in init.el that makes this all possible. Notably, it provides the require-package function, which takes a list of package names and installs them if (and only if) they aren't already installed. Additionally, if you realize you don't want to use a module, you can simply add it to disabled-module-list in init.el to prevent it from loading.

Features

• Solarized dark theme! How could you write code with any other color scheme?
• Helm! A much nicer way to call up all sorts of information, directly through Emacs. See helm.org.
• Gnus for Google Inbox. A pretty heavily configured Gnus that allows me to read and send email directly from Emacs. See gnus.org.
• AucTex! A wonderful LaTeX mode for Emacs. See latex.org.
• Much improved PDF browsing thanks to pdf-tools. See pdf.org.
• Elpy! A great Python mode and integration package. See python.org.
• YaSnippet, for dynamically expanding snippets. See yas.org.
• A nifty search engine interface I wrote for quick browsing within Emacs using eww. See search.org.

External Configuration

While I've gone to great pains to make my Emacs configuration self-hosted, not all my configuration tasks can be done in Emacs Lisp. For some of these modules, you need to do something besides running them on startup. If there is any external configuration, there should be a section named "External Configuration" that describes what needs to be done. It will probably even have commands to run, that should work on Arch Linux.

Here are the important externals:

• AucTex: pacman -S auctex
• English Aspell Dictionary: pacman -S aspell-en
• Poppler for PDF: pacman S poppler-glib