My Emacs settings

This is an ever-changing set of Emacs settings, mostly targetting the following uses:

• development (in Julia, Python, C++, and obviously a bit of elisp);
• document authoring (mostly in LaTeX).

Design principles

Objectives

This configuration was designed with several objectives in mind:

• Maintainability: it relies on John Wiegley's excellent use-package system to group package-dependent settings in logical units. Third party packages are automatically installed via the :ensure directive.

• Performance: another benefit of use-package is speed. Most packages benefit from deferred loading, so that the initial startup time is maintained under acceptable limits even with a relatively large number of dependencies.

• Fault-tolerance: since Emacs itself will be used to debug its init-file, it should be as tolerant to failures as possible. Part of the fault tolerance is gained at no cost once again by use-package (since errors in :config blocks are gracefully demoted to warnings). As for errors in the remaining parts of the configuration, they are tackled by a custom progn-safe macro. A make check command allows testing and debugging the entire configuration at once by ensuring all packages are correctly loaded (debugging with deferred loading can be a somewhat difficult problem).

• Self-containment and independance: this setup is designed so that it can be put anywhere and be used from there, without interferring with the regular emacs configuration installed in ~/.emacs.d. I use this so that the emacs23-based configuration imposed by the system on my work machine can safely co-exist with a locally-installed recent emacs version.

Files hierarchy

Files are more or less grouped in the following way:

• Sources:

  • init.el: top-level file, containing mostly everything;
  • elisp/setup-*.el: if the configuration of a package takes more than a few lines, it is put in a dedicated file;
  • elisp/host-*.el: host-specific settings, loaded at the beginning of startup.

• Variable files: all files used for local persistency, which should not be versioned and shared among machines (recent file list, desktops, ...)

  • var/*:

• Shared files: non-changing files which are needed for operation. Some are versioned in the repository, others are downloaded from public sources during initial setup.

  • share/info: specific info files. In particular, the entire Python documentation is included here.
  • share/fonts: I use the Symbola font for unicode symbols, and version it here since it seems to be (hopefully temporarily?) unavailable.

Installation and usage

You can of course instal this in your ~/.emacs.d directory, but you don't need to: this setup can be used from anywhere without interfering with another regular configuration.

$ git clone https://github.com/ffevotte/emacs.d /path/to/emacs.d
$ cd /path/to/emacs.d
$ make

If you installed everything to standard locations, you're done. Otherwise, you need to run emacs like this:

$ /path/to/emacs.d/bin/em

The correct environment to run the em command, as well as better integration between your shell and emacs (particularly for shells running within a term buffer in emacs), can be obtained by sourcing the provided bash configuration snippet from your ~/.bashrc file:

source /path/to/emacs.d/bashrc