Installation

Installation

Emacs is one of the world's oldest and most powerful editors. However, due to its poor user-interface and cryptic docs, developers new to Lisp choose Lighttable, Sublime, or Cursive. In this guide I will document my struggles to learn Emacs and port my workflow from Sublime/Lightable to Emacs.

Install the latest version of Emacs and symlink Emacs.app to ~/Applications:

brew install emacs --cocoa --srgb
brew linkapps Emacs

Marmalade is the package manager built on top of package.el (an older package manager pre emacs-23). It uses MELPA, a standard repo (package archives) for emacs lisp packages.

First, create a file under ~/.emacs.d/init.el.

Next, add this as a package archive source in:

(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives '("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/") t)
(add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa-stable" . "http://stable.melpa.org/packages/") t)
(add-to-list 'package-archives '("tromey" . "http://tromey.com/elpa/") t)
(package-initialize)

Packages

List available packages:

 M-x package-list-packages

To install a package, move the pointer to the line number of the package and press 'i' to select. Press 'x' (eXecute) to install. If you know what you want, you can also type C-s to find the package by first characters. For deleting packages, type 'd' followed by 'x'

Or you can install package directly from the mini buffer:

M-x package-install
RET
cider

After successfully downloading a required package Emacs will display done in the status bar.

This repo's init.el config comes pre-installed with the following core packages:

cider
paredit
company
rainbow-delimeters
magit
js2-mode
web-mode
scss-mode
markdown-mode
projectile
git-gutter

Optionally, add support for themes by installing color-theme

Without further ado, copy and paste init.el from this directory into your local ~/.emacs.d. Once you're familiar with emacs, you can override your config file at will.