Balaji's Weblog

My GNU Emacs Setup

  | #software  #emacs  

I use GNU Emacs version 29 built with native compilation support. Native Compilation compiles lisp functions to native code that promises speedy executions of editor functions. Not all packages need it, but some like LSP mode and JSON parsing benefit from it. Better to have it than not because you cannot add native compilation support after installing Emacs.

Package Manager

Elpaca

GNU Emacs comes with a built-in package manager that uses the (use-package) macro to install and manage packages. Elpaca is compatible with that macro and it is probably the only reason I could migrate to Elpaca from Straight.el

Alternatives:

What I like

  • Async, fast and to not have to worry about which repository to pull packages from.
  • Read the comment in Reddit from the package maintainer themselves: link

Editor Enhancements

Settings that enhance the editor experience through third-party packages or configurations.

better-defaults

better-defaults is a good package to start with for a visually clutter free and less intrusive user-experience with GNU Emacs. Here are some more options I add to my init file that are not provided by better-defaults.

(cua-mode t) ; regular keyboard fns for cut, copy, paste and delete
(global-display-line-numbers-mode 1) ; in Emacs v28 and below this is (global-linum-mode t)
(scroll-bar-mode 0) ; aesthetics.
(vc-follow-symlinks t) ; avoids the question everytime we open a symlink of a file.
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(fullscreen . maximized)) ; start with a maximized window

I prefer to have menu-bar on GUI mode. Menu Bar can be a very useful tool and disabling it for new users is considered a bad advice. better-defaults enables it (or rather, not disables it) for Mac only. This function re-enables menubar for all window systems but keeps it disabled in terminal.

(defun my/on-window-display ()
  (if (display-graphic-p)
      (progn
        (menu-bar-mode 1))
    (progn
      (menu-bar-mode 0))))

(add-hook 'after-make-frame-functions
          (lambda (frame)
            (select-frame frame)
            (my/on-window-display)))
(add-hook 'after-init-hook #'my/on-window-display)

This is built on the answer from Stackoverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5801740.

evil

The Extensible VI Layer. The goodness of vim on GNU Emacs.

evil-collection

This is a collection of bindings that Evil does not cover by default. It is a must have if one is already using evil and writes code for a living.

expand-region

Expand Region selects text region like Ctrl + A but way better. Expand region increases the selected region by semantic units. Just keep pressing the key until it selects what you want.C-= to continuously select and C-- to reduce the scope of selection.

doom-themes

A megapack of themes that comes part of the configuration framework called Doom, but has the option to be installed separately.

doom-modeline

A fancy and fast mode line. One would have to install Symbols Nerd Font to fully appreciate the usefulness of doom modeline.

solaire-mode

It is an aesthetic plugin designed to visually distinguish “real” buffers (i.e. file-visiting code buffers) from “unreal” buffers (like popups, sidebars, log buffers, terminals, etc) by giving the latter a slightly different background. This works particularly well with doom themes.

avy

Text jumping in visible buffers. If you write longform text (like blogs or journals or notes), avy would be very useful. One can do apparently anything with Avy, but for me I had to mentally pepare myself to use Avy before I start my text search. The cool thing is it doesn’t take long for it to become a part of my core editing workflow. I specifically use avy-goto-word-1 and avy-goto-line functions only.

ace-window

ace-window is the Avy of window management. It in fact installs Avy as a dependency. For a conclusive review of window managers check this blog post.

(use-package ace-window
  :config
  (global-set-key (kbd "M-o") 'ace-window)
  (setq aw-dispatch-always t)
  (ace-window-display-mode))

Minibuffer Enhancements

In GNU Emacs, minibuffer is where it reads complicated arguments. It is a special-purpose buffer with a small amount of screen space. There are scores of packages to make the minibuffer experience as smooth as possible.

vertico

VERTical Interactive COmpletion. Vertico provides a performant and minimalistic vertical completion UI based on the default completion system. This is similar in intent to ivy or helm. Because this is UI only, vertico needs and works well with complementary packages. I use all of them (well except for embark).

consult

Consult provides search and navigation commands based on the Emacs completion function completing-read. I specifically use these functions

  • consult-fd - searches for filenames using the fd command.
  • consult-ripgrep - searches for a string using the rg command
  • consult-outline- searches within outlines.
  • consult-line - searches within a file.

marginalia

Annotates completion candidates with richer information.

Before Marginalia

Before Marginalia

After Marginalia

After Marginalia

orderless

It provides an orderless completion style that divides the pattern into space-separated components, and matches candidates that match all of the components in any order.

Before Orderless

Before Orderless

After Orderless

After Orderless

which-key

The good news is that GNU Emacs 30 will include which-key-mode by default. which-key is a minor mode for Emacs that displays the key bindings following your currently entered incomplete command (a prefix) in a popup.

Before which-key

Typing `C-h` without which-key-mode

After which-key

Typing `C-h` with which-key-mode

Project Management

“Projects” are root folders/working directories. These are packages that makes working with projects better.

General.el

general.el provides a more convenient method for binding keys in GNU Emacs. In other words, one can create their own key bindings for most used functions. This is the bare minimum of what general can provide, checkout their documentation for the full feature list.

The reason why I kept general.el under project management is because all the keys I have mapped so far are for project management.

The feature set I use: which is to create a new keymap with custom bindngs, doesn't really require a separate package. They can be done with standard elisp functions. 
(use-package general
  :ensure t
  :config
  (general-auto-unbind-keys)
  (general-define-key
   :states '(emacs insert normal)
   :prefix-map 'custom/prefix
   :global-prefix "C-c"
   :non-normal-prefix "M-SPC"
   :prefix "SPC"
   "ff" 'find-file-in-project-by-selected
   "sf" 'consult-fd
   "sr" 'consult-ripgrep
   "so" 'consult-outline
   "sc" 'avy-goto-char
   "sw" 'avy-goto-word-1
   "sl" 'avy-goto-line
   "pp" 'whaler
   "wr" 'whaler-populate-projects-directories)

  (general-create-definer leader-global :keymaps 'custom/prefix))

Whaler

Whaler is a lightweight project manager. It is a package to move between directories while maintaining a sense of working directory. It is an alternative to projectile.

magit

Magit is the most intuitive git client ever across all editors. It is widely acknowledged so and I am not the last one to give accolades it. There are certain developer tools that make you want to code, to write, to engage. Vim and Emacs are among them and Magit certainly earns its place in that list.

find-file-in-project

While Consult covers all search and navigation needs for the editor, the consult-fd command is eager, as in it will start searching the project as and when we start typing. While this is OK for most projects, the command slows down when dealing with really large mega projects with LSP mode enabled. In such cases we would either have to disable LSP mode which may work or use find-file-in-project-by-selected command which first accepts a wildcard keyword to narrow the files list and then we can search the list like any fd command.

I am not covering the programming language specific packages here. Only the packages that make programming better.

eat

Eat stands for Emulate A Terminal. It is a terminal emulator. The UX and feature set is better than vterm. This also has a neat little function called eat-project which opens Eat in the root directory of the project. There’s a lot going on with Eat:

Eat Modes

original post

rainbow-delimiters

rainbow-delimiters highlights delimiters such as parentheses, brackets or braces according to their depth. Each successive level is highlighted in a different color.

Before which-key

without rainbow-delimiters-mode

After which-key

with rainbow-delimiters-mode

smartparens

Smartparens is a minor mode for dealing with pairs in Emacs. Since I don’t deal with lisp-like languages a lot, the only features of smartparens that I use often is their auto pair feature and sp-forward-slurp-sexp which forwards the closing parantheses by one token. This is better than paredit because by default it gets out of the way.

lsp-mode

There are several lsp modes in development. The most active one is the LSP mode and the other is eglot which is part of GNU Emacs from v29. There is more documentation and other packages support for lsp-mode than eglot at the time of writing.

corfu

COmpletion in Region FUnction. Corfu enhances in-buffer completion with a small completion popup. Corfu is a small package, which relies on the Emacs completion facilities and concentrates on providing a polished completion UI. This is so much easier to customize and works well with other packages such as orderless to provide a hassle free UX.

cape

Corfu does not include its own completion backends. The Emacs built-in Capfs and the Capfs provided by third-party programming language packages are often sufficient. Additional Capfs and completion utilities are provided by the separate Cape package.

flycheck

Modern on-the-fly syntax checking extension for GNU Emacs. This is one of the install and forget packages. To be honest, I haven’t used GNU Emacs in anger for even a week in software development to have any opinion on flycheck, but it has worked well so far with my code katas.

Org Mode

This requires its own blog post. I added orgmode here only to highlight that it is a very important reason for me to stick with GNU Emacs. Dare I say, like Rails is to Ruby, Gradle is to Groovy, Orgmode is to GNU Emacs?

Packages that I want to learn / use:

These are other interesting and useful packages that I haven’t accommodated in my workflow because I don’t use GNU Emacs in anger.

Tab Bar

Tab bars are cool. They can even have the emacs menu bar in a single icon at the beginning of the tab bar so one doesn’t have to do this.

embark

Embark stands for Emacs MiniBuffer Actions Rooted in Keymaps. To be honest, this one takes some getting used to. I am switching from visual IDEs such as JetBrains and VS Code and I am tuned to think in a certain way about code editing. Embark forces me to unlearn and relearn such ways of working.

Others

Origami, Perspective, Hydra, Treemacs, …

Full Configuration

https://github.com/balaji/config_files/blob/master/emacs/