Adam's emacs config

This is my collection of configuration files and utilities for emacs. I started tracking this in a CVS repository in 1999, and in 2011 finally migrated it to git. Due to its age, there is unsurprisingly a fair bit of cruft, although I'm gradually replacing the outdated hacks with the help of modern emacs packages.

OVERVIEW

I use straight.el for installing most packages, because:

• its dependency tracking is version-aware
• MELPA has tons of great packages
• MELPA stable is nice when I'm feeling risk-averse

That said, I intend to try switching to elpaca soon.

I use John Wiegley's nifty use-package and bind-key utilities for setting up autoloads, key bindings, and other per-package configuration. These are now natively included in emacs 29.1 and later.

I generally adhere to the convention of adding an as- prefix to any files, functions, and variables which are specific to my needs.

• .emacs -- effectively loads all *.el files in .emacs.d/init.d/.
• .emacs.d/
  • init.d/ -- all the files in this directory are automatically loaded at startup, starting with as-pre-init-d which bootstraps the environment so that it's ready to load all the other files. See below for the full details on the load order
  • lib/ -- .el files I wrote which could / should at some point be converted into packages, and published so that other people can benefit from them too.
  • custom/ -- contains custom-file files for each emacs version I use. Custom variables / faces change between emacs versions, so I keep a file per version. This is maybe not the best way of doing it, but it works OK. One other possibility would be a git branch per version (which was not an option when I first implemented this way back before git existed), with the significant disadvantage of requiring a lot more back- and forward-porting of stuff between branches, since with the current system, porting is only required for the contents of the custom files. OTOH the current scheme is incapable of tracking per-version differences, and this is a problem when emacs' core API changes.
• bin/ -- various scripts for launching and interacting with emacs in different ways.
• lib/emacs/ This directory hierarchy contains a bunch of old cruft which I am gradually phasing out in favour of the above.
  • Makefile -- byte-compiles files and generates autoload files
  • major-modes/ -- what it sounds like.
  • minor-modes/ -- ditto.
  • utils/ -- ditto.
• lib/xmacro -- key sequences to be fed into emacs via xmacro or similar in order to automate certain tasks.

INSTALLATION

I would not necessarily recommend forking / cloning this repo and attempting to use it directly. However, you will probably be able to benefit from reading through it and stealing at least ideas, if not code. If you discover something which you think is useful enough to deserve being properly packaged and published, then feel free to pester me into doing so. Stuff in .emacs.d/lib is already earmarked for publishing when I get free time for it.

This repository is designed to be stowed directly into your home directory:

git clone git://github.com/aspiers/emacs.git
stow -d . -t ~ emacs

BOOTSTRAP EXECUTION FLOW

The indentation below represents the call graph.

Loading starts with .emacs which effectively loads all *.el files in .emacs.d/init.d/ in this order:

• as-pre-init-d gets loaded first before all the other *.el files in this directory, and does the following:

  • adds the containing directory to load-path
  • requires as-load-paths which:
    • requires as-vars
    • adds all other necessary directories to load-path
  • requires as-progress
  • requires as-package-loading
    • requires as-custom
    • ensures req-package, use-package, quelpa, and related extensions are installed

• All other *.el are discovered and loaded via a custom external mechanism which I use for several sets of configuration files unrelated to emacs, including my shell mutt, and ssh configuration files.

  The mechanism is plugin-oriented, and essentially an enhanced implementation of the standard UNIX approach of creating a directory such as /etc/profile.d and then ensuring that any files dropped into that directory (which I chose a long time ago to call "hooks" - admittedly a bad choice of word considering that emacs already uses it for other purposes) automatically get loaded. The mechanism is implemented by shell functions defined in the run_hooks and find_hooks files within my shell-env repository. You can also see my very old notes on the design of this "hook" system.

LICENSE

The software in this repository is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.