My Emacs Kit
This document will be a living document that i’ll attempt to update from time to time
Table of Contents
Intro
I’ve been using doom-emacs for over a year now (since March 2021) and this is my personal experiences with it.
I do not put a ton of effort into editors, rather I spend a chunk of time intermittently. This has happened with vi/vim and again with emacs. my vim configuration was always flaky and never worked correctly until around neovim. At that point I was so fed up with reproducible editor configuration that I looked for something better.
Here is my editor timeline
| Editor | Years Using |
|---|---|
| nano pico | Since 2001 |
| vi | Since 2002 |
| vim neovim | Since 2004 |
| emacs | Since late 2020 |
Pico and Nano
As a systems administration and a PHP developer, I primarily built CMS type stacks and shopping cart applications. These editors worked well but I found myself wasting so much time navigating with page up and page down
Vim
When I discovered vim and what it could do, I became interested.. But…
It was really difficult for me to pick up. Once I managed to make the switch to a modal editor, I never looked back.
vim configuration was always mystical to me (and still is). I could barely customize it outside of it’s stock configuration so that’s what I used.
doom emacs
Being a vim user for so many years has basically burned those keys into my brain.
I am still a vim user to this day like using j and k to navigate is still present in doom emacs due to evil mode
I’m by no means a lisp expert but doom emacs is ready to go out very quickly. Some things that look time are learning and discovering everything that is out there.
Favorite packages
| Package | Notes |
|---|---|
| projectile | project manager |
| dired | file explorer |
| magit | use git in emacs |
| bookmarks | quickly jump to common files |
| ibuffer | grouping and switching buffers |
| LSP | for coding in go, rust, python |
| org-mode | knowledge base and interactive document |
| emacs-everywhere | quick pop up emacs buffer for editing and pasting back into an application |
Honerable mentions
- restclient.el
- code folding
- yasnippet for code snippets
- eshell
- markdown mode
- org mode and babel
- dired
emacs28 with native compilation
The editor install is a beast which is not ideal but native compilation made emacs so much faster that I can’t live without it
Markdown mode
Emacs never fails to amaze in the commands it has. One case is in markdown mode, you can simply run markdown-toc-generate-toc and it will generate
a index at the top of the page. This also works for org mode using toc-org-insert-toc
Org mode and babel
I use .org files for keeping notes about various things. Being able to have a text only interface with the ability to link between org files and sections is really all I need.
Then comes babel, which is a way for emacs to execute source code snippets. For instance for bash, I can get the output of df -h / rendered directly in
my org file
#+begin_src bash :results output
df -h /
#+end_src
#+RESULTS:
: Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
: /dev/nvme0n1p2 1.8T 473G 1.3T 28% /
I’ve used this for a lot of things where you want to remember the command and also capture the results.