Back in August, I wrote about how I was starting to learn Emacs. I had planned to post weekly updates as I was learning, but life happened and I didn’t end up doing that. So from now on, I’ll just be numbering these posts with #1
, #2
, etc.
On the bright side, I’ve still been learning! Since the last post, I’ve:
~/.emacs
file with some packages.I’ve been a vim user (occasionaly full time) for a several years, but I intentionally avoided evil-mode when I was getting started with Emacs. I wanted to learn the standard Emacs shortcuts first, before trying anything else.
Once I felt pretty confident with vanilla-emacs though, I was ready to get back some of that vim-awesomeness.
A quick google search turned up this talk and post by Aaron Bieber, both of which were great to help me get going.
Once I got everything setup, I instantly felt at home with evil-mode. I still had access to M-x function
and all the Emacs modes I had learned, but now there was a nice layer of vim on top. Like icing on a cake! 🍰
I also setup evil-leader, and bound it to ,
, to emulate my vim leader key.
Aquamacs had been serving me really while I was learning the ropes, but it was time to switch to something more standard. I’m on macOS, so I went with the homebrew cask version of emacs:
brew cask install emacs
Now that I needed to install and configure plugins, I figured it was time to setup my ~/.emacs
file.
In Aaron Bieber’s post he recommends use-package for auto-installing packages. It sounded similar to how I was using Vundle in vim, so I went with that.
Once I had use-package installed, I added in a couple of packages like powerline and markdown-mode to try it out.
I also added my ~/.emacs
file to my dotfiles on GitHub, because open-source! 🎉
Now that I can install fancy packages, I added Dracula theme for some pretty colors. I also really like having powerline in the bottom.