Brandon’s Emacs Configuration

Who Should Use This?

No one should use this. It’s not a starter-kit. Here are some starter kits, but I’d strongly recommend just using plain emacs and customizing it incrementally.

This repo is for reference & personal use only, and because I’m sure at least some parts of it will end up being useful to someone somewhere.

How do I use it anyway?

Clone this repo (or, better, your fork of it) to ~/.emacs.d/emacs-config.

cd ~/.emacs.d
git clone https://github.com/bgutter/dotemacs.git emacs-config

Copy example-init.el up into ~/.emacs.d/init.el.

cd emacs-config
cp ./example-init.el ../init.el

If you want to keep your existing customizations, copy them out of your existing init.el (or .emacs) and into ~/.emacs.d/emacs-config/custom.el.

Run Emacs. Enjoy.

See the init file itself for more complete documentation!

Troubleshooting and Other Advice

I still have vanilla emacs

If things aren’t working, make sure that emacs found the correct initialization directory. Arch and Windows seem to work out of the box. Ubuntu requires ~/.config/emacs to be deleted (yeah, I know, XDG etc 🤷).

The variable user-init-file can be used to determine which initialization directory is in use. Type C-h v, then enter user-init-file, and hit enter. You want it to say /home/you/.emacs.d/init.el.

Don’t track custom.el

Run this to keep changes in custom.el from being tracked by git.

cd ~/.emacs.d/emacs-config
git update-index --assume-unchanged custom.el