I just can't wait for Emacs24 to be released! (I know, it's in beta and it'll be officially released Real Soon Now, but my catalyst is Technomancy's ESK2 which is such an improvement over ESK1, and it needs Emacs 24).
In my last post I had steps to build emacs from source-code. This is worth following for hacker cred, but it soon gets tedious if you have a lot of systems to put emacs on. As pointed out by a few readers, there are some snapshot builds available for different platforms. This post lists steps for installing the pre-built snapshots, for the three operating systems that I use.
As pointed out earlier, you can get emacs-snapshot builds for Debian from Julien Danjou (of awesome fame). That page does have instructions, but I'll list them here anyway:
$ wget -q -O - http://emacs.naquadah.org/key.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
/etc/apt/sources.list
(by hand). Here's Julien's "stable" snapshot:
deb http://emacs.naquadah.org/ stable/ deb-src http://emacs.naquadah.org/ stable/
$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude install emacs-snapshot
I'm running Ubuntu 11.10 in a VirtualBox on work's Windows 7 machine. As mentioned at Julien Danjou's page,
Damien Cassou makes a version of the same emacs-snapshot for Ubuntu, which is hosted at Launchpad. You add it and install simalarly:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cassou/emacs
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot
It's handy to have a native Windows emacs as well as the one in the VM. Of course being Windows, it's more complicated to install and configure... This has been tested on Windows 7:
c:\Applications\emacs
<version> so I can maintain several different versions at onceC:\> CD C:\Applications C:\Applications\> MKLINK /D emacs emacs<version>
%HOME%
that refers to your Windows home directory (C:\Users\
<username>). This is so that you can put your .emacs.d
in your home directory, and Emacs will find it:
HOME
. In the "Variable value:" field, put %USERPROFILE%
, press "OK" button%PATH%
. Use the same steps above to edit the Sytem variable PATH and add the path to Emacs (;C:\Applications\emacs\bin
if you put a symlink in step 3)
You can now put your emacs settings into ~/.emacs.d
(that's %HOME%\.emacs.d
for Windows). I highly recommend Technomancy's Emacs Starter Kit (version 2).
My own ~/.emacs.d/init.el
is set up to bootstrap ESK2 and a few favourite packages, just as Technomancy describes.
One package I'd like to mention here is "ergoemacs-keybindings" which gives more modern/ergonomic key bindings to emacs. Together with cua-mode, it makes Emacs behave very nicely. Currently though I notice there's a problem loading the package (maybe it's autoloads aren't right yet?) So I have to hack it as described in the package's README, (with a hard-coded path to the package directory, that'll break if I update it in the future because it has the package version) but I hope to fix it and send a patch for Xah Real Soon Now... In the mean-time, here's a snippet:
;;;; egroemacs keybindings
(setenv "ERGOEMACS_KEYBOARD_LAYOUT" "dv") ; US Dvorak (Ergonomic)
;; FIX: for some reason the library isn't loading from the package?
;; Have to put full path to the load file, which is brittle
(when (package-installed-p 'ergoemacs-keybindings)
(load-file "~/.emacs.d/elpa/ergoemacs-keybindings-5.3.9/ergoemacs-keybindings.el")
(ergoemacs-mode 1)
(cua-mode 1))