Oh My Emacs

Introduction

It is said that Emacs is “a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor”[1].

Yes, it is, it really is. In fact, Emacs has basic process control and management, window and frame management(just like windows manager in modern Linux desktop environment), programming APIs(yeah, elisp to emacs is what syscall and glibc to Linux), comprehensive manuals and documentation. The only limitation with Emacs is your imagination.

You can live in Emacs if you like.

But I won’t do that, since I want to watch video with mplayer, surf the Internet with Firefox/Chrome(not with emacs-w3m), listen to music with amarok. I use Emacs to do what it is good at, namely, text editing. To me, coding and writing.

This project was born one day I want to reorganize my messy .emacs.d. I’ve tried all the famous .emacs.d projects(such as prelude, starter-kit, etc) but none of them works the way I want it to.

Then I found emacs24-starter-kit, I was deeply attracted by its literate way to organize and embed elisp code in org-mode files, I wanted to make some contribution to make it a full-blown hacking environment, but I stopped after I dived into the code a little, since I want:

• Adapt el-get instead of the builtin package.el, and
• Have a better completion including auto-complete and various ac-sources projects for various programming languages.

The starter kit projects is just starter’s kit, what I want is a full-blown hacker’s kit. So I start my own project, oh-my-emacs, whose name is inspired by oh-my-zsh.

Features

• Better default settings with various eye candy, powerline, scrollbar, color-theme, fonts, etc.
• Adopt el-get as the default package manager for Emacs, instead of the default builtin package.el, say goodbye to ./configure; make; make install and explicitly manually management of load-path. el-get also provides automatic documentation management, customizable user’s recipe support, etc.
• Self-adapted, only install necessary packages when it satisfies the prerequisities. You need to install clang for auto-complete-clang, for example.
• Modular, only load necessary packages as you need.
• Literate, each package has comprehensive documentation or even a tiny tutorial with it, together with necessary web links. Say goodbye to old, out-dated emacs lisp code from Google.
• Work as expected, completion every where when possible, semantic code completion through auto-complete with various ac backend, helm for minibuffer completion, etc.
• Full-blown, oh-my-emacs is not another starter kit, it is hacker kit.

Quick Start

Simple enough, first, ensure you have a good network(Chinese users should get rid of GFW when possible to avoid many weird problems during first startup); second, ensure that you have installed the necessary tools pointed out by the Prerequisites sections from oh-my-emacs modules. Basically, you need to install the following packages in you operating system, which is the mandatory prerequisites of ome.org:

• emacs 24.3+
• cvs
• subversion
• mercurial
• git
• make
• texinfo
• gcc
• automake
• autoconf

Please backup your old .emacs and .emacs.d before you join the journey:

git clone https://github.com/xiaohanyu/oh-my-emacs $HOME/.emacs.d

Then just fire up your Emacs and make a coffee, and you should have a full-blown Emacs OS!

Evil

Note that oh-my-emacs enabled evil by default, you can disable it globally by M-x evil-mode, however, I do recommend you enable it and try to adapt, ah, finally the Emacs OS get a good editor, evil.

Helm

You may miss the old M-x when you first start with oh-my-emacs, me too, before I fall in love with helm. I highly recommend you to adapt with the helm way. Believe me, helm will bring you lots of surprise.

There’re two key points for helm beginners:

• In normal helm, TAB is not used as the traditional completion key. Maybe this is the most whirlwind turnaround with helm since so many packages use TAB for completion. Remember, TAB in helm is used to access the helm action menu. You may wonder, then, how can I do type completion in helm? The answer is, no need to do type completion explicitly. Just type, and helm will lead you to the right place. However, oh-my-emacs has binded TAB to helm-execute-persistent-action for you, which will makes you feel like home. Type C-z for amazing things, and C-SPC to select and do some cool.
• oh-my-emacs bind the traditional C-x C-f to helm-find-files by default. You should use C-l to go to the precedent directory level instead of DEL.

What’s in Oh-my-emacs

Now you know why Emacs is “a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor”.

Module	Package	Description
ome-advanced	evil	Evil is an extensible vi layer for Emacs.
	evil-leader	Add <leader> shortcuts to Evil.
	evil-surround	Emulate Tim Pope’s surround.vim in evil.
	expand-region	Expand region increases the selected region by semantic units.
	ace-jump-mode	A quick cursor location minor mode for emacs
ome-auto-mode	puppet-mode	A simple mode for editing puppet manifests
	wikipedia-mode	Mode for editing Wikipedia articles off-line
	yaml-mode	Simple major mode to edit YAML file for emacs
ome-basic	flycheck	On-the-fly syntax checking extension
ome-cc	xcscope	Cscope interface for (X)Emacs
	auto-complete-clang	Auto-complete sources for Clang. Combine the power of AC, Clang and Yasnippet.
ome-clojure	clojure-mode	Emacs support for the Clojure language.
	cider	CIDER is a Clojure IDE and REPL.
	ac-nrepl	Nrepl completion source for Emacs auto-complete package
ome-common-lisp	slime	Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs
	ac-slime	Emacs auto-complete plugin for Slime symbols
ome-completion	auto-complete	The most intelligent auto-completion extension.
	helm	Emacs incremental and narrowing framework
	popup	Visual Popup Interface Library for Emacs
	yasnippet	YASnippet is a template system for Emacs.
ome-emacs-lisp	elisp-slime-nav	Slime-style navigation for Emacs Lisp
ome-experimental	lacarte	Execute menu items as commands, with completion.
	sr-speedbar	Same frame speedbar
	smooth-scrolling	Make emacs scroll smoothly.
	hungry-delete	Enables hungry deletion in all modes.
	doxymacs	Doxymacs is Doxygen + {X}Emacs.
ome-gui	solarized-emacs	Emacs highlighting using Ethan Schoonover’s Solarized color scheme
	powerline	Powerline for Emacs
	yascroll	Yet Another Scroll Bar Mode
ome-java	eclim	This project brings some of the great eclipse features to emacs developers.
ome-miscs	rainbow-delimiters	Color nested parentheses, brackets, and braces according to their depth.
	po-mode	Major mode for GNU gettext PO files
	magit	It’s Magit! An Emacs mode for Git.
	projectile	Project navigation and management library for Emacs
	smartparens	Autoinsert pairs of defined brackets and wrap regions
	emacs-w3m	A simple Emacs interface to w3m
	quickrun	Run commands quickly
	diminish	An Emacs package that diminishes the amount of space taken on the mode line by the names of minor modes.
ome-ocaml	caml-mode	O’Caml code editing commands for Emacs
	tuareg-mode	A GOOD Emacs mode to edit Objective Caml code.
ome-org	org-mode	Org-mode 8.x branch.
	htmlize	Convert buffer text and decorations to HTML.
ome-python	elpy	Emacs Python Development Environment
ome-ruby	inf-ruby	Inferior Ruby Mode - ruby process in a buffer.
ome-scheme	geiser	Make Scheme hacking inside Emacs (even more) fun.
	ac-geiser	Emacs auto-complete backend for geiser
ome-tex	auctex	AUCTeX is an extensible package for writing and formatting TeX files Emacs.
	cdlatex-mode	a minor mode which re-implements many features also found in the AUCTeX LaTeX mode.
ome-writing	markdown-mode	Major mode to edit Markdown files in Emacs

Gallery

Here‘re some screenshots of oh-my-emacs:

• Startup screen:

• org-babel from org-mode, auto-complete for emacs lisp:

• helm-grep to search words in multiple files:

• auto-complete for C++ QT

• auto-complete for python

• AUCTeX with outline-minor-mode, helm completion for TeX commands

References

• Emacs Prelude: Prelude is an Emacs distribution that aims to enhance the default Emacs experience.
• emacs24-starter-kit: A cleaner version of the literate starter kit based on Emacs24.
• emacs-starter-kit: The Starter Kit provides a more pleasant set of defaults than you get normally with Emacs.
• graphene: A set of defaults for Emacs, for refugees from GUI text editors.
• purcell’s emacs.d: An Emacs configuration bundle with batteries included.

Tips

• You need to install emacs24-el in ubuntu, or org-export won’t work. I don’t know why.

Support This Project

I’m just a single guy and I do not have enough time to make this project meet everybody’s needs. So if you want to support this project, you can do in the following ways:

• Contributing code. I’ve written a basic CONTRIBUTING guide about it. Please do read it before you fire github issue or send me a pull request.
• Make some donations. Currently I’m a freelancer doing some part-time job for my life. I create this project first for me, then share for you. So if you think it is not useless and want to support this project, you can make some donations for me via paypal or alipay:
  • paypal: xiaohanyu1988<at>gmail.com (Paypal didn’t support donation button for Chinese user, damn.)
  • alipay:

Footnotes

[1] Editor war