The Starter Kit provides a more pleasant set of defaults than you get normally with Emacs. It was originally intended for beginners, but it offers a nicely augmented working environment for anyone using Emacs.
The latest release is at http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/starter-kit with the source at http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
This won't teach you Emacs, but it'll make it easier to get comfortable. To access the tutorial, press control-h followed by t.
You may also find the commercial PeepCode Meet Emacs screencast helpful. The Emacs Wiki is also very handy.
You'll need Emacs 24, which comes with package.el. It's not hard to compile from source, but precompiled versions are readily available for Debian-based systems, Mac OS X, and Windows.
Add Marmalade as a package archive source in ~/.emacs.d/init.el:
(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives
'("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/") t)
(package-initialize)
Then you can install it:
M-x package-refresh-contents
M-x package-install RET starter-kit RET
Other modules are also available:
- starter-kit-bindings (spun out due to concerns about keybinding conventions)
- starter-kit-eshell
- starter-kit-js
- starter-kit-ruby
- starter-kit-perl
- starter-kit-lisp (including Emacs Lisp, Clojure, Scheme, and Common Lisp)
The Starter Kit used to be a git repository that you checked out and used as your own personal .emacs.d directory, but it's been restructured so that it can be treated like any other package, freeing you up to structure your .emacs.d directory as you wish.
There are a few conventions for naming files which will get loaded automatically. ~/.emacs.d/$USER.el as well as any files in the ~/.emacs.d/$USER/ directory. Finally, the Starter Kit will look for a file named after the current hostname ending in ".el" which will allow host-specific configuration.
Q: When I try to create a new file or buffer, the autocompletion is eager and tries to use the name of an existing file or buffer.
A: That's called ido-mode, and it's awesome! But sometimes it
gets in the way. To temporarily disable it, press C-f while the
prompt is open. You can also press C-j while it's still enabled to
force the creation of the name.
Q: When I'm writing Javascript, all my functions show up as ƒ. Am I going insane?
A: That's actually a render-time hack. The file on disk shows as
"function", but it's just rendered using the script F in order to
tone down the verbosity inherent in the language a bit. The same
happens with fn in Clojure and lambda to λ in
other lisps.
Q: I can't delete parentheses in Lisp!
A: To be specific, you can't delete parenthesis if deleting the
parentheses would result in invalid structure. That's called
Paredit, and once you get used to it, you'll wonder how you ever did
anything without it. But it can be disorienting at first. When
paredit tries to stop you from deleting something, you're probably
trying to delete something you shouldn't. Use C-k to kill whole
expressions. Two things to remember: you can always use C-w to kill
a region regardless of Paredit's rules, and you can always insert a
single character like a close-paren by prefixing it with C-q. You
may find the Paredit cheat
sheet
helpful. You can also enable paredit for non-lisp modes using the
esk-paredit-nonlisp function.
Q: How awesome is Emacs?
A: So awesome.
Users of the old version of the Starter Kit (version 1) should be able to upgrade by deleting the starter-kit-specific files out of ~/.emacs.d/:
$ rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/init.el ~/.emacs.d/elpa-to-submit/ ~/.emacs.d/starter-kit-*.el
The main difference is that the new one doesn't pull in a bunch of other package.el dependencies; users may pick and choose which they want. It's also more modular, so language-specific starter kit modules must be installed separately. User-specific and host-specific files are still honored.
Copyright (C) 2008-2011 Phil Hagelberg and contributors
Files are licensed under the same license as Emacs unless otherwise specified. See the file COPYING for details.