Overview
In my previous article, I documented a very brief tutorial of Emacs Lisp. In this article let’s continue to create an Emacs configuration for beginners.
Introduction
Emacs is more than just a text/code editor (LSP, DAP). It is an extensible computing environment that can be used as an email client (mu4e), window manager (exwm), editing remote files (tramp), and much more. With org-mode, you can use Emacs for keeping notes, maintaining to-do lists, planning projects, authoring documents, computational notebooks, literate programming (Babel), and more.
Unlike VSCode which is easy to get started, Emacs requires customization using elisp in order to be useful and effective for use. There are distributions like Spacemacs or Doom Emacs which make it easy to get started using Emacs. However, I suggest you start by understanding some basics of Emacs Lisp and try to configure your own Emacs dotfiles. Without understanding the basics you are going to encounter issues when you want to customize Emacs further.
With the fundamentals, you can then decide if you want to develop your own dotfiles or use Emacs distributions like Spacemacs or Doom Emacs.
The Basics
Emacs Screen
Above is a screenshot of Emacs out of the box
Frame
is highlighted in the RED rectangle.Menu bar
is highlighted in BLUE rectangle.Tool bar
is highlighted in GREEN rectangle.Window
is highlighted in MAGENTA rectangle.- On the left of the window highlighted in BROWN is the window
fringe
. Mode line
is highlighted in the YELLOW rectangle.Echo area
is highlighted in BLACK rectangle (at the bottom of…