The Emacs Operating System (EOS)

This is my attempt at a complete workflow inside of Emacs.

There are many like it, but this one is mine. So let's start with a story.

I used to be a hardcore Vim guy (hence the website named after a Vim command), in 2010 I joined a small company called Sonian doing Clojure as a full-time gig. As part of the job, we all pair-programmed together on Clojure code in Emacs using TMUX. This meant that I needed to learn Emacs having never used it before. I dived in head first and found Emacs to be a more customizable and elegant editor.

Around the same time, I switched to typing in Dvorak, so if you are reading this configuration and wondering why some of the bindings are the way they are, remember that my keys might be different than someone on Qwerty :)

People often say about Emacs "sure it's a great operating system, but it lacks a good editor" so I decided to call my configuration "EOS" for the Emacs Operating System. This is my tribute to the Complete Computing Environment, which heavily inspires this and from which I continue to find interesting tidbits to copy.

If you want to look at specific parts, jump down to the module list to see links to different parts of the configuration.

So usually you would check out this repository and then run make in the directory. That will tangle a bunch of .el files. If you want to install this, run make install (or just make init if you only want to run initialization things).

Once it's installed, make changes to the files directly and then just run make to re-tangle the files, no re-installation necessary, since symlinks are set up the first time you ran make install.

If you get lost at any point, checking the org source is probably the best way to go, or send me an email (lee at writequit dot org) or a message on twitter.

Because the installation symlinks things into whatever directory EOS is checked out it, it allows me to type make and generate new .el files without any file copying.

There is some initial prep that needs to happen before someone could run this, basically creating a bunch of directories so the tangled files and symlinks can go in the right place.

This will tangle an initialization script and invoke it. This is handled by the Makefile which special-cases this one file. Basically the following goes into initialize.sh:

# Directory for user-installed scripts
mkdir -p ~/bin

# GnuPG
mkdir -p ~/.gnupg
chmod 700 ~/.gnupg

# SSH
mkdir -p ~/.ssh
chmod 700 ~/.ssh

# Emacs configuration folders
mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d
mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d/snippets
mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d/eshell

This initialization file is then run first thing when running make install (or you can run make initialize manually to run this part).

There is of course the prerequisite, which is this file, and then EOS contains a number of different configurations and modules. This is a basic overview of the modules, which you should visit should you desire more information about a particular module.

Ideally, each module except for the "Core" module is optional and can be skipped if not desired. In practice though, I load all of them, because this is my config. I haven't really tried loading them all individually to make sure I don't have links between them.

• Core EOS - base Emacs settings and configurations
• Appearance - change the look-and-feel
• Navigation - helpers when navigating around Emacs
• Notification System - unifying notifications in Emacs with sauron
• Helm - incremental completion and selection framework
• Development (programming) System - various development settings
  • Java - for the day job
  • Clojure - for the old day job and the open source work
  • Elasticsearch - so useful for things
  • Git - usually the only VCS I use, so it has quite a few customizations
• Completion - auto-completing things while programming (and not programming)
• Org-mode and agenda - org is a fantastic organization tool
• Writing - various settings for writing human language
• Dired - directory browsing and file management
• Working with Remote Servers - transparently edit remote files with TRAMP
• Web browsing - internal and external browsing with eww
• Shell - shells inside and outside of Emacs, mostly inside with eshell
• Mail (Email) - mu4e configuration to keep mail inside
• IRC - ERC configuration for IRC inside of Emacs
• Distributed services - distributed services for things like ipfs and matrix
• RSS - keep up to date with websites I enjoy
• Twitter - social networking at its angriest
• Fun and Leisure - a catch-all for other things
• Music - listening to tunes with Emacs

init.el is the file that Emacs reads when it starts up, so here we do most of the bootstrapping before the EOS modules are loaded, then load the modules, then some cleanup at the end. It's worth noticing that even though this would tangle to eos.el by default, it gets symlinked to ~/.emacs.d/init.el.

Since an error may occur in loading any EOS files, I set some debugging things so a debugger is entered if there's a problem. These get unset after everything loads successfully.

(setq debug-on-error t)
(setq debug-on-quit t)

I load a couple of custom versions of libraries that are included in Emacs. This is so I can run a newer version than what's bundled, in particular this checks for the existence and loads them if there are there, otherwise it uses the bundled version.

A custom version of CEDET:

;; Load a custom version of cedet, if available
(when (file-exists-p "~/src/elisp/cedet/cedet-devel-load.el")
  (load "~/src/elisp/cedet/cedet-devel-load.el"))

I hardcode a version of of Org-mode:

;; Load a custom version of org-mode, if available
(when (file-exists-p "~/src/elisp/org-mode/lisp")
  (add-to-list 'load-path "~/src/elisp/org-mode/lisp")
  (add-to-list 'load-path "~/src/elisp/org-mode/contrib/lisp")
  (require 'org))

Also, let's make cl things available right from the start

(require 'cl)

I can't live without this, "x" on Dvorak is where "b" is on Qwerty, and it's just too hard for all the C-x things I have to hit. Maybe one day I'll just switch to evil (or god-mode) and be done with it.

For now, 't' is much more convenient so I switch C-x and C-t on the keyboard. I don't transpose things nearly as often as I C-x things

(define-key key-translation-map "\C-t" "\C-x")
(define-key key-translation-map "\C-x" "\C-t")

Copyright (C) 2015-2017 Lee Hinman <lee@writequit.org>

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