Tested with emacs 27.2 and 29.0.50 (emacs-version).

To try the configuration above, clone this repository in your home folder (~):

cd
git clone [email protected]:bfonta/dot-emacs.git

and replace the contents of your ~/.emacs file by:

(setq user-emacs-directory "~/dot-emacs/")
(load-file "~/dot-emacs/init.el")

You should now be able to open emacs. During initialization you might be required to accept the download of some packages and data, depending on your system. Ocasionally one gets an error similar to “Package not found”; please run package-refresh-contents and reopen emacs.

Issues might happen! Keep a backup of your files just in case, and let me know if you find some issue/bug.

It should look as follows:

Disclaimer

I did not participate in the development of the following packages, included in this repository (at most I applied small modifications):

• zoom/: frame-fns.el, frame-cmds.el, misc-fns.el, strings.el and zoom-frm
• shackle (enforce appearance rules for popup windows)
• yasnippet (0.13.0)
• persp-mode (similar to perspective)
• avy
• highlight-indentation
• markerpen
• org-present
• vundo (visualize the undo tree)
• helm
• which-func
• swoop
• magit
• with-editor
• expand-region
• multiple-cursors
• pulsar
• org-tree-slide
• desktop

Let me know if I omitted some package by mistake.

GNU Emacs Installation

Emacs is mirrored in GitHub, but the original git repository can be found here.

• Gcc Emacs: compiles elisp to native code, providing a performance improvement. Simply add the --with-native-compilation flag when building emacs (./configure =--with-native-compilation ...).

First start by installing required packages which might be required depending on the options passed to the ./configure step.

sudo apt install build-essential ...

Version 29

This version notably offers pixel-scroll-precision-mode for the first time, which provides a smooth scrolling experience when scrolling with the mouse.

It also comes with pure GTK support, which might be good if your system supports Wayland (from my experience Wayland is still unstable on Ubuntu, possibly due to the lack of good support from Nvidia). Type echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE in your terminal to know which one you are currently using.

As of 6^th August 2022 the latest tag points to emacs-28.1.91; indeed, the latest release available from the official website is 28.1. However, the README file mentions “This directory tree holds version 29.0.50 of GNU Emacs”. We thus can access version 29 by building it from the source code in its master branch.

The following steps show how to install emacs-29, storing it in a folder with the same name. Complete information is also available from the INSTALL file coming with the source code.

git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git emacs29
cd emacs29/
./autogen.sh
# './configure --help' displays all building options
./configure --with-native-compilation \
			--with-imagemagick \
			--with-json \
			--with-small-ja-dic \
			--with-pgtk
# You might receive an error due to missing libraries. If not, compile:
make -j8
make install

Sources

The following sources were consulted on 6^th August 2022:

• GNU Emacs Manual: How do I install Emacs? (note however that no release for emacs-29 is currently available)
• Gcc Emacs installation
• Bozhidar Batsov article (focuses on the new pgtk support)