Emacs From Scratch, Part 1: Foundations

Welcome to my new series Emacs From Scratch. I’m far from an Emacs expert, so join me in my quest to figure out how to create a useful Emacs setup from nothing¹.

In this part, we’ll install Emacs, set up sane defaults, packaging and do some basic UI tweaks to build a solid foundation.

Table of Contents

• Install Emacs
• Remove UI elements
• Configure the package manager
• Set sane defaults
• Become evil
• Set font and theme
• Add a nicer modeline
• Conclusion

Install Emacs

On macOS, everyone recommends Emacs Plus. For other systems, check out Doom’s Emacs & dependencies documentation.

We’re running this command:

brew reinstall emacs-plus \
  --with-savchenkovaleriy-big-sur-icon \
  --with-native-comp

And this is what it looks like when we start Emacs for the first time:

Remove UI elements

We want to remove everything but the text. To do so, we first create a file in $HOME/.emacs.d/init.el.

(tool-bar-mode -1)             ; Hide the outdated icons
(scroll-bar-mode -1)           ; Hide the always-visible scrollbar
(setq inhibit-splash-screen t) ; Remove the "Welcome to GNU Emacs" splash screen
(setq use-file-dialog nil)      ; Ask for textual confirmation instead of GUI

If you start Emacs now, you’ll see the GUI elements for a few milliseconds. Let’s fix that by adding these lines to $HOME/.emacs.d/early-init.el²:

(push '(menu-bar-lines . 0) default-frame-alist)
(push '(tool-bar-lines . 0) default-frame-alist)
(push '(vertical-scroll-bars) default-frame-alist)

This is better:

We’ll take care of the default scratch text and the C-h C-a hint down below.

Configure the package manager

We’ll be using straight.el for package management.

This is the installation code from the straight.el README:

(defvar bootstrap-version)
(let ((bootstrap-file
    (expand-file-name
      "straight/repos/straight.el/bootstrap.el"
      (or (bound-and-true-p straight-base-dir)
        user-emacs-directory)))
    (bootstrap-version 7))
  (unless (file-exists-p bootstrap-file)
    (with-current-buffer
      (url-retrieve-synchronously
       "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/radian-software/straight.el/develop/install.el"
       'silent 'inhibit-cookies)
    (goto-char (point-max))
    (eval-print-last-sexp)))
  (load bootstrap-file nil 'nomessage))

The docs also recommend adding this to our early-init.el to prevent package.el from loading:

(setq package-enable-at-startup nil)

Next we’ll install use-package for tidier specification and better performance:

(straight-use-package 'use-package)

Then we’ll make use-package use straight.el by default and always :defer t for lazy loading:

(setq straight-use-package-by-default t)
(setq use-package-always-defer t)

Set sane defaults

It’s good practice to specify Emacs-specific settings in a use-package block, even though this doesn’t change anything functionally. In the following, I’ll repeat the use-package emacs function, but you can, and probably should, move these all into a single use-package block.

Let’s start without the default scratch message and the text at the bottom saying “For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a”:

(use-package emacs
  :init
  (setq initial-scratch-message nil)
  (defun display-startup-echo-area-message ()
    (message "")))

In confirmation dialogs, we want to be able to type y and n instead of having to spell the whole words:

(use-package emacs
  :init
  (defalias 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p))

Make everything use UTF-8:

(use-package emacs
  :init
  (set-charset-priority 'unicode)
  (setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8
        coding-system-for-read 'utf-8
        coding-system-for-write 'utf-8)
  (set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
  (set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
  (set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
  (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
  (setq default-process-coding-system '(utf-8-unix . utf-8-unix)))

Use spaces, but configure tab-width for modes that use tabs (looking at you, Go):

(use-package emacs
  :init
  (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)
  (setq-default tab-width 2))

Map the correct keybindings for macOS:

(use-package emacs
  :init
	(when (eq system-type 'darwin)
		(setq mac-command-modifier 'super)
		(setq mac-option-modifier 'meta)
		(setq mac-control-modifier 'control)))

Become evil

I’m used to Vim keybindings and want to keep them, so we’ll use evil:

(use-package evil
  :demand ; No lazy loading
  :config
  (evil-mode 1))

Set font and theme

We’ll be using the PragmataPro typeface:

(use-package emacs
  :init
  (set-face-attribute 'default nil
    :font "PragmataPro Mono Liga"
    :height 160))

For themes, I can recommend the Doom Themes, we’ll be using doom-challenger-deep³:

(use-package doom-themes
  :demand
  :config
  (load-theme 'doom-challenger-deep t))

Finally, we want relative line numbers in prog mode:

(use-package emacs
  :init
  (defun ab/enable-line-numbers ()
    "Enable relative line numbers"
    (interactive)
    (display-line-numbers-mode)
    (setq display-line-numbers 'relative))
  (add-hook 'prog-mode-hook #'ab/enable-line-numbers))

Add a nicer modeline

We’ll install doom-modeline:

(use-package doom-modeline
  :ensure t
  :init (doom-modeline-mode 1))

For pretty icons, we need to install nerd-icons as well:

(use-package nerd-icons)

After restarting Emacs, run M-x nerd-icons-install-fonts (Option-x on macOS) to install the icon font.

And we’ll install Nyan Mode, a minor mode which shows a Nyan Cat (which is 12 years old at the point of writing this) in your modeline to indicate position in the open buffer.

(use-package nyan-mode
  :init
  (nyan-mode))

Conclusion

This is what looks like:

We have sane defaults, we can open a file with :e, navigate around and we have a nice color scheme⁴ and modeline. Here’s the the final init.el and early-init.el

In part 2, we’ll add a project manager, our own keybindings, the best Git TUI, a handy shortcut to restart Emacs and a ton of small tweaks.

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