Emacs Prelude

Prelude in its own words...

Emacs is probably the best text editor in the world. However, the process of coming up with a useful Emacs configuration is long and difficult. It's this process that separates you from truly taking advantage of Emacs's power. I like to refer to this process as the Prelude. The Emacs Prelude has the goal to ease the initial Emacs setup process and to provide you with a much more powerful and productive experience than that you get out of the box. By using Emacs Prelude you're basically getting a "Get me out of the Prelude, I just want to use Emacs" card.

Emacs Prelude is compatible ONLY with GNU Emacs 24. While Emacs 24 is not yet officially released it's a rock solid piece of software more than suitable for everyday work. There is no good excuse not to use Emacs 24!

So, let's have  a crack at it, you'll need git and curl installed...

Visit http://batsov.com/prelude/ and follow along there if you want to try it out, remember it needs Emacs 24, so make sure you're up to date.

Here's how it worked out for me, first off a few warnings thrown by the installer, notably a few unknown functions electric-pair-mode and make-repeatable-command (which I recall should be available, something I'll need to investigate)

I fired up Emacs and after waiting for the elpa to download its package list... (the now standard Emacs 24 package manager, more on this later.)

So while I wait, Prelude adds the melpa package archive at milkbox.net for some of it's packages, and it's a long wait for the initial payload to come down, a couple of things are slightly disappointing at this stage, and to get back my nice comfortable Emacs environment I still have plenty to do.

Most disappointing is an error Invalid function: with-selected-frame This aborts the init.el so I'll need to take a look under the covers for this to work...

Of course, since I'm running Emacs from a failing init.el I lose all the useful stuff that Emacs would give me and anything cool that Prelude would've added, this isn't good, and defensive programming is something that really does need to improve here.

As a result, I'm dropping back to the command line and searching with grep for with-selected-frame in the newly created .emacs.d by the way, I'm trying to behave like an Emacs novice here, obviously I could bring my regular config in here and hack away at Prelude, to try and get it working, odds are I won't... but we'll see.

That will be something to write about another day, but for now, let's look at Emacs starter kit...