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My .emacs file
AI Notes
The piece opens by noting that the .emacs file itself is ninety lines — almost nothing — and that the question "can I see your .emacs file?" makes sense only before you've grasped the Zen of Emacs. Behind the ninety lines sits an emacs/ directory tree: ten thousand lines of Steve's own Elisp plus a quarter-million lines of community packages in over four hundred files. The body is a tour. JDEE, Paul Kinnucan's Java Development Environment, "an absolutely unbelievable pain in the arse to install" but indispensable; Calc, Dave Gillespie's stack-based scientific calculator that takes up roughly a fifth of the total Lisp volume; VM, Kyle Jones' mail client that Steve has used for ten years; nXML-mode, James Clark's XML editor; tuareg-mode for OCaml; an emacs-wiki for personal notes; plus the stock utilities Steve uses daily — Dired, the calendar, the completion engines — and the bash shell that lives inside Emacs ("Always always."). Underneath the catalog runs a hard-won philosophy of what an editor is for.
Related listings
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2005
Effective Emacs
Same year — the practitioner's manual. Effective Emacs teaches the moves; My .emacs file shows the configuration that supports the daily practice.
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2005
The Emacs Problem
Same year — the architecture critique. My .emacs file is the optimistic catalog of what Emacs already gives you; The Emacs Problem is the sober account of what it can't, and why.
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2008
Emergency Elisp
Three years later — the primer for anyone who reads My .emacs file and thinks 'I should write some of this myself.'