Intro

I have been using Emacs for 6 years now and for the last couple of years, Emacs has been my primary tool for writing Clojure at Helpshift Inc. Over the years, I have realized the value of Emacs. It has made me productive at work and org-mode has certainly made me more disciplined. The idea of having an editor which you can customize as it runs is itself amazing! :)

Unfortunately, I have also realized that getting on-boarded on Emacs is not an easy path. Many people try it for a few days and go back to their IDEs. So I’m going to try and write about customizing Emacs from scratch. My goal is to make this process simpler (or at least well documented) and help people get comfortable with Emacs until the point they realize its true value! :)

Installation and interactive tutorial

I’m going to use Emacs 26.1 on macOS. You can get it here for macOS, Linux or for Windows.

(The version doesn’t really matter. Most of the things written here will work for any Emacs version.)

Once you start Emacs, you will see this:

Startup screen

I would advise everyone to go through the “Emacs Tutorial” section displayed above. The Emacs way of doing things is a bit different and this interactive tutorial does a great job explaining it. It is a bit long but you won’t regret spending time on it.

But before you go through the tutorial, please consider mapping the Caps Lock key to control. Control is used a lot in Emacs, and if you don’t use Caps Lock as control, you’ll suffer from Emacs pinky. Here’s how to do it for macOS, Linux, and Windows.

If you don’t want to read this (you really should though!), here’s the gist of the tutorial:

Tutorial Summary

(If you have followed the interactive tutorial, skip this section and go to the Customizing defaults section)