Emacs starter kit

Why?

Getting started with Emacs can be tough. Not only do you have to learn a bunch of new keybindings, you also need to know enough Emacs Lisp to coerce the editor to behave how you'd expect. Jumping into Doom seems like a smart way to skip the learning curve, but ends up adding too much friction when you learn enough to make it your own.

This starter kit offers a middle ground. It provides modern conveniences and hand-crafted settings while retaining the simplicity of a single file of Emacs Lisp. It assumes Emacs 29.1 (the latest release) and takes advantage of many of its new features. The config is heavily annotated with comments to guide you through Emacs Lisp esoterica and help you build Emacs your way.

What's in the config?

Opinionated defaults that incorporate lots of goodies from Phil Hagelberg's better defaults, among other hand-picked settings.
Package management organization and helpers with use-package.
LSP support with Eglot.
Enhanced built-ins with Vertico, Corfu, and Marginalia.
Language support for many programming languages not supported OOTB.
Code comments that annotate all the important stuff.

Get started

First, download Emacs 29.1 (the current latest version). Then fill out the form below to generate your config file. Take that file and drop it into your Emacs home directory. If you don't know where that is, use ~/.config/emacs/init.el.

Configure Your Emacs

Editor settings

Font family:

Theme:

Extra packages

Your config will already include LSP support and code/minibuffer completion. Below are some extra packages that may suit your style.

Include these extra features:

Enhance built-in documentation with examples

Use vim keybindings

Add a lightweight notetaking system

Add an awesome git UI

Add breadcrumbs to buffers

Help me with Lisp parentheses

Programming languages and tools

Although Emacs supports a whole bunch of languages out of the box (Python, C, C++, etc.) it's likely you'll want to bring a few extra modes along for the ride.

Support these additional languages:

Elixir Go Julia Lua Markdown PHP TypeScript + JSX Rust YAML

Kudos

Kudos to Philip's Emacs Configuration Generator for the idea. Use his configuration instead if you already have some experience with Emacs and know what you like.