My Emacs Configuration

Screenshot of my Emacs. Some notable packages in screenshot include doom-modeline, Catppuccin Frappe color theme, and JetBrains Mono font.

Introduction

This is my Emacs configuration, a somewhat simple config compared to most. The setup and installation is geared towards macOS, although it should work on most *nix configs. I also run this same config on Fedora with no issues. I’ve never tried this on Windows, so YMMV.

This configuration aims to provide you with a bare-bones configuration with sane defaults, built upon use-package.

Although Emacs has support for many programming languages, this config is geared towards the following languages and workflows:

• Emacs Lisp
• Python
• JavaScript/TypeScript
• Go

As part of my constant tweaking and rewrites, I created a dedicated terminal-only init.el found in ./terminal/init.el that is meant to be the absolute minimum carried over from my main config.

Installation

To install, it’s recommended to clone this repo wherever you prefer and symlink the directory to ~/.emacs.d.

$ git clone https://github.com/jonathanchu/dotemacs.git

There is a Makefile provided that will create the symlink for you at ~/.emacs.d:

$ make setup

My current Emacs distro of choice is:

$ brew tap daviderestivo/emacs-head
$ brew install emacs-head@30 --with-cocoa --with-imagemagick --with-liquid-glass

Please note, this requires Homebrew to be installed.

Requirements

There are a few requirements needed for this config to properly run. All of these pre-requisites can be installed via homebrew and npm.

$ brew install gh
$ brew install ripgrep
$ brew install node
$ npm install -g eslint

Nerd Fonts

doom-modeline and nerd-icons require a Nerd Font to render icons correctly. Install the Symbols Nerd Font via Homebrew:

$ brew install --cask font-symbols-only-nerd-font

Then register the fonts with nerd-icons from within Emacs:

M-x nerd-icons-install-fonts

Restart Emacs afterwards.

Tree-sitter grammars

This config uses tree-sitter for several languages. The grammar sources are declared in init.el under treesit-language-source-alist. Two helpers are provided to install them:

M-x my/treesit-install-all-grammars
M-x my/treesit-install-missing-grammars

Use the first for a fresh install or to force-update every grammar; use the second to fill in only what’s missing. Requires a C compiler available on PATH.

Language servers (eglot)

Install language servers for Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, and Go:

$ npm install -g pyright --prefix "$HOME/.local"
$ npm install -g typescript-language-server typescript --prefix "$HOME/.local"
$ go install golang.org/x/tools/gopls@latest