Spacemacs

Spacemacs is an Emacs configuration of friendly to users new to Emacs.

Requirements

• Emacs 26 recommended. On Joule /usr/bin/emacs is 24.3.1, so recommend using an recent build of emacs.
• Spacemacs itself is a git repo of $HOME/.emacs.d

Setup .emacs.d

Go to https://www.spacemacs.org and click on the INSTALL link. Copy and paste the resulting command on Joule:

> git clone https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs ~/.emacs.d
> cd ~/.emacs.d
> git checkout develop

Load Emacs module

There is a compiled version of Emacs under /nfs/home/public:

> module load gnu/8.4.0
> source /nfs/home/public/mmeredith/spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh
> spack compiler add   # Creates ~/.spack/compilers.yaml; only necessary to run once
> spack load emacs
> emacs --version  # Should be GNU Emacs 26.3

Run Emacs

• Run emacs.
• Select either vim or emacs keybindings, your preference
• Select standard distribution
• Select completion framework helm
• Wait a minute or two for Spacemacs to install.
• Start editing (default uses Vim keybindings)

Reset Configuration

If your Spacemacs config gets corrupted, doing:

> rm ~/.spacemacs
> git -C ~/.emacs.d clean -fdx

then the next time running emacs will bring the configuration back to a known state.