mjlbach / kickstart.el

The WIP migration path from kickstart.nvim

WORK IN PROGRESS DO NOT USE

kickstart.el

Introduction

A starting point for Emacs that is:

• Small (<500 lines)
• Two-file
• Documented
• Modular

This repo is meant to be used as a starting point for your Emacs configuration; remove the things you don’t use and add what you miss.

If you are interested in a more full-featured, modular configuration. Please use Doom emacs.

Installation

Kickstart.el at this time targets Emacs 29. If you are experiencing issues, please make sure you have the latest version.

• Backup your previous configuration

  mv $HOME/.config/emacs{,.bak}
      

• Recommended: Fork this repo so that you have your own copy you can modify.
• Clone the kickstart repo into `$HOME/.config/emacs/`

  git clone https://github.com:mjlbach/kickstart.el.git $HOME/.config/emacs/
      

• Start Emacs (`emacs`) and allow `elpaca` to complete installation.

Additional system requirements:

• ripgrep is required for multiple vertico pickers.

Contribution

Pull-requests are welcome. The goal of this repo is not to create an Emacs configuration framework, but to offer a starting template that shows, by example, available features in Emacs.

Each PR, especially those which increase the line count, should have a description as to why the PR is necessary.

Limitations

• The startup time for Emacs is poor, please help me optimize lazy-loading
  • You can Emacs as a daemon and attach to the server with clients for instant startup
• Emacs client/server model was not designed to have separate settings for TUI/GUI clients
  • This mainly manifests in being unable to customize the UI layer for GUI/TUI without restarting the daemon
• Emacs lacks a unified UI layer around childframes, so some feature (namely eldoc-box, corfu) have an inconsitent or degraded experience in the TUI
• Emacs requires significantly more boilerplate in its plugins
• Elisp (even native or byte-compiled elisp) is much slower than comparable scripting languages like javascript or luajit
• Emacs is not designed with Vim bindings in mind, and requires emulation packages like evil

Attribution

• Nicholas Vollmer (progfolio), Henrik Lissner (hlissner), and all the other configurations/README’s I’ve ripped off.

kickstart.el's Issues

Modularity suggestion

I know this is WIP, and that you want to keep this super focused and minimal, but I wonder if you might consider adding some way for users to add their own modules to a subdirectory, without them having to figure out how to do this themselves, and modify the main init.el file?

Say adding something like:

(add-to-list 'load-path (expand-file-name "lisp" user-emacs-directory))

... and then, I dunno, some standard feature init.el will load, which can in turn load other user features, like:

;;; init-user.el --- user init -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-
;;;
;;; Code:

(require 'init-bd) ; my stuff

(provide 'init-user)
;;; init-user.el ends here

Could have the benefit that one can still easily update the main init.el file as it evolves, and also demonstrate how to modularize functionality into separate files/features.