So while setting up my new laptop I needed to copy my emacs settings over and thought this would be a good topic for a short blog post.

I like to keep things as standard as possible, especially key bindings. This way if I find myself ever needing to use a strange computer my muscle memory will help me find my way around 1. However, I do customize a few things, and emacs is one of them. As you will see these customizations are mainly visual or for things that do not change user interactions.

Backups

Emacs provides a robust backup system for ensuring inadvertent changes can be recovered. By default, it will save the previous version in the same directory as the original suffixed with a tilde (~).

I don’t like my filesystem being littered with these backup files, so I add the following to my $HOME/.emacs file:

(setq backup-directory-alist `(("." . "~/.emacs_backups")))
(setq backup-by-copying t)
(setq delete-old-versions t
      kept-new-versions 6
      kept-old-versions 2
      version-control t)

This puts all backup files on %HOME/.emacs_backups. These files will be named <absolute path><filename>~<revision num>~, where the path separator is !. This configuration will keep the latest 5 backups of every file edited with emacs.

Column number

By default emacs displays the line number in the status area. I find it useful to display the column number as well.

(setq column-number-mode t)

You can always enable (or disable) it selectively by using M-x column-number-mode.

I also strictly use emacs from a terminal and really have no use for the built-in menu, so I disable it with the following:

(menu-bar-mode -1)

Again, you can toggle it selectively by using M-x menu-bar-mode.

Selecting Text

By default emacs highlights selected text (C-Space) with a bright yellow background, and leaves the font face foreground color the same. Depending on the colors you use, this can be very difficult to read:

Before.

You can change this to something more pleasing like so:

(set-face-attribute 'region nil :background "#666" :foreground "#ffffff")
After.

The Minibuffer Font Color

Likewise, the default color for the minibuffer font is blue and is very hard to read on a black background:

Believe me there is text in the minibuffer here

This can be changed via:

(set-face-foreground 'minibuffer-prompt "lightblue")
Much better.

That is it for now. I’ll have other posts that cover some other emacs customizations I use, namely Syntax Highlighting 2, and a major mode for use with Go programming.

Thanks for visiting.

  1. At least if the owner of said computer doesn’t change anything. If they do then all bets are off and I just have to muddle my way through it. ↩

  2. The default emacs syntax highlighting colors are atrocious, at least they are on a black background. ↩