Following up on the very popular emacs-starter-kit, I’m now proposing the emacs-kicker. It’s about the .emacs file you’ve seen in older posts here, which I maintain for some colleagues. After all, if they find it useful, some more people might to, so I’ve decided to publish it.

What you’ll find is a very simple 128 lines Emacs user init file, based on el-get for external packages. A not so random selection of those is used, here’s the list when you hide some details:

'(el-get			; el-get is self-hosting
   escreen            		; screen for emacs, C-\ C-h
   php-mode-improved		; if you're into php...
   psvn				; M-x svn-status
   switch-window		; takes over C-x o
   auto-complete		; complete as you type with overlays
   emacs-goodies-el		; the debian addons for emacs
   yasnippet			; powerful snippet mode
   zencoding-mode		; http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ZenCoding
   (:name buffer-move		; move buffers around in windows
   (:name smex			; a better (ido like) M-x
   (:name magit			; git meet emacs, and a binding
   (:name goto-last-change	; move pointer back to last change

Another interresting thing to note in this kicker is a choice of some key bindings that are rather unusual (yet) I guess.

(global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-b") 'ido-switch-buffer)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-c") 'ido-switch-buffer)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x B") 'ibuffer)

Yes, you see that I’ve rebound C-x C-c to switching buffers. That key is really easy to use and I don’t think that M-x kill-emacs deserves it. Keys that are so easy to use should be kept for frequent actions, and quiting emacs is a once-a-day to once-a-month action here. And you can still quit from the window manager button or from the menu or from M-x.

Also Mac users are not left behind, you will see some settings that either are adapted to the system (like choosing another font, keep displaying the menu-bar or not installing the darkish tango-color-mode on this system, where it renders poorly in my opinion), as you can see here:

(if (string-match "apple-darwin" system-configuration)
    (set-face-font 'default "Monaco-13")
  (set-frame-font "Monospace-10"))

(when (string-match "apple-darwin" system-configuration)
  (setq mac-allow-anti-aliasing t)
  (setq mac-command-modifier 'meta)
  (setq mac-option-modifier 'none))

So all in all, I don’t expect this emacs-kicker to please everyone, but I expect it to be simple and rich enough (thanks to el-get), and it should be a good kick start that’s easy to adapt.

If you want to try it without installing it it’s very easy to do so. Just clone the git repository then start an Emacs that will use this. For example that could be, using the excellent Emacs For MacOSX:

$ /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -Q -l init.el

I hope some readers will find it useful! :)