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Setting up Emacs for the first time on Windows (ARM64)

Start here

Setup %HOME%/.emacs.d/init.el

  1. Install Emacs from GNU mirror (for ARM64 devices, if you have an older version of Windows, you might need to use the i686 MSI version)
  2. From the command line, setup your preferred location for environment variable %HOME%; this will be many times referenced in Emacs via `~` in paths like `~/.emacs.d/init.el`, etc.
    1. you can do this in cmd line via `setx HOME {YOUR HOME DIRECTORY}`
  3. Once this is done, restart Emacs, and then create your init.el configuration file:
    1. in Emacs, use C-x C-f and then type `~/.emacs.d/init.el` RET RET

This should create a new file

Setup basic Emacs customization via the menu-bar

  1. In the top menu, you will find a menu called Options. Take a look at what is avaialble
  2. Here are some interesting customizations to consider:
    • Highlight matching parentheses (super useful to track multiple nested parens - LISP has that)
    • Use CUA keys: use same Windows commands for Copy, Paste, etc.
    • Blink cursor (disable)
    • Show/Hide:
  • Tool-bar (disabled)
  • Tool-tips (disabled)
  • Scroll-bar -> No vertical scroll-bar
  • Battery-mode
    1. Save the configuration via Options -> Save Options
    2. Restart Emacs (C-x c to close Emacs)
    3. Check that the configuration has been preserved
    4. Set default font: I used Segoe UI (popular on Windows)
    5. Let’s setup a nice theme
      • Options -> Customize Emacs -> Custom Themes
      • click through the themes and find something that you like
      • once you found a good theme, click on `Save Theme Changes`
    6. Onced you saved your changes, open `~/.emacs.d/init.el` and notice the changes that were added by Emacs customization

Setup recentf-mode via init.el (.emacs in my case)

  1. To make it easier to jump to frequently used files we should enable recentf-mode
    1. Go to your init.el file and add the following (recentf-mode t)
    2. This will remember what files you recently used and give you and option to load them via M-x `recentf-open-files`

Setup dedicated customization file `emacs-custom.el`

Learn more about Emacs customization

  1. Add the following lines to your .init.el (.emacs in my case) “` (setq custom-file “~/.config/emacs-custom.el”) (load custom-file) “`
  2. Move `custom-set-variables` and `custom-set-faces` to the newly created emacs-custom.el
  3. Restart Emacs
    • you should see no difference, and moving forward all UI customizations will be saved in `emacs-custom.el` keeping your init.el configuration clean and tidy

Setup MELPA

Learn more about MELPA

  1. Add this to your `init.el`: “` (require ‘package) (add-to-list ‘package-archives ‘(“melpa” . “https://melpa.org/packages/”)) “`
  2. Save and restart emacs
  3. Go to Options -> Manage Emacs Packages
  4. If prompted, select `always accept (a)`
  5. Notice there is a Package menu option
  6. Select Package -> Refresh Package list (r) This will ask yor for certificates, select `always option (a)`
  7. Type the following and accept all certificates when prompted `M-x package-install RET dashboard`

Setup Emacs dashboard

Learn more about Emacs dashboard (GitHub)

  1. Go to Options -> Manage Emacs Packages
  2. Make sure you have refreshed the list of packages via Package -> Refresh Package List (r)
  3. Search for `dashboard` package and click on it to install it
  4. Add this to your `init.el` file “` (require ‘dashboard) (dashboard-setup-startup-hook) “`
  5. Restart Emacs

Advanced: all-the-icons

  • Learn more about all-the-icons
  • Dashboard has nice integration with `all-the-icons` package where it displays icons for file names and for the main dashboard icons.
  • Here are the steps to install it:
    1. M-x package-install RET all-the-icons RET
    2. Add `( require ‘all-the-icons)` to your `.init.el`
    3. M-x all-the-icons-install-fonts RET
      1. select the location where you want to download the fonts required for this package and download them (follow instructions)
      2. In Windows Explorer, navigate to the downloaded fonts folder and opean each `.tff` file individually
    • click on install, and repeat the process for each one of them
  • Once installed, you would want to enable support in dashboard for the new package.
    • Add the following:

    “` (setq dashboard-set-heading-icons t) (setq dashboard-set-file-icons t) “`

    • Restart Emacs

All-the-icons-XXX

You can add other packages for showing icons in different kind of buffers, for example I added one for dired functionality: `all-the-icons-dired`.

Further dashboard customization

  • add support for custom navigation buttons via `dashboard-navigator-buttons`

Projectile

Learn more about Projectile

Tooling

  • Git for Windows
  • GH CLI -> this was needed in order to reliably get Github clone to work on my Surface Pro X
    • run gh auth setup-git to enable GH auth for git commands
  • install DejaVu Fonts
  • install jq from GitHub - jqlang/jq: Command-line JSON processor
  • install java using winget winget install --id Oracle.JavaRuntimeEnvironment