Emacs: Difference between revisions

Line 4:

== About ==

Emacs is an interactive graphical emacs lisp interpreter that comes with many applications, but is primarily used as a text and code editor. It has one of the largest repositories of packages of any similar code editor such as {{ic|vim}} or its fork {{ic|neovim}}.

=== Features ===

Emacs is often valued as a general purpose programming environment. Its power comes from its

* Extensibility

* Automatic self-documenting behaviour

* Flexibility

* Syntax awareness

* language server protocol support

* potential for reproducible portable literate configurations

Emacs, much like NixOS can rebuild and re-fetch all of its packages based on its initialisation file alone, if one chooses to use an extension called {{ic|(use-package)}}. Such a configuration file can be version controlled and used in all compatible operating systems. Certain issues are possible, when mixing different versions of Emacs, in particular a configuration file tailored towards emacs with native compilation, may misbehave on non-native compiling versions, unless only the emacs lisp code is shared between them.

==== Unstable branches ====

As of July 2021, the Nix community offers [https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay/blob/f177e5d14ad2e1edceb63f3ab8aa9748ebe6383c/default.nix#L104 7 variants of GNU Emacs] as overlays: emacsGit, emacsGcc, emacsPgtk, emacsPgtkGcc, emacsUnstable, emacsGit-nox, and emacsUnstable-nox.

===== Pure GTK =====

Offers better integration with wayland compositors, in particular, there's better support for sharing the kill ring contents with the system clipboard.

===== GCC =====

Branches offer a means for automatic, asynchronous native compilation of emacs lisp into native code, that is then transparently used whenver the original versions of the functions are requested.

== Installation ==

=== Emacs overlay ===

As of July 2021, the Nix community offers [https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay/blob/f177e5d14ad2e1edceb63f3ab8aa9748ebe6383c/default.nix#L104 7 variants of GNU Emacs] as overlays: emacsGit, emacsGcc, emacsPgtk, emacsPgtkGcc, emacsUnstable, emacsGit-nox, and emacsUnstable-nox. For installing one of ~~them~~, add the following lines to {{ic|/etc/nixos/configuration.nix}} (replace emacsPgtkGcc with the variant of your choice).

For installing one of the unstable branches of emacs, add the following lines to {{ic|/etc/nixos/configuration.nix}} (replace emacsPgtkGcc with the variant of your choice).

{{file|configuration.nix|nix|<nowiki>

{