A package-based, web-centric, customizable, awesome-by-default, acceptance-tested Emacs distribution curated by your friends at Frontside.
Let's face it: Emacs is an incredible technology that unfortunately is intimidating, and quite often downright terrifying to get started with.
When you use Frontmacs, you get a version of Emacs that does all kinds the amazing things out of the box that you would expect from a moden IDE including Web and JavaScript development. Not only that, you get painless upgrades to new packages and techniques as they become available.
When you maintain your own editor configuration, you are in a constant struggle with obsolesence. Unless you're willing to constantly research the latest techniques, and fiddle with them to work with your unioue setup, it will inevitably fall out of sync with the ever-evolving set of best practices.
Alternatively, you can base your configuration on some shared repository where a common configuration is maintained and regularly updated. You clone the repo, and then you're off to the races.
However, any customizations you make are made to files under version control and so upgrading and keeping up with the community is a constant battle of merges, rebases, throw-aways and ultimately do overs. We know because we've been there.
But Emacs has a mechanism to distribute elisp code without having to
use git. It's called ELPA and it's awesome. You can think of it like
a Ruby gem or an NPM package, and this is what Frontmacs uses for deployment.
None of us wants to maintain a private fork of a mega-repo, we just want to enter a few keystrokes and download more awesome. And that's what you get by using elisp packages to install Frontmacs. Now, anytime anybody fixes a bug or make an improvement, the entire community can benefit with a simple upgrade.
A wider group of people contributing to Frontmacs development means that if you're wanting to try something new, chances are it's already powered up and ready to go with a great set of features. For example, if you want to try your hand at React, you don't want to spend the first 90 minutes fiddling with your editor. You want to spend that time ripping code!
Just because the default set of packages is heavily curated, doesn't mean that there shouldn't be room for you to innovate and exercise your creative muscles.
In fact, because Frontmacs is distributed as an Emacs Lisp package, it is decoupled from git and so you are now free to maintain your own customizations in your own repository without fear of conflicting with the main distribution.
A modern Emacs configuration is software that is subtle and complex. So if it's going to provide a pleasant, error-free experience, then it needs to be treated like software of that level.
Frontmacs tests critical workflows so that you won't get bad upgrades that ruin your day.
It is recommended that you remove any current configuration that you have from your emacs directory before installing Frontmacs.
Download the bootstrap script into your emacs directory
$ mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d && cd ~/.emacs.d
$ wget https://raw.github.com/thefrontside/frontmacs/master/scripts/init-frontmacs.el
add the following lines to the top of your init.el:
;; boot frontmacs
(load (expand-file-name "init-frontmacs.el" user-emacs-directory))Restart your Emacs and away you go!
Frontmacs will create several files and directories in your Emacs
directory (usually $HOME/.emacs.d) to help with configuration and
initialization. The first is config.el This file is loaded before
Frontmacs actually initializes, and so it's a chance to set any
well defined customizations. But don't worry, Frontmacs will generate
this file for you so that you can see what all configuration variables
are available.
For everything else, there are all of the files contained in
$HOME/.emacs.d/initializers. Every elisp file contained in this
directory will be evaluated after Frontmacs has been fully
configured and initialized, so settings made in these files will
override anything that comes with Frontmacs out of the box. For
example, you can create your Ruby configuration with a file called:
$HOME/.emacs.d/initializers/ruby.el
(eval-after-load 'rspec-mode
'(rspec-install-snippets))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("Gemfile" . ruby-mode))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.gemspec\\'" . ruby-mode))Just drop any .el file into the initializers/ directory, and
Frontmacs will evaluate it.
Note: When in doubt about whether you should put something in
config.elor a custom initializer, use an initializer.
You will need a patched version of Cask to do development on.
$ git clone -b specify-package-descriptor --depth=1 https://github.com/cowboyd/cask.git $HOME/.cask
$ export PATH=$HOME/.cask/bin:$PATH
$ cask install
$ make runlocal