minemacs

MinEmacs

MinEmacs is a lightweight Emacs configuration framework.

Why?

Since many years, Emacs forms the foundation of my workflow, serving as my go-to tool for various tasks such as document writing, academic paper writing, programming in multiple languages, email management, and staying updated with news, among other things.

Hence, I wanted a VIM-style framework that is both robust and straightforward. Spacemacs was the first framework I’ve tested, I liked the idea of using SPC as a leader key, but I didn’t like the way Spacemacs packs things in layers, and imposes a unique way of writing your configuration.

I discovered then Doom Emacs, which I found a remarkable software that introduced me to the world of Emacs. Nonetheless, my experience with it turned out to be less enjoyable later. In fact, before I started the MinEmacs project back in September 2022, I encountered numerous issues with Doom Emacs. Occasionally, after running the doom upgrade command, everything would cease to function properly. These problems always seemed to arise during my busiest days, causing unnecessary additional stress. To be frank, at that time, Doom Emacs started to feel overly complex as a configuration framework. It incorporated a command line interface, an extensive library with extra features, numerous unnecessary hacks to tweak Emacs behavior for a negligible improvement in startup time, configuration modules that tightly combined various packages in an opinionated manner, CI commands, and even a profile manager! Each of these features introduced extra complexity and more failure points at every layer.

As a result, MinEmacs emerged as my personal configuration framework for Emacs, and it continues to serve that purpose. I’m trying to tailor it to my specific needs while maintaining its modularity and portability. You can refer to the change log for more information about the evolution of MinEmacs. However, I have no intention or availability to create an alternative to Doom Emacs or Spacemacs. While I find joy (like every other Emacser out there) in tinkering with Emacs, MinEmacs remains just a tool that I use in my everyday work, and that I like to share with other Emacsers. However, please note that I am not really interested in becoming a full-time maintainer of this tool that I would only use to maintain itself!

Install

Open a shell and run:

git clone https://github.com/abougouffa/minemacs.git ~/.emacs.d && emacs

By executing this command, the repository will be cloned, and Emacs will be launched. During the initial run, Emacs will automatically install the necessary packages.

[!IMPORTANT] Please note that I’m using a fresh Emacs 29 built from source on a Manjaro Linux system. I have enabled basic Github CI actions to automatically test running Emacs 28, 29 and a fresh 30 build on Ubuntu Linux and MacOS and Emacs 28 on Windows. These actions ensure that MinEmacs is “runnable”; with all modules enabled on these systems. However, more testing should be done to validate the configuration on systems other than Linux.

I’m trying to support at least Emacs 28.1, so I back port some of the new functions/macros I use to Emacs 28. Furthermore, for Emacs 28 and earlier, MinEmacs includes the me-compat module which loads the compat package at early stage (just after bootstrapping straight and use-package), this can facilitate porting MinEmacs to earlier Emacs versions. However, I’ve never tested MinEmacs with versions earlier than 28.1, and I don’t plan to do so!

Customization

To personalize MinEmacs, you can incorporate a specific set of files within the default user configuration directory, which is located at ~/.minemacs.d. However, if you prefer to use a different directory, you have the flexibility to do so by setting the MINEMACSDIR environment variable.

Main configuration files

There are two main files that can be added in the ~/.minemacs.d directory:

1. The ~/.minemacs.d/modules.el file contains a list of enabled modules and a list of disabled packages (minemacs-core-modules, minemacs-modules and minemacs-disabled-packages can be set in this file).
2. The ~/.minemacs.d/config.el file contains the user configuration and customization, you can think of it as your init.el, which gets loaded at the end of MinEmacs’ init.el!

This repository contains skeleton files for modules.el and config.el (under skel/). We highly recommend following the same structure as in the skeleton files, specially the use of with-eval-after-load and use-package instead of using require directly (require loads the packages immediately, which increases the startup time of Emacs).

Machine-specific configuration files

In my workflow, I use mainly the same configuration files across all my machines (which are traditionally shared in my dotfiles repository). However, I have some machine-specific (local) configurations that I like to load. For example, to overwrite the email address on my workstation.

For this purpose, MinEmacs will also check for files in ~/.minemacs.d/local/{early-config,config,modules}.el and load them if they exists.

Advanced configuration files

MinEmacs provides also some advanced customization files, these files can be used to tweak MinEmacs’ behavior, add some early initialization code, make MinEmacs runnable on older Emacs versions, etc.

1. The ~/.minemacs.d/early-config.el file is loaded at the end of MinEmacs’ early-init.el. You can use it to set up some early stuff like tweaking the UI, overwrite the variables set by MinEmacs, and so on.
2. The ~/.minemacs.d/init-tweaks.el file is loaded at an early stage of the init.el file. You can use it to do some useful stuff before MinEmacs starts to customize packages and load modules. This can be useful for porting MinEmacs to an older Emacs version by providing an implementation of new functions MinEmacs uses. See the init.el for more information.

Environment variables

You can customize MinEmacs’ behavior via some environment variables.

• MINEMACS_DIR or MINEMACSDIR: Path for MinEmacs user configuration directory, if not set, ~/.minemacs.d/ is used.
• MINEMACS_MSG_LEVEL: Change message log level, from 1 (only errors) to 4 (all messages).
• MINEMACS_VERBOSE: Be more verbose (useful for debugging).
• MINEMACS_DEBUG: Enable debugging at startup.
• MINEMACS_ALPHA: Set frame background-alpha to percentage (value from 0 to 100).
• MINEMACS_NOT_LAZY: Load lazy packages immediately after loading Emacs.
• MINEMACS_ALWAYS_DEMAND: Load all packages immediately (this works by setting use-package-always-demand to t and use-package-always-defer to nil.
• MINEMACS_IGNORE_VERSION_CHECK: Do not perform version check in init.el, this can be useful if you use ~/.minemacs.d/init-tweaks.el to implement the functionalities used by MinEmacs and missing from your Emacs version.
• MINEMACS_IGNORE_USER_CONFIG: space-separated values, used to disables loading ~/.minemacs.d/<file>.el user configuration files. Accepted values for <file> are: early-config, init-tweaks, modules, config, local/early-config, local/init-tweaks, local/modules and local/config. Use all to disable all user configuration files.
• MINEMACS_LOAD_ALL_MODULES: Load all modules (without taking ~/.minemacs.d/modules.el into account).

MinEmacs keybindings cheat sheet

MinEmacs defines several keybindings, mainly using general.el. To see the full list of keybindings defined using general, you can type SPC h g or M-x general-describe-keybindings.

Extra documentation

More information about customization variables, functions and commands defined by MinEmacs can be found in the documentation generated from the source code.

Troubleshooting

If you experienced an issue with MinEmacs, you can check the FAQ, check open issues or open a new one.

This site is open source. Improve this page.