in which is revealed a rather ambitious undertaking

I've recently been trying to take advantage of the recent upswing in interest in Emacs by working on things to help folks get started easily. I'm proud to announce that I'm working with the illustrious Geoffrey Grosenbach on a Peepcode screencast about learning Emacs and Lisp. Peepcode is well-known especially in the Ruby community for producing high-quality, hour-long, informative screencasts for $9. I'm doing the writing and coding for it, and Geoff will bring his trademark charm with voiceovers and slick recording.

Geoff makes it look easy, but creating a professional screencast is actually tons of work. I'm nearly half-way through writing the outline, but the outline is only the beginning. I know a lot of people are looking forward to this, so I'm eager to get something out there soon.

While you're waiting on me, you can take a look at my new project called the Emacs Starter Kit. It's designed to be a companion to the Peepcode—a set of dotfiles extracted from my years of obsessive Emacs tweaking. It acts as a base config from which new users can get going with minimal fuss. You won't learn Emacs from it, but it will help you get started out as it provides saner defaults and bundles a lot of really useful functionality.

I've been using it as my main config for quite some time now, so it's got all the libraries I need. If you're interested in trying out with Emacs but don't know where to start, give this a shot. If you're an old hand but are curious to pick up some new tricks, try out the starter kit and let me know if it's missing some must-have functionality that you're used to.

Update: Geoff posted a short screencast on getting around Emacs and his first impressions. It should serve as a nice teaser.

« 2008-12-05T22:06:52Z »

visitor – 2008-12-05T21:52:20Z: I recommend showcasing the anything.el package: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Anything

New users usually don't know it, though it's power could be very appealing to them. Some call it the Quicksilver of Emacs.
Jack Danger Canty – 2008-12-06T00:51:23Z: Thanks for doing this Phil! I just finished the emacs tutorial to get the basics and your starter kit looks like it'll be a real godsend. Can't wait for the screencast!
Bill – 2009-04-13T01:01:48Z: I am new to Emacs, and recently viewed the Peepcode screencast.

I am using a recent build of Carbon Emacs running on Mac OS X 10.5.6. Perhaps I have a set-up problem, but I have 2 issues I don't know enough to resolve on my own.

1) Elisp functions that call external web browsers no longer seem to work. If I launch Emacs without the starter-kit, type a full URL into the scratch buffer, move the cursor back to the beginning of the URL, then type "M-x browse-url-at-point RET", my browser launches, showing the expected web page. After I add the emacs-starter-kit to my home directory and create the linkage with .emacs.d and re-launch emacs, the previously-successful browser launch no longer works.

2) The file emacs-starter-kit/elpa-to-submit/nxhtml/nxhtml-loaddefs.el contains references to a non-existant file "../related/php-mode-2008-10-23". When I change the references to "../related/php-mode.el" and re-start emacs and load a PHP file, the major mode switches to PHP/nxhtml. However, because of issue #1, none of the PHP documentation commands ("C-c RET", for example) work properly.

Thanks for making time to help me resolve these issues.

--Bill
Phil – 2009-05-27T16:37:24Z: Bill: I pushed out a fix for that problem a few weeks ago; didn't realize that you couldn't launch a browser from the command line on OS X. Should be OK now.