Improving my emacs setup

Posted by Samuel Iglesias on January 29, 2019

I need to start this post mentioning the reason I improved my Emacs setup after so many years with no change in it. Funny enough, I need to say thanks to Visual Studio Code :-D

Last month, I came across the blogpost “10 years of love for Emacs undone by a week of VSCode”. As I have been using Emacs for almost a decade, I wondered if that could be true… so I tried Visual Studio Code!

During my testing period, I found that IntelliSense worked like a charm, I love that “peek declaration” feature, it has a huge number of extensions that provide almost anything you want and it is well supported on GNU/Linux, including GDB and terminal support. This was the first Microsoft product in years that I considered it worth using every day :-O

Screenshot of Visual Studio Code

This experience made me think also what I was missing on my Emacs setup and I did not know before. I realized that I missed having multiple cursors, a good source code tag system, a modern theme (yes, why not?), markdown support and, if possible, a integrated way to check Pull Requests on Github and Merge Requests on Gitlab. I found a way to have everything in Emacs except the Gitlab’s Merge Requests integration, due to a failed installation of the gitlab package. Now I am much happier user of Emacs than one month ago, and I need to say thanks to Visual Studio Code :-P

In case you want to test it, I have pushed my emacs.d/ config to Github. Be aware this is not the final version… I plan to improve it in the future.

Screenshot of Emacs