Emacs Dev Kit

During the past few months I’ve been working on a project to convert my vast Emacs configuration into something generally useful and self-contained that could help the typical software engineer. Thus the Emacs Dev Kit was born. Conceptually it’s similar to the older Emacs Starter Kit and it even shares a bit of code with it. The Emacs Dev Kit, however, targets more programming languages and features more customizations/enhancements.

EDK relies on ELPA for packages that are available there and packages everything else locally. At some point I’ve played with the idea of using el-get instead, but I had a lot of problems with it and thought that using only ELPA would be better since it would be part of Emacs 24. Everything is tested only on the latest version of GNU Emacs (currently 23.2). I’ve tried to do everything in the most efficient and modern way - for instance SLIME is supposed to be installed via Quicklisp so it could be easily updated without waiting for a new version of the EDK.

EDK currently offers enhanced (well, I know that this is subjective, but it feels enhanced at least to me) support for the following languages:

• C/C++
• Clojure
• Common Lisp
• Emacs Lisp
• Haskell
• Java
• LaTeX
• Perl
• Prolog
• Python
• Ruby
• Scala
• Scheme
• XML

It also offers an advanced ERC configuration (so that you can ask your questions on #freenode), extended keybindings and lots of general purpose utility functions.

EDK goes a step further and even includes a different color-theme by default - zenburn. You can turn it off easily of course, but I have the feeling that many programmers will appreciate its eye strain reducing qualities.

The project is still very young and mostly untested. I’d be thankful for feedback, bug reports and suggestions.