MinEmacs

MinEmacs is a lightweight Emacs configuration framework.

Why?

Since a few years, Emacs forms the foundation of my workflow, serving as my go-to tool for various tasks such as document writing, academic papers writing and editing, email management, staying updated with news, developing software using multiple programming languages and for different domains including: robotics, embedded systems, embedded Linux, CI/CD, among other things.

Before Emacs, I was mainly using VSCode and QtCreator with a little bit of Vim/Neovim. Hence, I wanted, in the beginning, a VIM-style configuration 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 piece of 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 honest, I think at that time, big parts of Doom Emacs where being rewritten, which cased these annoying breakages then, but I think it should be more stable now. However, 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. MinEmacs is changing constantly, you can refer to the change log for more information about the evolution of MinEmacs.

MinEmacs was mainly based on Evil and General (for the SPC leader), even though Evil still supported via the me-evil module, I'm moving away recently from Evil to embrace the classic Emacs experience. Vim is awesome, and Evil does a great job in emulating Vim functionalities in Emacs. However, using Emacs via Evil hides a lot of Emacs beauty and alters the classical Emacs experience, and to be honest, Evil is quite slow and sometimes messy, and doesn't integrate well with other packages. For these reasons and other, I started embracing Emacs as it is, trying to make use of its features as they are intended to be used.

[!NOTE] Please note that I have no intent 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.

Install

Open a shell and run:

git clone --recursive 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. You might need to run M-x minemacs-run-build-functions when Emacs loads up to install some extra stuff (build some libraries, install Nerd Fonts, etc.)

[!IMPORTANT] Please note that I'm using a fresh Emacs 29 (recommended version) built from the emacs-29 branch mainly on two machines, one based on Manjaro Linux and the other on (the quite old) Debian 10. However, I have set up some basic Github CI actions that automatically test running this configuration on Emacs 28, 29 and 30 in Ubuntu Linux and MacOS and on Emacs 29 in Windows. These actions ensure that MinEmacs is "runnable" on these systems; with all its modules enabled. However, more testing should be done to validate the configuration on systems other than Linux.

I'm trying to support at least Emacs 28.2, so I back port some of the new functions/macros I use to Emacs 28. Furthermore, 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 28.2, and I don't plan to do so!

Customization

To personalize MinEmacs, you can add a specific set of files within the default user configuration directory, which is located by default at ~/.minemacs.d/ or .emacs.d/user-config/ (the first to be found). 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-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 contain some private and machine-specific configurations. For example, I use them to overwrite the email address on my workstation, to setup my Email accounts, to setup Forge and Jira integration in my workstation, and so on.

For this purpose, MinEmacs will also check for files in ~/.minemacs.d/local/{early-config,config,modules}.el and load them, after the ~/.minemacs.d/{early-config,config,modules}.el 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 in ~/.emacs.d/early-init.el, 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. See the comments in 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_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_BENCHMARK: Run a benchmark at initialization of Emacs (using benchmark-init.el) and display the results after startup (including lazy packages).
• MINEMACS_NO_PROXIES: Set if you have minemacs-proxies setup in your early-config.el but you want to start Emacs without passing by these proxies (useful if you use some proxies for work but you want Emacs to start without passing by them to be able to download packages).

Extra documentation

For more information about customization variables, functions and commands defined by MinEmacs, you can refer to the documentation generated from the source code.

Troubleshooting

If you experienced an issue with MinEmacs, you can take a look at the FAQ, consult the discussions, check open issues or open a new one.