I used this: https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
Some of it has been subsumed into newer emacs releases.
In general, find out which modes are considered best for whatever you are doing, install them, and then learn how to modify the configuration file to customize how the rest of the UI works.
In Emacs 25.2 releasedtechnomancy
emacs-starter-kit
Developer Tools2008–2017
technomancy / emacs-starter-kit · Archived
emacs-starter-kit
[ARCHIVED] this is ancient history
29Distinct people
34Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
2.8KGitHub stars
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[ARCHIVED] this is ancient history
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Besides the inline manual that emacs has in itself. I recommend you to start using the Emacs Starter Kit [1]. Try to read the source and understand what it's doing. You will…
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year34 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2008-12-04 12:29:47 UTC to 2017-04-22 19:16:55 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | 2008-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2009-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2009 | 2009-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2010 | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Emacs Starter Kit
Version 3 of the Emacs Starter Kit is implemented as a prose guide to
various packages and settings which can greatly improve the Emacs
experience.
History
Older versions of the Starter Kit attempted to be one-size-fits-all
codebase intended to be dropped into your ~/.emacs.d directory
wholesale. While this proved very popular, taking a big bundle of
unrelated functionality leads to simply adopting things without
developing any real understanding. When something goes wrong or even
just behaves differently from what you'd like, you don't know where to
look to fix it.
I've since come to realize users are better suited by small, focused
packages which provide specific pieces of new functionality. So rather
than putting up a big pile of code, the Starter Kit has shifted to
become merely a guide. As an Emacs user, you're going to have to get
comfortable seeking out new pieces of elisp, bringing them in,
configuring them, and eventually writing your own. The Starter Kit can
help this process by giving hints as to where to start and what to
look for, but constructing a solid configuration is ultimately a
personal journey for which you must take the first steps.
Getting Started
I strongly recommend keeping your dotfiles under version control and
installing Emacs packages inside it using git subtree.
This avoids many common
problems with
package.el, and it allows you to seamlessly roll back upgrades which
introduce breaking changes as well as guaranteeing that all machines you
work on share the same versions.
(defun pnh-reinit-libs ()
(interactive)
(let ((generated-autoload-file (concat user-emacs-directory "my-autoload.el")))
(dolist (d (directory-files (concat user-emacs-directory "lib") t "^[^\.]"))
(dolist (f (directory-files d t "\\.el$"))
(byte-compile-file f))
(update-directory-autoloads d))))
(dolist (l (directory-files (concat user-emacs-directory "lib") nil "^[^\.]"))
(add-to-list 'load-path (concat user-emacs-directory "lib/" l))
(autoload (intern l) (concat l ".el")))
(when (not (file-exists-p (concat user-emacs-directory "my-autoload.el")))
(pnh-reinit-libs))
(load (concat user-emacs-directory "my-autoload.el"))
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Copyright
Copyright © 2008-2017 Phil Hagelberg and contributors
Files are licensed under the same license as Emacs unless otherwise
specified. See the file COPYING for details.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
34 sourcesNew users who plan to configure and extend Emacs thoroughly might not benefit from using another person's configuration because they will end up reconfiguring that configuration, which I think is more difficult than configuring vanilla Emacs.
During the first weekend that I started using Emacs, I ended up writing hundreds of lines of Emacs Lisp to optimize Emacs for my usage. I had never written Lisp before, and I think using another person's configuration would have hindered my progress.
But I think that reading other people's configurations can be super helpful.
Phil Hagelberg, the creator of Emacs Starter Kit, seems to have arrived at the same conclusion that I have:
https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit#history
In Mastering Emacsalso don't forget to take a look at technomancy's emacs starter kit, which was very helpful to me when I got started using emacs:
https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
In Moving Atom to ReactEmacs Starter Kit version 3 to be implemented as a prose guide
1 points · Open discussionI dont have a tutorial to offer you, but here's what made semi-comfortable with emacs:
- install the emacs starter kit [0] as it's much user friendly than the raw emacs
- learn the most used shortcuts (C-w to cut, M-w to copy, C-Y to yank (paste), C-x C-s to save, C-x C-f to open a file, C-k to kill a text, C-a to go at the start of a line and C-e to go at the end, etc.)
- try to use emacs for everything and slowly get more and more comfortable at it.
[0] https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
In Learning Emacs, any tips or tricks, best tutorial?I'd say it's not warranted and it's not needed. After meddling about for a bit, I did a reset and I did it using "emacs starter kit" by technomancy (of leiningen fame):
https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
On top of this I've added some tweaked versions of yank-indent and indent.el from the emacs-wiki:
http://emacswiki.org/emacs/AutoIndentation
On top of that, I've just added whatever tweaks and hacks necessary to get screen & emacs behaving properly in a FreeBSD shell, since currently my best and most powerful internet-facing host is a FreeBSD machine.
So as you can see, most of it is repo'd already :)
In Why I love everything you hate about JavaWhich one?
This one: https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
or this one: https://github.com/eschulte/emacs24-starter-kit
I've been using and configuring emacs for a few weeks now. Is it worth starting again with one of these or will it move too much cheese?
In The Ultimate Vim DistributionIt's hard for me to really say, but at the least I can talk about my own experience. I began learning Common Lisp by going through "Land of Lisp" by Conrad Barski, and because it was so fun it really helped to keep me motivated while learning such a different way of programming. The book was also useful in that you learned through writing short programs which actually did something, which I found to be a great teaching style. I mean, I really, really loved going through that book.
As far as I know, there are no comparable books for Clojure. However, once I became familiar with CL, it was not at all difficult to pick up Clojure. Sure, Clojure has some new ideas, especially when it comes to mutability and concurrency. But in terms of the basic language, it's very similar to CL and in many ways it's easier to work with.
As for emacs - I also
Read the rest
strongly recommend using it. It has great support for lisp and really makes development a joy. Emacs itself is written in a lisp variant, elisp. If you do decide to go with emacs, use this: https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit . It's a great set of packages pulled together by someone who, it turns out, is very big in the Clojure community. I'm not really sure what the best resource is for learning emacs these days.
I've really enjoyed the way I've learned lisp, and I feel comfortable recommending that you start with Land of Lisp and emacs. I hope this helps!
What functionality does prelude provide? Unless I'm missing something, the website suggests that you can find out by "reading the source."
I had a similar experience once with the emacs starter kit [1]. Though it's a noble effort and probably does have a ton of great features, there are some problems: you pretty much get all or nothing (ESK split it out into a "core" and "per-language" set of libraries but still, there's a lot of stuff) and it's hard to tell which things are emacs builtin and what is customizable. If you disagree with a customization you're SOL; I knew enough about emacs to know that some things had been customized, and I didn't like them, but it was nigh impossible to find out where they were customized and how to turn them off.
It reminds me of the libraries vs frameworks discussion [2]. Emacs works well with libraries
Read the rest
(with little elisp functions counting as "mini-libraries"), and the ESK/prelude seem like frameworks.
I'm not trying to pick on these toolkits in particular. They are probably a good way to start out with emacs--I know that the ESK provides a bunch of features to make it more "friendly" out of the box for someone who is coming from something like TextMate.
Most "old-school" emacs people I know have their own .emacs that have accumulated over years and years of trying to solve specific problems or customize that one thing that's annoyed the crap out of them for a while. My .emacs is not pages and pages, but it does have some good stuff in it.
What I'd love to see (and maybe I'm inviting myself to do this) would be a tool (maybe ELPA is this tool, though It's hard to know) which allows you to search for, browse, and install elisp snippets to help you out. ELPA is good for bigger libraries (i.e. major modes) but not for "how do I create an unfill-paragraph function?"
[1] https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2762280
Take a look at the Emacs Starter Kit README:
https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
Basically it uses a combination of `package-installed-p` to check if the package is installed, and `package-install` to install said package if it is not.
Note this is for Emacs 24, which comes with `package.el` preinstalled.
In A Brief Beginner's Guide To ClojureProbably the best way to get started is to grab an Emacs 24 pretest and use technomancy's Emacs Starter Kit: https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
Emacs 24 gives you a solid package manager, and the starter kit gives you a good solid spot to build on.
From there, install the packages you want. If you want haskell-mode, just M-x package-install [return] haskell-mode. Get the full package list with M-x package-list-packages.
In Ask HN: How do you learn emacs?Some projects related insofar as they are attempts to simplify the initial configuration of Emacs. I've used all but the last at some point and have found them useful (though like any good scaffolding, they become irrelevant over the course of continued Emacs usage):
* https://github.com/gabrielelanaro/emacs-for-python
* https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
* http://eschulte.github.com/emacs-starter-kit
* https://github.com/pdee/pdee
I am especially interested to see this get off the ground, though, as even the simplified "starter kits" above still require a certain non-trivial level of contextual Emacs-knowledge -- a simple binary with overly-sane keybindings and functional out-of-the-box would be a real contribution. I would have loved to use something like that myself about a year ago.
In Emacs for the rest of us: ErgoEmacsHe doesn't mention emacs-starter-kit, so as a community service, I'm pointing it out. I had used Emacs for a long time, and switching to this made my life much easier. And my customizations still worked fine (although I was able to remove many of them)
https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
WARNING!!! The version in git is for Emacs 24. You will need to actually download the earlier version to use with Emacs 23.
In Emacs adventures - a couple of things I’ve learnedBesides the inline manual that emacs has in itself. I recommend you to start using the Emacs Starter Kit [1].
Try to read the source and understand what it's doing. You will learn how to configure emacs, and the basics of elisp.
[1] https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
In Vi and Vim vs. Emacs Shootout and DealI would suggest just getting emacs 24. If you are on OSX you can build the emacs head using homebrew. There's some cool stuff in 24 like the emacs package manager (package.el) etc.
Once you have emacs 24 ready to go, it's a good idea to take a look at the emacs starter kit: https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
There's also a pretty good peepcode screencast on emacs, its a bit old, but gives a good overview of a lot of the basics.
Once you feel like delving deeper, your best bet is to snoop around on emacswiki.org
In Vi and Vim vs. Emacs Shootout and DealShowing the 15 most recent of 34 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.