Configuring emacs with doom emacs

Feb 13, 2020 · 668 words · 4 minute read

Emacs with doom emacs

After having used spacemacs, then vanilla emacs, suffered during months to make it work with all the languages, then going back to spacemacs… you can see, emacs is a journey… that never ends… feels like a pathologica goal, masochistic, now with doom-emacs will be the same xD but I'm trying any way.

One of the best selling points of doom-emacs is that feels really curated, it's fast (all the modes load in a lazy fashion) and also feels complete. It has support for all the languages, plus support features like workspaces (how screens are organized).

So, are you onboard? Cool! from now on bear with me… this is not an actual tutorial! this is more like my mental notes of what I did to have emacs working :)

https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

Installing

pretty easy…

git clone https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs ~/.emacs.d
~/.emacs.d/bin/doom install

Good to go! just execute emacs and that's it…..

Now to configure you just need to modify the `~/.doom.d/init.el` where you will find some configuration and most of it is comment.

it's important to know that doom-emacs has a few particularities

Every time you modify your init.el, you will need to refresh your installation (this is what will install your emacs packages, so each time you start emacs it doesn't need to connect to melpa to check what is new)
```
~/.emacs.d/bin/doom sync
```
when you modify your environment variables in .bashrc or similar you need to run a command, basically the envirnment variables are cached. This way it doesn't matter if you execute emacs from a shell or from MacOs finder.
```
~/.emacs.d/bin/doom env
```

Configuring some languages with LSP

Python

on the doom.d/init.el add the following "layers"

lsp
(python +lsp +pyenv)

Also, you will need to install the lsp server for python

pip install ‘python-language-server[all]’

Now you are done, enjoy your beautiful 35 year old editor using the same backend as VSCode…

Something that is quite normal in python is using virtualenv/pyenv/venv etc… that why you should add also pyenv to the extensions of your thep ython layer.

normally starting a project so it works perfectly in emacs is

mkdir myproject

pyenv virtualenv 3.7.6 myproject
pyenv activate myproject
pyenv local myproject

pip freeze ## check that actually the virtual env is empty

now when you open the files in emacs, it will automatically use the pyenv environment setted by the pyenv local command.

finally, note that most of the lsp commands are triggered by the pref `SPC c`

Org Mode + Encryption

Not much… just add the layer org… I used the following config.

       (org              ; organize your plain life in plain text
        +dragndrop       ; drag & drop files/images into org buffers
        +hugo            ; use Emacs for hugo blogging
        ;;+jupyter        ; ipython/jupyter support for babel
        ;;+pandoc          ; export-with-pandoc support
        ;;+pomodoro        ; be fruitful with the tomato technique
        +present)        ; using org-mode for presentations

Encryption

First for using encryption you will need to make sure you have gpg installed using brew or apt-get or other package systems.

Once you have that, you will need a asymetric keys

gpg --full-gen-key

Then you can export it

gpg --armor --export ${email_you_put_in_create} > public_key.asc
gpg --armor --export-secret-keys ${email_you_put_in_create} > private_key.asc

then you can import it using

gpg --import private_key.asc
gpg --import public_key.asc

I strongly suggest saving the key inside a password management

Well now to the encryption of org files… for that we will need to use `epa` epa is a nice package that already comes with emacs that allows to seamly encrypt files that have .gpg extensions.

in the ~.doom.d/config.el add the following snippet

(require 'epa-file)
(epa-file-enable)

now any file you write with gpg extension will automatically encrypted with your pgp key. That is awesome!

But since you lost your file extension, when loading the file back the mode for the file will be lost. But that's easy fixed by adding the following header in the files

# -*- mode:org; epa-file-encrypt-to: ("kozko2001@gmail.com") -*-

were you can define which mode this file belongs, and also which key you want to use to encrypt/decrypt