I'd like to share with the community my emacs init file and a set of plugins to give a nicer experience on Ruby on Rails development, which you can checkout from http://github.com/spastorino/my_emacs_for_rails/tree/master. I have been using this environment under emacs 23, and it has not been tested on other emacs versions, so all feedback is welcome, if something goes wrong please feel free to contact me. ## What's in the package? The package provides my customized Emacs init file and some plugins I found very useful to enhance Ruby on Rails development experience. ### Plugins * anything * auto-complete * autotest * [cedet](http://cedet.sourceforge.net/) * color-theme * [ecb](http://ecb.sourceforge.net/) * find-recursive * flymake * javascript * [nxhtml](http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/nXhtml/doc/nxhtml.html) * [rcodetools](http://eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?rcodetools) * rdebug * redo * ri-emacs * [rinari](http://rinari.rubyforge.org/) * ruby-block * ruby-mode * toggle * yaml-mode * [yasnippet](http://code.google.com/p/yasnippet/) * [yasnippets-rails](http://github.com/eschulte/yasnippets-rails/tree/master) ## Installation Before you can use some plugins you have to install a few packages: To use rcodetools you need to install the rcodetools, gem with

sudo gem install rcodetools

To use autotest you need the ZenTest gem, install it with

sudo gem install ZenTest

On further post I'm going to explain how to set it up under the gnome environment using all the beauty that gnome-notifier has. Checkout the package

git clone github.com/spastorino/my_emacs_for_rails

and copy all the files under my_emacs_for_rails directory to ~/.emacs.d directory if it doesn't exist you have to create it. ## Screenshot You can see here some screenshots to get a taste of the look and feel that this one has. !http://blog.wyeworks.com/assets/2009/9/11/emacs-screenshot.png!:http://blog.wyeworks.com/assets/2009/9/11/emacs-screenshot-full.png

This is the first of a set of posts talking about Emacs. In this case we are going to install Emacs from the CVS repositories on Unix based systems. Emacs has alternative mirrors repositories in Bazaar, Git, Mercurial and Arch. You can check out the procedure and other information on [EmacsFromCVS](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsFromCVS) ## Why emacs from CVS? Because the current CVS version provides new exciting features like: * [XftGnuEmacsYour](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/XftGnuEmacs) (With XFT support, Emacs will be able to use anti-aliased fonts in the X11) * [MultiTTYSupport](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/MultiTTYSupport) (Use the multiple tty if you need one process that displays on tty and X at the same time) * [UnicodeEncoding](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/UnicodeEncoding) (built-in Unicode support) ## Installation procedure If you're going to compile it with the default options, you need the following list of libraries: * [libXaw3d](ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/widgets/Xaw3d/) for fancy 3D-style scroll bars * [libxpm for XPM](ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/libraries/) Get version 3.4k or later, which lets Emacs use its own color allocation functions. * [libpng for PNG](ftp://ftp.simplesystems.org/pub/libpng/png/) * [libz (for PNG)](http://www.zlib.net/) * [libjpeg for JPEG](ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/) Get version 6b -- 6a is reported to fail in Emacs. * [libtiff for TIFF](http://www.libtiff.org/) * [libgif for GIF](http://sourceforge.net/projects/giflib/) But you can go without some libraries, check ./configure --help, search for (--without-LIB options). On GNU/Linux systems, these libraries should be available as packages. Check for the mentioned libraries plus dev, in debian the packages are called somethings like libgif-dev, libtiff-dev, and so on.

$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs
santiago@debian:~$ ./configure --prefix=/home/santiago/bin/emacs
santiago@debian:~$ make
santiago@debian:~$ make install

If you want to upgrade remember to do:

$ cvs update
santiago@debian:~$ make
santiago@debian:~$ make install

I'm going to post more Emacs related posts talking about how to set up an Emacs enhanced for Ruby on Rails development.