Pre-built Emacs configurations like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs are impressive. They give you a working, polished setup in minutes. But they are also someone else's opinion about how Emacs should work, and when something breaks — or when you want to understand what is actually happening — you are left reading hundreds of files written by strangers.
Getting Xdebug 3 working through a Docker/Nginx stack is the kind of task that takes an afternoon if you don't know the networking pitfalls. This guide cuts straight to a working configuration, explains every setting, and covers both PhpStorm and Emacs (DAP Mode) as IDE targets.
Magit is not a thin wrapper around Git. It is a complete reimagining of the Git workflow inside a text editor, and it is almost universally cited as the single Emacs package that converts sceptics. After one week with Magit, most developers find the command-line Git UX intolerable by comparison.
Emacs has two mature LSP clients: Eglot, which ships with Emacs 29+ as a built-in package, and lsp-mode, a third-party package with a far larger feature surface.
In a previous article I covered getting GPTel running with LM Studio and a local Qwen model — a great setup when privacy and offline access matter. But the Emacs AI ecosystem has grown considerably, and there is now a whole family of packages targeting different parts of a coding workflow.
Emacs, a versatile and powerful text editor, offers numerous features to
enhance productivity. By customizing your Emacs configuration, you can
streamline your workflow and boost efficiency. In this article, we will
explore various tips and tricks for configuring Emacs to increase
productivity and efficiency.
Modern software projects are getting bigger. Monorepos, microservice architectures, vendor dependencies, and generated code can easily push projects into tens of thousands of files. Without the right workflow, even powerful editors like Emacs can become slow or overwhelming.
Emacs Lisp (Elisp) is a small, elegant Lisp dialect that powers Emacs. Even if you’re not writing full Emacs packages, understanding a few essential constructs can help you automate tasks, customize your editor, and write smarter configuration code.
Keeping your Emacs packages up to date is essential if you want the latest features, performance improvements, and security fixes. But manual updates can quickly become a chore — especially if you use Emacs as your main development environment and rely on dozens of packages.
For years, Emacs has relied on traditional techniques like regular expressions to provide syntax highlighting, indentation, and code navigation. While powerful and flexible, these approaches struggle to keep up with the complexity of modern programming languages.