Environment Setup

I have tried to ensure my development environment can be set up quickly on a new system. The basic process is:

1. Install packaged tools for the platform. Most platforms will support a subset of the tools I need, but with the exception of Debian Jessie, I generally need to either repackage or do custom installs for other tools. On Mac OS I prefer MacPorts for everything, although their Clang port does have some issues.
2. Clone my dotfiles to $HOME/.dotfiles. Also update submodules and run bootstrap.sh as described in the readme.org file.

There’s no step 3!

Well, actually in step 3 I usually need to switch my login shell to zsh and a few other minor tasks, but generally speaking it’s a massive time saver to have all of your common configuration in a git repo.

The code samples on this wiki are taken directly from my dotfiles repo, and I encourage you to refer to the current up-to-date version where relevant.

Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the code in my dotfiles repo is for Emacs initialization. There are several third-party Emacs packages which I rely on, and these are installed automatically as part of the setup process. Some of these are checked out directly from their source repo (e.g. CEDET), but where possible I try to use Cask to download and install the relevant packages. The result is that I can generally write my Emacs initialization code to assume (rather than check for) the presence of these packages.