Starter Kits

Starter kits contain useful Emacs defaults. There are lots of cheat pages, that help to get an overview of the most important commands.

Play.el is a project to help try out new configurations in a sandboxed $HOME.

External Links

• Emacs Prelude offers very good default settings and is modular. You activate the modules that you use.
• Emacs Starter Kit
• Spacemacs is aimed at users using modal editing. It makes good use of Evil, the Vim layer. However, users who don't like modal editing can still use Emacs-style key bindings with holy-mode.
• Graphene: A set of defaults for Emacs, for refugees from GUI text editors.
• Emacs Kicker
• kehealy's emacs-starter-kit is aimed at social scientists researching and writing in plain text using some combination of LaTeX, R, ESS, Git, Markdown, and Org-Mode.
• emacs-for-social-science is similar in scope with the above, with two differences, according to its author: this is one is smaller and simpler and not focused on Macs.
• Emacs-bootstrap is a website where you can select a few programming languages, some options, and have it generate a full .emacs.d folder for you.
• better-defaults A small number of better defaults for Emacs
• frontmacs A package-based, web-centric, customizable, awesome-by-default, acceptance-tested Emacs distribution.

Scimax, for scientists and engineers

Scimax is a set of open-source software tools to integrate narrative text with data, code, figures, equations, tables and citations. Scimax brings plain text to life by making it functional and interactive. With scimax you can embed and run code directly in your documents, and capture the output in your document. You can embed data in your documents with narrative text that explains what it is, and then use the document as a data source for analysis. You can easily convert documents written with scimax to HTML, LaTeX, PDF, even MS Word.

Scimax builds on Emacs, org-mode and programming tools to provide a rich authoring environment for writing, programming, research and teaching.

See its github.

How to switch profiles

• chemacs helps in the process of switching profiles, hence simplifying the test of many starter kits.