Emacs ElementaryX: Elementary Emacs configuration coupled with Guix
Fork of Emacs Bedrock: stepping stones to a better Emacs experience

elementaryx aims at achieving some specific workflows. In a way, it may be viewed as an extension of the original emacs bedrock by ashton314 to achieve them. On the other hand, it breaks some of the very nice features of the original bedrock. For instance, the original bedrock is delivered through a single git repository and depends only on one external package by default, which makes it very nice to play with. On the contrary, the present revisited version – elementaryx – is split into multiple repositories and may have many dependencies, which makes it hard to use. In addition, the focus on the considered workflows of the present version is certainly useless or suboptimum for many (most) emacs users.

While, according to its synopsis, the original bedrock is an "extremely minimal emacs starter kit", there exist much more fully-featured starter kits such as spacemacs or doomemacs. These starter kits provide an excellent user-experience, are developed and maintained by hundreds of contributors. The elementaryx suite does not – and will not – achieve 1% of their capacity, nor ergonomics.

Though, as shown by asthon314 with the original bedrock, it is possible to design a pleasant set up of emacs with a modern emacs (version 29.1 or more), and we hope that this revisited version may also be pleasant to use for performing a few selected workflows.

As discussed in Section 2, we rely on the guix package manager to use this elementaryx. It can be installed on any linux distribution (see below) but:

• you may not be on linux;
• or you may not want to install yet another package manager within your linux distribution.

In these cases, we do not recommend either to use elementaryx. Note that it is nevertheless possible to use it with docker as explained below.

In a nutshell, assuming we have guix available (see below in Section 2.2), we can launch elementaryx in an isolated shell with guix time-machine using these guix-hpc fixed channels as follows:

mkdir -p "$HOME/org-roam"
mkdir -p "$HOME/references"
mkdir -p "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/.emacs.d"
wget https://gitlab.inria.fr/elementaryx/elementaryx.gitlabpages.inria.fr/-/raw/main/dotfiles/bash-elementaryx/.bashrc.elementaryx -O "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/.bashrc.elementaryx"
wget https://gitlab.inria.fr/elementaryx/elementaryx.gitlabpages.inria.fr/-/raw/main/channels-fixed.scm -O "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/channels-fixed.scm"
cd "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/"
SHELL="bash" guix time-machine --channels=/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/channels-fixed.scm -- shell --share=/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/ --share="$HOME/org-roam" --share="$HOME/references" --expose=/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/.bashrc.elementaryx=$HOME/.bashrc --expose=$HOME/.config/guix/current=/guix --expose=/tmp/.X11-unix --expose=$XAUTHORITY --expose=/etc/ssl/certs --preserve="^SHELL|^DISPLAY$|^XAUTHORITY$|^TERM$" -CNW icecat emacs-elementaryx-as-default -- bash -c 'GUIX_PROFILE="/guix" ; . "$GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile" ; emacs'

The rest of the section explains these latter instructions and propose alternative execution modes. The above proposed execution mode corresponds to the concatenation of the preliminary setup from Section 2.3 and the isolated execution from 2.4.1.1. If you are happy with this execution mode you can skip the rest of the section and go to Section 4 to play with elementaryx.

We just mention before that, that, although we recommend it, it is not necessary to create and share the $HOME/org-roam and $HOME/references as suggested above. In case you do not want to create and share them, we can create them in "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/" instead. In this case, proceed as follows:

mkdir -p "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test"
mkdir -p "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/org-roam"
mkdir -p "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/references"
mkdir -p "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/.emacs.d"
wget https://gitlab.inria.fr/elementaryx/elementaryx.gitlabpages.inria.fr/-/raw/main/dotfiles/bash-elementaryx/.bashrc.elementaryx -O "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/.bashrc.elementaryx"
wget https://gitlab.inria.fr/elementaryx/elementaryx.gitlabpages.inria.fr/-/raw/main/channels-fixed.scm -O "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/channels-fixed.scm"
cd "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/"
SHELL="bash" guix time-machine --channels=/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/channels-fixed.scm -- shell --share=/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/ --share="/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/"="$HOME/org-roam" --share="/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/"="$HOME/references" --expose=/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/.bashrc.elementaryx=$HOME/.bashrc --expose=$HOME/.config/guix/current=/guix --expose=/tmp/.X11-unix --expose=$XAUTHORITY --expose=/etc/ssl/certs --preserve="^SHELL|^DISPLAY$|^XAUTHORITY$|^TERM$" -CNW icecat emacs-elementaryx-as-default -- bash -c 'GUIX_PROFILE="/guix" ; . "$GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile" ; emacs'

As mentioned in Section 1.1, elementaryx is composed of multiple (tiny) git repositories and has many dependencies (a few emacs dependencies, and many non emacs dependencies). As a consequence, it is not straightforward (at all) to use. Therefore we rely on a robust deployment tool – namely guix – to set it up. Note that the guix package manager can be installed on any linux distribution. We refer to guix manual for installing guix and assume guix is available in the following.

Note that elementaryx is not packaged in the main channel of guix but in the guix-hpc channel, which must therefore be enabled (see guix-hpc). This is why the channels we use include the guix-hpc channel.

The interested reader might read the guix definition of the present elementaryx suite but this is not necessary at all for proceeding.

We proceed with a few folder and file creations:

mkdir -p "$HOME/org-roam"
mkdir -p "$HOME/references"
mkdir -p "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test"
mkdir -p "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/.emacs.d"
wget https://gitlab.inria.fr/elementaryx/elementaryx.gitlabpages.inria.fr/-/raw/main/dotfiles/bash-elementaryx/.bashrc.elementaryx -O "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/.bashrc.elementaryx"
wget https://gitlab.inria.fr/elementaryx/elementaryx.gitlabpages.inria.fr/-/raw/main/channels-fixed.scm -O "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/channels-fixed.scm"

• $HOME/org-roam will be used for storing non-hierarchical org-roam notes and TODOs;
• $HOME/references will be used for storing (bibtex) bibliography;
• /tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/ will be used for testing purpose;
• /tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/.emacs.d/ will be used as an emacs init directory (not necessary in an isolated container);
• /tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/.bashrc.elementaryx will be used as a minimalist bashrc set up (enable direnv, …);
• /tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/channels-fixed.scm will be used as channels for guix time-machine or guix pull.

Note that an even more minimalistic /.bashrc setup can be used as follows (rather than the wget above command):

echo  "eval \"\$(direnv hook bash)\"" > "/tmp/$(whoami)/elementaryx-test/.bashrc.elementaryx"

Note also that in the long run, $HOME/org-roam and $HOME/references might instead be symbolic links to git repositories.

Assuming guix is available (see Section 2.2) and the preliminary folder and file creations are done (Section 2.3), multiple options are then available to start elementaryx and play with it.

The most simple way is to use the emacs-elementaryx-as-default guix package. This package sets up a minimalist default.el emacs init file (see emacs init file reference), basically consisting of (use-package elementaryx-full) (see source) for requesting the emacs elementaryx package. We also use the icecat package for convenient check out of html exports (see below for the corresponding workflow).

Here are multiple options for starting elementaryx, from the most conservative to the most flexible.

The philosophy is to follow as much as possible the reference emacs 29.1. When additional packages are used, we follow as much as possible the proposed default suggestions both in terms of enabled configuration and key bindings.

We are now logged onto the image and can start emacs elementaryx from there:

emacs

As with most editors, most common operations can be performed using the graphical user interface (GUI), an important feature for discoverability.

In particular, the menu-bar allows one to