Clementson's Blog

Minimal .emacs for Win32

Sunday, November 12, 2006

I've grown accustomed to having my own development environment always available. Even though I do custom coding for clients, I generally do it remotely on my own hardware, so it is rare that I have to use someone else's box. However, the last few weeks I've been doing work for a client who required that I use their hardware. They were ok with me downloading tools that I might need for my work, but they did want me to use their Win32 box.

It's been a while since I've had to use Win32 for development as I normally use my Mac even when I'm connecting to clients that have standardized on Win32. So, the first thing I did was download Emacs. On the Mac, I use CVS Emacs (actually, I use Aquamacs, but it's essentially just CVS Emacs with some bundled elisp libraries) and I've grown accustomed to features in CVS, so I was pleased to find that there's a pre-built CVS Emacs for Win32 available. Since I'm not doing Lisp work for this particular client, I was able to make do with just a very basic set of customizations in my .emacs file:

;; Override defaults
(fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p)           ;replace y-e-s by y
(setq inhibit-startup-message t)        ;no splash screen
(setq ls-lisp-dirs-first t)             ;display dirs first in dired
(tool-bar-mode nil)                     ;no tool bar
(show-paren-mode 1)			;paren matching
(setq mouse-1-click-follows-link 'double)

;; Conventional selection/deletion
(pc-selection-mode)                 
(delete-selection-mode t)

;; Convenience keys
(global-set-key [f4] 'kill-this-buffer)
(global-set-key [f6] 'other-window)
(global-set-key [f7] 'delete-other-windows)

(find-file "~/")