Doom gccemacs on MacOS

The first time I saw Emacs was on the ThinkPad of my Master Thesis' supervisor. He was coding in R and he had split the screen in two parts, writing code to the left, evaluating it to see the results in the REPL on the right. I was impressed by it, my setup at the time consisted of Jupyter Notebooks for exploration, Visual Studio to write LaTeX, Pycharm to debug and deploy batch jobs to the VM.

Little did I know that 2 years later I would have integrated my worfklow into one editor, the very same one he was using. Another colleague of mine was using Emacs and when pair programming with him I was again struck by his workflow and some of the features of its editor. One weekend, almost joking, I downloaded vanilla Emacs and I followed the tutorial.

Maaan, these weird keybindings. Now I know that Emacs has been developed before the Common User Access guidelines were designed. Its philoshopy allows the user to change keybindings to whatever you expect from it but it won't suggest it to you!

Of course I did not know how easy it would be to configure cua-mode in case I wanted standard s-x, s-v bindings to copy and paste. However, on the same day I discovered that a popular alternative to the vanillla keybindings was the so-called evil-mode. The power of vim's modal editing and the expressivity of the lisp machine.

Very soon I learned about Emacs "distributions" or "starter kits". The most popular is Spacemacs: it comes configured with all the "cool" packages, among them evil-mode. I then spent weeks learning about Spacemacs, Emacs and emacs-lisp.

I will have to write another blog post to celebrate all my achievements with Emacs. This one will just bedicated to the configuration of it.

Some of Spacemacs qualities:

• Spacemacs is well documented and perfect for a first Emacs user.
• It is a community effort, things movest fast. Maybe too fast, looking at the number of open issues.
• It is feature complete. Maybe too complete, someone would argue it is slow.
• It abstracts away much of the complexity of Emacs. Maybe a bit too much, I would sometimes learn Spacemacs specific terminology but not so much elisp.

Beacuse I am curios, I decided to try the second most popular Emacs distribution: Doom (I am still not amused by the name). Here some of its qualities:

• Doom is not a comunity effort like Spacemacs but is mantained by one person, very active and helpful.
• There is a great community of users on Discord, helpful and respectful.
• It is modular and completely configurable. The default configuration for the available modules is always well thought.
• It is carefully designed with performance in mind.
• It is much closer to the elisp metal. It offers cool macros to rebind keys, to install packages, etc.

Thanks to Doom I started to configure my editor and not just to rely on other people's modules. I finally learned to inspect Emacs by describing functions and variables. I learned about modes, hooks, advices. I wrote some simple elisp functions to add features I needed. Here you can see an HTML render of my config.

The Doom Emacs community is active on Discord, here is where I hear about the latest trends. Lately (August 2020) the latest trend has definitely been gccemacs. This is a development branch of Emacs HEAD which compiled elisp code to native code, bringing huge performance benefits.

Emacs is often accused of being slow compared to modern editors. The dynamic nature of the elisp machine makes it by nature slower than the compiled counterparts. This clever solution has gained popularity lately, so much that it has been announced it will be merged into master.

During these COVID times our team is working from home. My work laptop is a dual core MacBook Pro, which has some performance issues when I am screen sharing and programming with Emacs. One day I decided I had to try it. It was worth it.

I used this repo to build Emacs 28, feature/native-comp branch. After cloning it, I first had to install a patched gcc version:

./install-patched-gcc

I had some installation issues which were solved by updating to the latest Apple's Command Line Tools. You can do that with:

xcode-select --install

Once gcc was installed, I could build Emacs 28 with:

./build-emacs-for-macos --git-sha 3023eb569213a3dd5183640f6e322acd00ea536a feature/native-comp

You should pick a recent git sha by looking at this issue which tracks "good commits" that lead to stable versions.

I then replaced my previous Emacs.app with the one just built. Maybe that won't work for everybody, it depends how you installed Emacs27. My previous installation was this tap of emacs-plus:

brew tap d12frosted/emacs-plus

And this are the install options:

brew install emacs-plus --without-spacemacs-icon --HEAD --with-emacs-27-branch --with-jansson --with-modern-icon

Doom Emacs already unofficially kind of supports gccemacs. I just replaced my Emacs.app with the new one and had to run:

doom sync && doom build

And wait for the compilation jobs to finish.

Once that was done I faced a few issues, which were not exactly well documented. After running a second doom sync my Emacs failed to start with an error about some misteryous magit variable. I found the solution on Discord: the guilty is a compiled autoloads file:

rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/local/cache/eln/x86_64-apple-darwin19.5.0-8b26f6d2e293e8b6/autoloads*.eln

Another important remark: Emacs 28 is unstable and some packages don't support it yet. My workflow relies heavily on two packages: emacs-jupyter and dap-mode. Both of them were broken after the update.

When I tried to run emacs-jupyter in an .org file I was asked to download the zmq module, to which I agreed. But then the installation broke because of a missing file. I found the solution on a remote github issue: I had to change the extension of the downloaded .so file:

cd ~/.emacs.d/.local/straight/build/emacs-zmq
cp emacs-zmq.so emacs-zmq.dylib

To fix dap-mode I had to unpin few packages to enable the support of Emacs 28. In fact, Doom locks pacakges to specific versions to make sure nothing breaks on the stable version (Emacs 27). All I had to do was to write:

(unpin! dap-mode lsp-mode treemacs)

In my .doom.d/packages.el.

I hope some early adopter can find this blog post and solve some of his installation/configuration issues with these solutions!