jmax - John’s customizations to maximize Emacs

This project is not under active development. Up-to-date version available at https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax.

Try it you might like it. These customizations have been compiled and derived from prelude and the emacs24-starterkit, and my own emacs hackery.

Installation

1. Change to a directory you want.
2. Clone the repository like this. It will create a new directory called jmax in the current directory.

git clone https://github.com/jkitchin/jmax.git

1. Run this command in a terminal:

emacs -q -l jmax/init.el

This will load the emacs on your path, without using whatever you have defined in .emacs.d.

The first time you run this, a lot of packages will be downloaded into the elpa folder inside jmax. This takes a few minutes. You might have to restart emacs.

Windows users

Install git (http://git-scm.com/download/win). Open a git bash terminal. Run this command.

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jkitchin/jmax/master/install-jmax-win.sh)"

There is an emacs binary in this repository for Windows. You should be able to run the jmax.sh command to launch jmax now.

Mac users

Run the next command in your terminal in the location you want to install jmax. The command will make sure you have homebrew, git, and emacs installed, and then will clone jmax and tell you how to use it. It will take some time to install.

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jkitchin/jmax/master/install-jmax-mac.sh)"

Alternative manual installation of jmax for Mac users

Alternatively, you can install homebrew yourself, install git from http://git-scm.com/download/mac, build your emacs like this:

brew install emacs --with-gnutls --with-imagemagick --with-librsvg --with-x11 --use-git-head --HEAD --with-cocoa

This got me:

(emacs-version)

Enthought Canopy has a Mac version of Python that I like.

and MacTeX from http://www.tug.org/mactex if you plan to export org-mode files to LaTeX and convert them to PDF files.

After that, I clone jmax as described above, and use the jmax-mac.sh script to open emacs configured to use jmax.

Linux users

Run this command. It checks for a git and emacs, but does not install them. You will have to use your package manager for that.

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jkitchin/jmax/master/install-jmax-linux.sh)"

Other software you probably need

1. Python https://www.enthought.com/products/canopy/ (Windows, Mac and Linux)
2. LaTeX https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc.html (Windows, Linux) (Mac)
3. git Windows Mac Linux
4. Any other languages that will be used, e.g., Ruby, R, Matlab, compilers, etc…

For some LaTeX packages installed in jmax, you need to add them to your LaTeX path. For TeXlive distributions, do something like this:

tlmgr conf texmf TEXMFHOME "~/Dropbox/kitchingroup/jmax/texmf"

Spell checking on windows

Install aspell http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/w32/Aspell-0-50-3-3-Setup.exe and this dictionary http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/w32/Aspell-en-0.50-2-3.exe.

In your init file:

;; set i(a)spell options on different machines
(setq ispell-personal-dictionary (concat starter-kit-dir "user/.ispell"))

;; adjust this path if it is not where aspell got installed
(setq-default ispell-program-name "C:/Program Files/Aspell/bin/aspell.exe")

Customization

These files contain variables with paths specific to your computer. You probably need to change them.

To set the variables for our org-bibliography functionality you can run: M-x customize-group org-ref

As an alternative, put these variables into a .el file in the user directory. You will want to modify them for your needs of course. Here is some of what I have in a file in user/jkitchin.el.

(setq reftex-default-bibliography '("~/Dropbox/bibliography/references.bib"))

;; see org-ref.el for use of these variables
(setq org-ref-bibliography-notes "~/Dropbox/bibliography/notes.org"
      org-ref-default-bibliography '("~/Dropbox/bibliography/references.bib")
      org-ref-pdf-directory "~/Dropbox/bibliography/bibtex-pdfs/")

;;Tell the program who you are and setup for email
(setq user-full-name "John Kitchin"
      andrewid "jkitchin"
      user-mail-address "jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu"
      ;; specify how email is sent
      send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it
      ;; used in message mode
      message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it
      smtpmail-smtp-server "smtp.andrew.cmu.edu"
      smtpmail-smtp-service 587)

What do these files do?

file:jmax.el does most of the setup that is not related to org-mode. It provides some useful functions. The ones I use the most are get-path, and insert-relative-path.

jmax-org.el is responsible for how we customize org-mode to work for us.

Scientific manuscript preparation

See ./examples for many examples of preparing scientific manuscripts for submission to ACS, APS, Elsevier and Springer journals.

We have a pretty decent way of handling citations and references provided by org-ref/org-ref.org. This file sets up how bibtex keys are made and provides a lot of new links for org-mode for citations, references, labels, and bibliography files.

See this example for the basics examples/technical-documents-in-org.org.

If you are a student at CMU, you may appreciate:

• Writing your MS report in org-mode ox-cmu-ms-report.el
• Writing your PhD qualifier or proposal in org-mode file:ox-cmu-qualifier.el
• Writing your PhD dissertation in org-mode ox-cmu-dissertation.el

Create standalone org-archives

Ever wanted to package up an org-file and all the figures, files and directories it references so you can email it to someone? Check out ox-archive.el.

Handy email functions

email.el provides functions to email a region, or an org-heading conveniently.