My Top Emacs Packages

30 May 2024

If you ask anyone what the best Emacs packages are, you’ll almost definitely hear Magit (the only Git porcelain worth using) and Org Mode (a way to organize anything and everything in plain text) listed as #1 and #2. And they’re right! I use those packages extensively every day.

Besides those two powerhouses, there are a handful of packages that make using Emacs a delight. If I had to ever use something else, I would miss these packages most:

• Avy

  Jump around your screen crazy fast. Teleport to any character with ~5 key strokes. See https://karthinks.com/software/avy-can-do-anything/ for more reasons why it’s awesome. I almost exclusively rely on avy-goto-char-timer and have it bound to s-j.

• Embark

  Kind of like a super-charged right-click for Emacs. Works beautifully in dired, when selecting files in the minibuffer. There’s an easy way to make it play well with Avy which is just the best.

• Eat

  Eat is a terminal emulator that’s faster almost all the other terminal emulators for Emacs. The only emulator it’s not faster than is Vterm, which is pretty dang speedy. Eat has been more than fast enough for all my needs however. Additionally, it can make a terminal emulator in a particular region, so if you use Eshell, you can get a little terminal emulator for every command you run. Normally, if you run, say, cal, you see the ugly terminal escape characters printed as text. With Eat, however, those terminal escape characters get interpreted correctly. Interactive programs (e.g. the Julia and Elixir REPLs) work flawlessly with it.

• Jinx

  Best spellchecking ever. It can spellcheck based off of the fontlock face; I keep this on when I program to get on-the-fly spellchecking of code comments and strings. I keep jinx-correct bound to C-; à la flyspell because it is so darn helpful. Supports checking documents with mixed languages. This is one of the packages I miss most when I’m editing text outside of Emacs.

• Citar

  The best way to add citations in Emacs, hands-down. Reads bibtex, inserts in org-mode, LaTeX, whatever.

User interface enhancement #

These next packages are all by Daniel Mendler. These packages improve selecting commands, buffers, files, etc. from the completing-read and completion-at-point interfaces. These make Emacs insanely ergonomic and excellent.

These replace packages like Helm, Ivy/Counsel/Swiper, and Company. In comparison to these packages, Vertico + Consult + Corfu are lighter-weight, faster, less buggy (in my experience; I’ve tried them all!), and work better with other Emacs packages because they follow the default built-in APIs.

• Vertico

  Lighter-weight, less buggy vertical completing-read interface. Replaces Ivy. Incredibly flexible. Works out-of-the-box with everything that has a completing-read interface, so you don’t need special *-ivy packages to make it play nice. Recommend adding Marginalia as well by the same author to add extra infos.

• Consult

  Better than counsel. The live preview is amazing; I use consult-buffer instead of switch-to-buffer, consult-line instead of Swiper. consult-ripgrep is :fire: for searching large projects with instant previewable results. Pairs well with Embark to save results to a buffer.

• Corfu

  Lightweight pop-up library. Pairs well with Cape by the same author.

See also Orderless which enhances everything from M-x to consult-line to the Corfu popup. Vertico + Consult + Orderless + Marginalia + Corfu + Cape + Embark is sometimes called the “minad stack”. Embark and Orderless are both developed by Omar Camarena (oantolin) who frequently collaborates with Daniel Mendler. When I asked Omar on Reddit about the name, Omar replied that “minad stack” is fine; another name they’ve tried for the stack is “iceberg”, which I think is a good name too. It’s the new hotness—that said, it’s gotten really really stable over the past two years.

If you like these packages, consider sponsoring their maintainers! These are some of my favorite open-source projects and I try to support them when I can.

A starter kit built on these #

If you like these packages, you might like my Emacs Bedrock starter kit which, unlike many other starter kits, is meant to be a no-nonsense no-fluff no-abstraction bare-bones start for you to fork and tinker with to your liking. The stock configuration only installs one package (which-key, which is amazing) but includes some extra example configuration. The extras/base.el file includes sample starter configuration for most of the above packages. (I should add eat to it, come to think of it…)

Errata #

• Eat is not the fastest terminal emulator, Vterm is. Thanks to a Redditor who pointed this out.