Installed Emacs evil. How do I start it?

Question

Just out of curiosity, I wanted to try emacs + evil. Here's what I've done so far:

• Installed emacs 24 on Windows 7 -- went well

• Created an .emacs file in C:\Users\name\AppData\Roaming\ (where .emacs.d ended up)

• Added the following to that .emacs file

    (setq package-archives '(("ELPA" . "http://tromey.com/elpa/")
                             ("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")
                             ("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/")))

• started emacs then M-x package-list-packages

• selected evil, evil-leader, evil-numbers with i then x to install

• restarted emacs

Evil shows as installed in package-list-packages and the evil files are present in .emacs.d\elpa, but evil doesn't seem to be loaded when I start emacs (No <N> in the status bar).

JUST starting with emacs. Not managing to get much out of it except for a lot of beeps. Want to start simple and use it for a few days before possibly moving forward with further extensions.

Mod

protip: you can change the location of .emacs.d. – Gladdy

Answer 1

You should add following s-expressions to your .emacs.

(package-initialize)
(evil-mode 1)        ;; enable evil-mode

Gora

Thank you. Worked perfectly. Afraid I had to drop emacs after just one night. Nothing against emacs, there's just too much outdated information on the net to filter through. After trying a half-dozen (worked for someone once-upon-a-time) "solutions" to a few problems, I gave up. The best thing about vim is that I already know how to use it. – Mod

@Mod As for getting used to Emacs, I would try to stick with the menu bar until you get used to the keyboard shortcuts. The menu bar always displays a keybinding if one exists, so you'll learn them by osmosis, so to speak. There is a steep getting-it-functional learning curve involved with Emacs, but once you get over that -- it's a breeze. – Gladdy

Emacs has an abundance of fully up-to-date documentation contained within it. You don't need to resort to "outdated information on the net". Not to discount the learning curve -- it's still lengthy -- but absence of good relevant documentation is really not a problem that Emacs suffers from. – Khufu

+1 @Khufu I believe that Emacs documentation could have guided us. Could you give me some pointers or where/how to look for such issues? As beginners we would love to hear from you. – Gilletta

vijiboy: (1) In general... the in-built tutorial (C-h t) is very valuable for newcomers, and the well-indexed Info manuals (C-h i) are always a sensible place to look. Take good note of the notes at the top of the Info directory. Once you know how to use the Info reader (including the indexes and full-text isearch), you'll have taken some solid steps towards learning how to learn Emacs. – Khufu

(2) For some specific library such as Evil, I would typically either use M-x find-library to read the Commentary in the code comments towards the top of the file (a standard place for documentation to live), or see if the package installed its own Info manual (I see that it does). – Khufu

To keep it clean @phils, I could make it a seperate question and mark your answer. let me know ... – Gilletta

Hello @lanza. I don't understand your comment. What it is that doesn't work for you? – Khufu