allen hansrisuk

Doom Emacs (Learning How to Use a Computer Again)

Being familiar with Vim keybinds, Doom Emacs seemed the obvious choice for a client in order to engage with Org Mode. After spending a considerable amount of time in Doom Emacs, I wanted to see what it would take to get Doom Emacs working for React/Typescript development. Luckily, not much.

The goal was not to make it exactly like VS Code but enable type checking, code, completion, and auto imports.

Config Files - init.el

In addition to the packages enabled by default. These also needed to be enabled by uncommenting the package names in init.el:

• company
• (format +onsave)
• vterm
• lsp
• magit
• json
• javascript
• web

Run the sync command in your terminal and restart Emacs to download and install the new packages.

$ doom sync

You can look through my current Doom Emacs dotfiles here

Installing vterm

In order to compile vterm, you'll need Cmake, libtool, and libtool-bin. It turns out that the libtool-bin executable is not included in the libtool package so you'll have to install it seperately.

$ sudo apt install cmake libtool libtool-bin

End Result

You can now open up a terminal window in Doom Emacs. My preferred method is to open it in my active buffer as opposed to the pop up window with the keybind:

SPC o T

You should now have code completion suggestions courtesy of company and lsp. Although, you may have to initialize lsp in your buffer:

M-x lsp

If you have ESLint installed, you'll start to see the code annotations, type errors, warnings, and more in your buffer. If the error is actionable such as:

Cannot find name 'myFunction'

you can utilize the command

lsp-execute-code-action (SPC c a) 

to automatically import the function.