Setting up Emacs for Ruby Programming

How to Set Up Emacs for Ruby Programming in Seconds

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This is a short note how you can set up your Emacs editor for programming in Ruby within seconds.

The settings for your emacs is explained in detail this blog here.

I personally in my Ubuntu Linux home folder created a folder named emacs to put there all kind of settings for my emacs. Here, I create a folder for ruby in this folder and enter it:

$ mkdir -p ~/emacs/ruby
$ cd ~/emacs/ruby

Then, I git clone a folder containing the init.el file with all necessary settings for ruby programming by:

$ git clone https://github.com/worace/emacs-for-ruby

And now comes the step and knowledge which took most of the time to find it out:

Usually emacs people do something like

$ mv ~/.emacs.d ~/.emacs.d.orig
$ mv ~/some_settings_folder ~/.emacs.d

And later have to name the renamed folders back. This is quite error prone.

A better solution is to start your emacs by:

$ env HOME=$HOME/emacs/ruby/emacs-for-ruby emacs &

This defines the folder containing the init.el for emacs as $HOME for the command emacs &. The disadvantage however is, if you call system commands from within your script using absolute paths or paths requiring your actual $HOME.

The advantage however is that you don’t have to rename folders which can mess things up a lot.

Since I want to call emacs for ruby programming by the command $ ruem (for rubyemacs), I add to my ~/.bashrc file:

alias rubyemacs="env HOME=$HOME/emacs/ruby/emacs-for-ruby emacs &"
alias ruem="rubyemacs"

And source the ~/.bashrc, and can call my emacs with ruby settings by:

$ ruem

In my particular case, since I have my emacs locally installed in a conda envrionment named emacs, I entered into my ~/.bashrc:

alias rubyemacs="source activate emacs && env HOME=$HOME/emacs/ruby/emacs-for-ruby emacs &"
alias ruem="rubyemacs"

This activates first the conda environment by source activate emacs (or conda activate emacs, before it calls emacs with the newly defined $HOME.

The init.el file of emacs-for-ruby takes care of all necessary installations in emacs’ site.