Starter Kit Package Manager

Since emacs version 24, elisp code can be downloaded, installed and loaded almost automatically with package.el. There are still some discussions on how to use it properly (see B. Batsov article for example). In this file, we use the "usual" way through ELPA for most of the packages to be installed. Nevertheless, we also define some el-get command to install some packages a bit oldy and not supported by any ELPA repository.

Checking internet connection

If there is no internet connection then no way to use any of the package managers. This should not work under Windows system since it does not have the network-interface-list function

(defun starter-kit-elpa-online ()
  "Check internet connectivity."
  (if (and (functionp 'network-interface-list)
           (network-interface-list))
      (some (lambda (iface) (unless (equal "lo" (car iface))
                         (member 'up (first (last (network-interface-info
                                                   (car iface)))))))
            (network-interface-list)) t))

`el-get`

el-get allows you to install and manage elisp code for Emacs. It supports lots of differents types of sources and is able to install them, update them and remove them, but more importantly it will init them for you. The next pieces of code are largely inspired by this article.

Checking `el-get`

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/el-get/el-get")
(unless (require 'el-get nil t)
  (with-current-buffer
      (url-retrieve-synchronously
       "https://raw.github.com/dimitri/el-get/master/el-get-install.el")
    (end-of-buffer)
    (eval-print-last-sexp)))

Setup packages

(setq el-get-sources
     '((:name cask
        :description "Emacs dependency management"
        :type github
        :pkgname "cask/cask")
       (:name pallet
        :description "A package management tool for Emacs, built on Cask"
        :type github
        :pkgname "rdallasgray/pallet")
       (:name trac-wiki
        :description "Simple but efficient interface to Trac."
        :type github
        :pkgname "tiborsimko/trac-wiki-el")
       (:name emacs-deferred
        :description "Facilities to manage asynchronous tasks."
        :type github
        :pkgname "kiwanami/emacs-deferred")
       (:name inertial-scroll
        :description "Soft mouse scrolling."
        :type github
        :pkgname "kiwanami/emacs-inertial-scroll")
       )
     )

Install packages

(mapc (lambda (f)
        (let ((name (plist-get f :name)))
          (when (not (require name nil t)) (el-get-install name)))) el-get-sources)

Starter Kit Package Manager