Prelude is an Emacs distribution that aims to enhance the default Emacs experience. Prelude alters a lot of the default settings, bundles a plethora of additional packages and adds its own core library to the mix. The final product offers an easy to use Emacs configuration for Emacs newcomers and lots of additional power for Emacs power users.

Prelude is compatible ONLY with GNU Emacs 25.1+. In general you're advised to always run Prelude with the latest Emacs - currently 26.1.

You can support the development of Prelude via PayPal, Salt, Patreon and Liberapay.

Assuming you're using an Unix-like OS (*BSD, GNU/Linux, macOS, Solaris, etc), you already have Emacs 24.4+ installed, as well as git & curl you can skip the whole manual and just type in your favorite shell the following command:

curl -L https://git.io/epre | sh

You can now power up your Emacs, sit back and enjoy Prelude, forgetting about the rest of this manual.

There are two environment variables you can use to control the source repository and the installation directory. To change the installation directory:

export PRELUDE_INSTALL_DIR="$HOME/.emacs.d" && curl -L https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/raw/master/utils/installer.sh | sh

To change the source repository:

export PRELUDE_URL="https://github.com/yourname/prelude.git" && curl -L https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/raw/master/utils/installer.sh | sh

Note that the installer will back up any existing .emacs file or .emacs.d since it will unpack Prelude's code in .emacs.d. If you're doing a manual install make sure you don't have a .emacs file or back up your existing .emacs.d directory manually.

Don't forget to adjust your prelude-modules.el file in your personal directory once the installation is done. By default most of the modules that ship with Prelude are not loaded.

Check out our user manual for more information.

Check out the project's issue list a list of unresolved issues. By the way - feel free to fix any of them and send me a pull request. :-)

Support is available via several channels:

• Prelude's Google Group [email protected]
• Prelude's Freenode channel (#prelude-emacs)
• Gitter

Here's a list of all the people who have contributed to the development of Emacs Prelude.

Bug reports and suggestions for improvements are always welcome. GitHub pull requests are even better! :-)

Cheers,
Bozhidar