WARNING: THIS GIST IS OUT OF DATE AND NO LONGER RELEVANT
- Native-comp was enabled by default in nixpgks
- Pgtk is not enabled by default, for that you can either override the derivation or use emacsPgtk from the nix-community emacs overlay if you don't want to build it yourself
Add the nix-community overlay to your nixpkgs. You can add the following to your configuration.nix (NixOS, non-user specific) or to your home-manager's home.nix. Note in the case of the latter, this will not be available for installation via nix-env.
{
nixpkgs.overlays = [
(import (builtins.fetchTarball {
url = https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay/archive/master.tar.gz;
}))
];
}See nixos or home-manager options for more information on adding overlays.
echo "import (builtins.fetchTarball {
url = https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay/archive/master.tar.gz;
})" >> $HOME/.config/nixpkgs/overlays/emacs.nixAs this package is installed via an overlay, it is not built by the Hydra CI/CD pipeline that underlies nixpkgs. Instead, the binary is built by the nix-community hydra and pushed to Cachix. Follow the instructions here to add the nix-community cachix.
nix-env -iA cachix -f https://cachix.org/api/v1/install
cachix use nix-communityYou will need to ensure that you are are installing the emacs overlay from the nixos-unstable unstable channel, not the nixpkgs-unstable channel. If you are using home-manager, you will need to set your default channel to nixos-unstable (you can do this on non-NixOS systems, the difference is that nixos-unstable lags behind nixpkgs-unstable due to requiring more comprehensive tests before deployment). Alternatively, you can separately import nixos-unstable import <nixos-unstable> { overlays = [ overlay1 overlay2 ]; } separately, and use a separate channel specifically for emacs.
If you followed option 2, the following will work.
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.emacsGccMore likely, you will want to declaratively install in your configuration.nix or home.nix.
Home-manager provides a handy module, you can also add extra packages such as vterm.
{
programs.emacs = {
enable = true;
package = pkgs.emacsGcc;
extraPackages = (epkgs: [ epkgs.vterm ] );
};
}Alternatively you can add something like the following to you configuration.nix system packages
{
emacsWithPackages = (pkgs.emacsPackagesGen pkgs.emacsGcc).emacsWithPackages (epkgs: ([epkgs.vterm]));
}As of 2020-08-03 the above works on fedora/ubuntu/debian and under NixOS. If you get an immediate segfault upon starting emacs, please ensure that your font is appropriately configured.
@mjlbach Thanks for this! I have a question on using Cachix, though. The gist says:
I'm not entirely sure I get what this means. Does that mean running
nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-unstable nixosor is there some configuration you can do in home-manager? I tried looking through the readme for home-manager, but couldn't find anything obvious there.The gist also mentions you can
import <nixos-unstable>and use overlays there, but I'm afraid I don't know how I'd do that either. Could you elaborate on how to do that?Aside from Cachix, everything works great. But having to unexpectedly rebuild Emacs when just wanting to change some configuration settings can be an annoyance 🤷