Changing .spacemacs

Let me walk you through getting a fresh install of spacemacs to writing your first blog post.

1. Follow the these instructions to download spacemacs
   • For me, I went to the Spacemacs GitHub page and followed the instructions for homebrew.

2. Open spacemacs or your text editor of choice

   • This step is pretty simple right? We have to edit some text, so we open our favorite text editor

3. Open your ~/.spacemacs file

   • This is where your settings live

4. Find the bit of code that looks like this: If it doesn’t exist already, go ahead and just add this yourself.

   dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
   '(
      ;; Lots of stuff in this set of parentheses
    )
   

5. Add the following snippet of code anywhere inside of the parentheses

   (org :variables
        org-enable-github-support t
        org-export-with-toc       nil)
   

   After you add that in, assuming you did it at the end of whatever is already there, it should look like this:

   dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
   '(
       ;; Lots of stuff in this set of parentheses
       (org :variables
            org-enable-github-support t
            org-export-with-toc       nil)
   )
   

   So three things that I know of are happening here. The line that starts with (org says, “Add org-mode as a mode I can use in Emacs”. The github-support line says, “Let me export the file in the way Github likes it”. Finally, the export-with-toc says, “Don’t include a table of contents in any file I export”.

   There’s one more line we need to add before this works though.

6. Find this line of code or add it yourself:

   dotspacemacs-additional-packages '()
   

7. In the parentheses, add this bit of text

   ox-gfm
   

   This is a package that lets Org-mode export to GitHub Flavored Markdown, on top of all of the other formats it can already handle.

8. Save your file

   • In evil mode, that would be SPC f s.

9. Reload the init file

   • In evil mode, that would be SPC f e R

That’s all folks!