Emacs is not just an editor — it’s an extensible platform for crafting highly personalized development environments. With tools like company, yasnippet, lsp-mode and dap-mode, Emacs transforms into a feature-rich Python IDE capable of competing with PyCharm or VS Code.
This guide explores how to evolve Emacs into a robust Python IDE. Whether you’re writing simple scripts or managing large-scale projects, you’ll find a setup that aligns with your engineering needs and reflects the power of Emacs customization.
The purpose of this guide is to meticulously explore how Emacs can be transformed into a advanced Python IDE. This is not a universal manual intended for everyone — it is deeply tailored to my specific needs, preferences, and engineering rigor. Throughout this document, I aim to combine practical usability with transparent configuration, balancing power and simplicity.
This guide reflects my personal journey in creating an IDE that meets my own standards of excellence. Could Emacs be made “better”? Absolutely, because the concept of “better” is always contextual. Could someone else choose different tools than I did? Certainly. The tools I selected represent the choices I made based on my criteria and understanding, which I will detail throughout the guide.
At its core, this is a collection of my thoughts, experiments, and findings — a snapshot of my current understanding of how to make Emacs the ultimate Python development environment. While it may not suit everyone, I hope it inspires others to refine their workflows and explore the potential of Emacs as a highly customizable IDE.
A note on some conscious exclusions: I do not use use-package in my personal Emacs configuration and this guide. While it may be a popular choice in the Emacs community, I have not found it particularly valuable for my workflow. I manage my configuration manually, and this approach works perfectly for me. If you are a use-package user, you might need to adapt discussed configuration to fit your own setup — I leave this as an exercise for you.