Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences: Now Easier to Install

New in nerdery this week, it’s now a bit easier to install the Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences that I put together (based on lots of great work by Phil Hagelberg and, more recently, Eric Schulte). In the past, the fact that AucTeX was both necessary and had to be compiled locally made for some awkward steps in the installation. But AucTeX is now part of the new Emacs Package Manager, so it’s possible to install it automatically. I may end up doing this for Org-Mode, too. This just leaves ESS as the largest really important package that still needs to be bundled with the starter-kit. In the longer term, things look pretty good for the relationship between the starter-kit and the package system: the kit will specify which packages are needed, the package manager will install them automatically, and the kit will put some nice default settings in place.