Karol Krizka

I am a bit fan of the GNU/Emacs editor, and I use it for all my large scale development. One reason I like it is because of its ability to handle the formating, like automatic indentation and highlighting, of PHP files with the use of the php-mode package. However this package does not come with the default GNU/Emacs installation, so when I am using a public computer or editing the files directly on the web server, I do not get the comfort of that package. I cannot install it, because I do no have the write privileges to the default site-lisp file that contains all these packages. But luckily I can easily change the path site-lisp to another directory where I can place the needed file. I will provide step-by-step instructions on how to do this.

1. Download the php-mode package version 1.2.0
   
2. Create a new directory called site-lisp in the emacs.d directory located in your home directory. You can do that by issuing the following command:
   

   mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d/site-lisp

3. Install the php-mode package that you downloaded in step 1 by moving it to this directory.
   

   tar -xvzf php-mode-1.2.0.tgz
   mv php-mode.el ~/.emacs.d/site-lisp

4. Open the .emacs located in your home directory file using your favorite editor. This file contains all the definitions that are automatically loaded every time you start up emacs
   

   emacs ~/.emacs

5. Insert the following lines into the .emacs file. The first will append your newly created site-lisp directory to the list of directories that contain emacs packages. The rest of the lines associate PHP files with the php-mode package, so it is automatically loaded.
   

   (setq load-path (cons “~/.emacs.d/site-lisp” load-path))

   (autoload ‘php-mode “php-mode” “PHP editing mode” t)
   (add-to-list ‘auto-mode-alist ‘(”\\.php\\’” . php-mode))
   (add-to-list ‘auto-mode-alist ‘(”\\.php5\\’” . php-mode))
   (add-to-list ‘auto-mode-alist ‘(”\\.php4\\’” . php-mode))
   (add-to-list ‘auto-mode-alist ‘(”\\.php3\\’” . php-mode))