I have a long history with text editors and I have always been facinated with the different flavours of interfaces and capabilities. After working my way through ED and then VI Emacs was a bit of a revalation. I found myself idle for a few minutes this morning and thought I would do some editor maintenance and install haml-mode into my copy of Emacs. While surfing around I came across the Emacs Lisp Package Archive which made the installation a breeze and I then found myself installing all sorts of other additions that might be useful in the future.

ELPA installation instructions (copied from the ELPA site)

(let ((buffer (url-retrieve-synchronously
	       "http://tromey.com/elpa/package-install.el")))
  (save-excursion
    (set-buffer buffer)
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (re-search-forward "^$" nil 'move)
    (eval-region (point) (point-max))
    (kill-buffer (current-buffer))))

Paste the code into a scratch buffer, and then execute the code in the buffer. Once complete run the package-list-packages command. In the packages buffer ā€˜iā€™ marks an entry for installation and ā€˜xā€™ installs the marked packages.