~mattyblog

Emacs config

I've been a long time user of the GNU Emacs text editor.

It truly is impressive what some people are able to accomplish in Emacs. I am a programmer, so I use it to write code. CIDER - an Emacs major mode used for writing clojure code - is one example of some of this very impressive work that I use regularly. Other people might use something like org-mode to manage their calendar, to-do list, and even create an entire Zettelkasten system for themselves. It is wild what you can do in Emacs. It is flexible enough to be a full on integrated development environment with something like CIDER while simultaneously being a true hypertext experience with something like org-mode and org-mode.

If you are just an average user like me and aren't writing major or minor modes for Emacs, or doing the whole Zettelkasten thing, you're probably still writing confiuration files to tell Emacs how to use libraries people have written. With the ability to configure your experience so heavly, users naturally do so. It can be very overwhelming to a new user, and it was for me for a long time. A lot of users of Emacs will share their configurations online and exchange notes on how to do things they want to do or how to mold the editor into a workflow that better works for them.

An Emacs user's configuration usually grows over time into a difficult to maintain mess. Not always - but it happens often enough that the Emacs user community has a running joke about declaring "bankruptcy" and starting their configuration over from scratch once it gets too unwieldly. I've one this multiple times myself. If you've survived multiple major versions of the editor like I have, then you'll naturally have a lot of spooky cobwebs in your config that you might want to clear out. It takes a lot of care to keep a configuation lean and modular. Sometimes you just want to get things done and non faff around in configuration.

I almost had the bankruptcy impulse this last week!! Instead of declaring full on bankruptcy and starting over I decided to make an effort to clean up my configuation, throw in a README file, and just put it online.

You can find my emacs configuration here. As usual with Emacs and user-configurations: my configuration is likely not to be very useful to you unless you happen to be me. README is still getting updated.