Untitled

Submitted by reeses on Tue, 2003-02-11 09:40.

I have this, well, huge emacs configuration I've carried around for years. It's about 22 megs uncompressed, runs on both Unix and Windows, and most recent versions of GNU Emacs. I first starting contributing to it around 1990, when I decided that I wasn't a vi person, (see Naggum's 'typical behavior of the "vi" editor' emulation) and it's grown a bit since. I have configs for every bloody Lisp variant I've used, apart from some such as Corman or DrScheme, that I didn't like enough to bother. I have all of the account information for every email system I've used in the last seven or eight years, from POP3 to S/IMAP, from VM to GNUS, all integrated with bbdb. I have every variety of aid in composing text, rivaling Word for over-the-shoulder advice and automatic correction, even querying Internet dictionary servers if available. I can, and do, use it to write code in Ruby, Python, C, C++, Objective-C, Java, Lisp, and XSLT, but not Smalltalk.

But I find myself...unhappy. I _like_ reading email in Outlook, and it's just...easier, given my Rube Goldberg backend, which obviates emacs's manly splitting capabilities. I like IDEA instead of JDE, because it finally brings Java development into the 1990s. Sure, emacs is fine for scripting languages, and stellar for Lisp, but I don't do either of those enough now for it to be that big a deal.

Oh, and I've started using vi again. vim has killer syntax highlighting for JavaCC files, something that IDEA and emacs both lack. The syntax is confusing enough, and my desire low enough, to rule out writing my own javacc-mode.

The more I move away from emacs, the more I think it's time to throw away the 20+ megs of .el files and start over with something that takes less than ten seconds to load on a 2.4GHz P4.

This may sound remarkable only for its banality, but it's causing me to reflect on the number of hours spent on various aspects of this configuration. A very small portion of it, perhaps ten thousand lines, were actually written by me. Another thousand, perhaps, that I wrote to configure and glue the various other modules together. But some of those chunks of code were written out of desperation, late at night, and not having any idea what I was doing. That's the nice thing about Lisp, by the way. Even idiots can get something written, provided they're persistent enough.

So, tomorrow, I archive the emacs-config.[zip|tar.gz], and start debugging the empty .emacs.

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