If you don’t use Emacs, you can safely skip this post. If you’re curious, checking out my files is probably a bad place to start; I’ll make a post sometime about all the “starter kits” I’ve discovered and pilfered ideas from.
I don’t know if I have anything super awesome in my configuration (yet) that actual Emacs users would want to check out, but hey, here’s what I’ve got. You’ll notice there’s an insane amount of comments in there. By my last count, the file “old .emacs” contained 1207 lines. Without comments, it only had 239 lines of code. The main benefit is that it’s really, really easy to read through (for me, anyway). I can go a couple months without looking at the files and still understand why a certain snippet is there. I’ve linked to the source for a lot of things (80 character line limit be damned), too. I’ve got sort of a hierarchy going on with the number of semi-colons in a given comment line - five for the introduction of a section, three for the introduction of a paragraph explaining something, and one for each line thereafter.
Oh, and 80 semi-colons surrounding every conceptual section. They’re kind of hard to miss.
Something that may be new to you: I learned about electric-buffer-list yesterday, which I don’t think anyone ever uses, but it’s enough of a marginal improvement over the default buffer-list command that I mapped it to C-x C-b. And, hey, it supports the same buffer highlighting as the original buffer-menu (you only have to modify a single line). But of course, this being Emacs, you also have the option of BufferMenuPlus, if you like.
It’s not meticulously organized just yet… There’s mostly no rhyme or reason to the ordering of a given file. I’m planning a big revamp johnw’s use-package soon, and just generally getting things organized in a clear way. I haven’t actually used org-mode yet, but I’m starting to itch for hyperlinks within/between my files - I may very well take advantage of org-babel and base a new version off of it. I could even have a table of contents for a given file, which would be nice for other people who you don’t know what to search for.
Hyperlinks in a text file. Yay, Emacs!