Spring Cleaning Your .emacs.d

A good practice is to ditch your existing .emacs.d/init.el every now and then. Start over with a fresh file and add back the stuff you really need, when you need it.

• Make sure you know what every line you put in init.el actually does.
• Reassess your keybindings. Which do you need for everyday use? I had a pretty elaborate Spacemacs-inspired setup where every command I could think of was tied to a chord under the C-c prefix. But that was overkill. I start notmuch maybe once a day, and easy-jekyll once a month. Maybe they don’t need dedicated keybingings? On the other hand, I’ve found that I want to access recent files almost constantly, so it makes sense to bind it to something like C-c f r.
• In the same vein, think about what modules you are actually using. I kept including yasnippet-snippets for the longest time because I was using yasnippet anyway and wouldn’t it be nice to have this huge library of snippets created by strangers on the internet? Turns out those strangers always had different opinions of coding style than me and I wasn’t using their snippets at all.

• This is a good opportunity to look for new things to incorporate in your workflow. The Emacs ecosystem is pretty vibrant, and new interesting ideas keep popping up. This is what I’m playing around with right now:

  • Inspired by Protesilaos Stavrou, I’m testing out selectrum and consult instead of ivy and consul, and I like it so far. The idea is to use independent modules that work together by hooking into already existing Emacs APIs instead of building new abstractions on top of the stack.
  • I was a long-time company-mode user, but I’ve dropped it in favor of Emacs’s native completion-at-point system, at least for the time being.
  • projectile is great and all, but I recently discovered that Emacs actually has its own built-in project management system, called project.el, which covers my (very limited) use case. I mostly need to open a file or switch to a buffer in the same project, or close all open buffers belonging to a project. So it turns out I don’t actually need projectile?