I’m using org-mode to write and maintain my Emacs(24) configuration. This is based on (and initially forked off) a fantastic idea by my friend Marius. The actual elisp is extracted from these files on startup by init.el, and the surrounding org-file structure of headers and text makes it really easy to comment and structure the setup well.
Note: See Marius’ original take at https://github.com/zmalltalker/dot-emacs for a more lengthy descripton of the why and how of this setup.
You’ll notice that this git repository doesn’t include any .el files, except init.el. In fact, you’ll find that .gitignore instructs Git to ignore several .el files.
The .emacs.d/extras directory contains libraries/functionality in org-mode files, which are compiled to elisp like this:
(setq org-custom-library-dir (expand-file-name "extras" dotfiles-dir)) (mapc #'org-babel-load-file (directory-files org-custom-library-dir t "\\.org$"))
This code will compile all .org files in the extras/ directory and load them into Emacs. After these files have been loaded, the same trick is applied to any .org files directly under ~/.emacs.d:
(mapc #'org-babel-load-file (directory-files dotfiles-dir t "\\.org$"))
- I start emacs, and it will by convention load ~/.emacs.d/init.el
- init.el will load org-mode
- init.el will call org-babel-load-file for any .org files in extras/
- init.el will call org-babel-load-file for any .org files in ~/.emacs.d. In fact, the file you’re reading right now will have a corresponding .el file.
- I treat thomanil.org as my main configuration file.
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