Re: Cool and Useful LISP for the .emacs file

[Rob Thorpe]

gareth.rees@pobox.com (Gareth Rees) wrote in message 
news:<e867ce6d.0311070327.4cd5decc@posting.google.com>...
> Dan Anderson wrote:
> > I was wondering what other people have in their .emacs file.  I would
> > like to challenge everyone to add at least one cool tip / trick to:
> 
> Here's my cool tip:
> 
>    Delete your .emacs!
> 
> This means that you can go to a new machine, run Emacs on it, and it
> works just the same as on your old machine!  No more confusion over
> non-default keybindings, unusual settings for variables, bizarre mode
> hooks, etc.  And when you find a problem you know it's really to do with
> Emacs and not with some "cool" trick you copied out of someone else's
> .emacs without understanding it.

I'm not so extreme.
I would say:

- Never use lisp code you don't understand
- Customize as little as you can possibly bear with
- Don't customize things because its cool
- Examine your .emacs code every few weeks, remove what isn't used.
- Remember everything that's in it.

For all my good intentions my biggest .emacs file is 80 lines long.