Re: porting crufty old init.el to package management

[Fabrice Niessen]

Tom Roche wrote:
> I've been using emacs for ~20 years, during which I have
>
> 1. accumulated a functional but aesthetically- and
>    maintenance-challenged collection of {init.el, files it calls}
>
> 2. regularly bemoaned the lack of emacs package management
>
> The latter problem has been solved (non-uniquely :-) for awhile now,
> and I'm setting up a new box, so I really should port my emacs
> configuration to the new millenium. I'm wondering, would anyone care
> to recommend especially worthy docs for this process (guides, howto's,
> tutorials)? esp how best to accommodate snippets of elisp (gists?)

FWIW, you can put all your ELisp snippets in an Org file, and comment
them, their usage (key bindings), why you do (or don't do) some specific
stuff, etc.  That's LP (Literate Programming).

That big file (in my case) can be:

- Tangled ::
     Extract the source code blocks and generate *real working code*
     files for further compilation or execution, eventually outside of
     Emacs.

- Weaved ::
     *Export* the whole Org file as literate, *human-readable
     documentation* (generally in HTML or LaTeX).

That becomes an invaluable tool when you need to understand or extand
some part of your config file as, thanks to Org mode, you can focus on
a particular section (hiding all unnecessary ones), or even construct
a "sparse tree" of some function/variable name (that is, display a tree
where only the entries with a match are expanded, all others are
collapsed), and much more.

My example?  Follow http://www.pirilampo.org/emacs/dot-emacs.html [1].

Best regards,
Fabrice

[1] Website still in draft, though...

-- 
Fabrice Niessen
Leuven, Belgium
http://www.pirilampo.org/