Re: OT: version control of .el files in NT Emacs

[Óscar Fuentes]

Sivaram Neelakantan <nsivaram.net@gmail.com> writes:

>> You probably noticed that you need to adjust the load-path. A robust way
>> of doing that is to put in your_el_repo/emacs.el :
>>
>> (add-to-list 'load-path (file-name-directory load-file-name))
>>
>> It is also is useful to put this
>>
>> (setq user-init-file load-file-name)
>>
>> at the beginning of your emacs.el file in your_el_repo. Look up the
>> docstring for the user-init-file variable to see why.
>>
>
> How does this help?  Because I have just 2 lines in the $HOME/.emacs

If you always use absolute paths and don't plan to change them, not
much, other than noise. The lines I suggested makes possible to move
your files to another directory requiring only a change to $HOME/.emacs.

And by not setting user-init-file some features will try to
inspect/modify $HOME/.emacs instead of your_el_repo/emacs.el.

> (setq user-emacs-directory "c:/gnu/initfiles/.emacs.d/" )
> (load-file "c:/gnu/initfiles/.emacs")
>
> And in the c:/gnu/initfiles/.emacs file I hard coded paths like
>
> (load-file "c:/gnu/initfiles/.text_config.el")

Prepending those files with a dot is not a good idea. The dot means that
the files are hidden on most GNU/Linux file browsers and might confuse
some tools on windows, that expect file names to obey the name.extension
format.

Besides, load-file is an interactive function that calls `load'. With
my suggested adjustment to load-path you can simply use

(load "text_config.el")

or simply

(load "text_config")

which will also work if you ever decide to byte-compile your config files.

> I get it that .sh_history, .smex_history and other .history*
> files used/created by various packages will be still created in
> $HOME/.emacs but those are fairly transient stuff aren't they?

Yes, I don't care about those either.

One thing I do is to use a separate file for customizations:

(setq custom-file
  (concat (file-name-directory load-file-name) "customizations.el"))
(load custom-file 't)

If you use custom themes you probably want to set custom-theme-directory
too.