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Comment by hereisdx | Hacker News Reader

Q. Would you mind sharing your Emacs configuration files?

Richard Stallman: Configuration files are personal and will not be shared.

This cracked me up! xD

EMACS was developed on ITS, a multi user timesharing operating system with no security. I developed a complex init file (in TECO of course) which was a compiled module in my home directory.

One day I changed something in an incompatible way and received complaints. Unbeknownst to me there was a community of people who linked (symlinked) directly to my init file and whose workflows were disrupted by my change.

Were there any interesting consequences? Like did you consequently avoid making disrupting changes to your own init file, or did people agree to make copies instead of rely on links?

It can be (consider that some Emacs power-users used to do most things in Emacs, including email, Usenet, etc.), but this reminded me of something...

Many years ago, some new founder I knew asked to see my elaborate .emacs file. I was reluctant, because it had some slightly sensitive info in it , as well as unreleased bits I might turn into packages. But he reassured me he just wanted to see how I'd done some things, to inform some non-Emacs thing he was about to build, and he'd keep it private.

Sometime later, one of the developers at his startup happened to mention that "everyone" uses my .emacs file.

Today, that person I let see my very personal .emacs has sold the original startup, and is CEO of a different business you've heard of, but I received nothing from the indiscretion. :)

> (consider that some Emacs power-users used to do most things in Emacs, including email, Usenet, etc.)

We still do. Consider that I have coordinates for weather in my .emacs, and yes, I should probably externalize that, but FFS, sharing my own incredibly personalized and personal configuration files was not first on my mind when I did that.

You want snippets, that will be useful to someone other than me? Fine. But there's no contradiction in arguing for openness in infrastructure and privacy in personal affairs.

Wow, send a bill to the company and ask them to renew their site license for the emacs config. Or opensource what you can of it and remove the competitive advantage they have.

As much as I'm a fan of Emacs, I don't think a .emacs file had much to do with that startup's success. He just wanted to see the UX and features that were possible for a particular purpose, for ideas and competitive analysis. But I did opensource a minority of the bits. :) https://www.neilvandyke.org/emacs/

Not unless the startup was Amazon, which used emacs as an application platform for all their customer support :)

Totally believeable. I had one research prototype that invoked an Emacs process for every Web CGI request. To get that kind of R&D rapid development productivity, I then had to start building out libraries for Scheme. :)

That one day when my emacs config is gonna give anyone a competitive advantage, Sasquatch is gonna get caught on camera grooming a unicorn.

Well, it could be a competitive advantage for your own company, if you share it with competitors.

We all know that configurable editors are a huge time sink ;-)

Are you swedish by any chance?

I simply separate user/machine specific things into separate files, and don’t commit them to public repository (https://github.com/alexott/emacs-configs - it wasn’t updated for a long time, and it needs to be rewritten to modern stuff - first line was written 25 years ago)... But this may allow sharing, and even contributions...

I take advantage of the fact that a .emacs file has higher precedence than a .emacs.d/init.el file for this. All the common stuff lives in the .emacs.d directory and is under source control. The little bit of work/machine specific stuff I have goes in the .emacs file, which wraps a

    (load "~/.emacs.d/init")

My home machines don't need anything special, so there's no .emacs file and the .emacs.d/init.el file just gets loaded directly.

Folks sharing conf files are the reason I was able to switch to linux on desktop (i3wm).

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