Karl Voit’s Emacs Configuration

Karl Voit is an expert on organizing and storing information. One of his basic building blocks is Emacs and Org mode. It’s interesting, therefore, to see the history of how he’s organized his Emacs configuration. If you follow the link you can see how he’s progressed from an unorganized linear list of miscellaneous setq’s and defun’s to an Org-based configuration.

The impetus for moving to Org for his configuration was the growing importance of comments in his init.el. You can, of course, add all the comments you want to init.el but they’re hard to maintain because they’re hard to reformat. With Org, you just add text as usual and Emacs takes care of the formatting. The actual Elisp is in code blocks, which aren’t affected by changes in the surrounding documentation.

His current Emacs configuration is a long Org document that you can peruse for ideas. As Voit says, you don’t want to just blindly grab his configuration because some of it depends on his particular machines and environment but it is useful to see how he’s solved certain problems and what tools he’s using.

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