Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has a new way of managing his Emacs configuration. As you can guess from the above title, it’s a literate document based on Org-mode code blocks. He has a video up explaining his new configuation and how it works.
You’re probably yawning and thinking, “So what? Prot discovered literate programming.” But that’s not the case. His previous configuration was also literate but depended upon Org to load it and execute the code blocks. That’s the normal strategy. It has the advantage of having only a single file used both for coding and execution: you don’t have to worry about source and target files getting out of sync.
The problem was that Prot’s configuration is quite lengthy and caused Emacs to load slowly. For me, and maybe for you, that’s not a problem because I don’t start Emacs very often—it’s always running. But Prot does a lot of Emacs package development so he is always restarting it and the long startup time starts to add up.
For various reasons explained in the video, he didn’t want to give up his literate configuration so he changed it to tangle the code blocks into various module files. The result is a single Org file that builds a complex but modular system of configuration files.
Having everything is a single Org file makes it easy to export. Here it is from his Web site. It’s still a work in progress but you can see how valuable it is for understanding his configuration.
The video is just shy of 25 minutes so you’ll have to schedule some time but it’s a nice video and worth your time.