My last Red Meat Friday rant was about the desire for minimal Emacs configurations on the part of some people and how I didn’t understand what they were perusing. Sebastián Monía, a frequent Irreal commenter, has his own take on the matter that he wrote about on his blog. He makes the case for a minimal configuration but at the end of the day, I don’t think we disagree.
He lays out why he prefers to use builtin functionality when he can. But the thing is, no one is arguing against that. I, too, prefer to stay in vanilla Emacs and add third party packages only when they provide something missing from the default install. That’s why several of the third party packages I’ve installed have since been moved to core: they fulfill a real need. Monía says that his configuration is about 1,700 lines. After more than 17 years with essentially no culling, mine is less than 2,500 lines including comments and code that I’ve commented out “just in case” I might need it later.
Both of us, I think, add packages only when they provide something new that can help with our workflow. As I said in my original post, I spent many years with just vanilla Emacs before I started adding any packages.
The desire to keep our configurations as simple as possible is different from seeking a minimal configuration for its own sake. You can tell the difference by the way people talk about it. If they say, “My configuration is less than X lines” or “My configuration is too long at Y lines” that’s probably a sign that they think a small configuration is a good thing per se.
Of course, it’s not a mortal sin to want a minimal configuration. It’s just, as I said before, that I don’t understand what the people pursuing it are after.