Last week I saw this post by Case Duckworth about Emacs bankruptcy but this post isn’t really about Duckworth’s post. Rather, it’s about the whole notion of Emacs bankruptcy and whether it’s something we should embrace as a routine activity. Some writers view it as part of the cycle of our Emacs life and recommend it as a regular activity.
As I wrote last year, my init.el is an organic entity that grows and adapts as my needs change. Sometimes I delete configurations or packages that I no longer use but most often I add a configuration or package as my needs change or I learn something new. I’ve put a lot of work into evolving my configuration and I can’t think of any reason that I’d want to abandon all that work and start over. Much better to fix the parts that need fixing and save the parts that are working.
My configuration is by no means a carefully considered project that has grown according to some master plan. Rather, it has evolved to meet my changing needs and newfound knowledge. Sometimes there are experiments that don’t work out and when that happens, I simply delete the offending lines and keep going.
At no point have I ever felt the need to just quit and start over. That strikes me as crazy. It is, I suppose, an Emacs specific example of the urge to scrap an existing system and rewrite it. As Joel says, that always ends in tears.
The TL;DR is that I reject the idea of Emacs bankruptcy and think that in almost every case, you should too.