Re: electric-pair, autopair, smartparens, etc in org-mode

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Eric S Fraga <esflists@gmail.com> writes:

> On Wednesday, 24 Oct 2018 at 12:38, Roland Everaert wrote:
>> Pleased to see it was helpful. The funny thing is that I use that config
>> for, maybe, 10 years and never think about changing it.
>
> I've been using emacs for well over 30 years now.  You would not believe the crud that has built up in my config files... ;-) :Q
>
> Mind you, with org, I have started rationalizing the config files but it's a time consuming task and the adage of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" has power...

+1

Likewise, started with Emacs 19 and I still have some code which I added
back then in my init!

I went through the pain of cleaning up my init file some time ago when I
moved to make better use of 'use-package'. Have to say that while things
were not 'broken' before my cleanup, they are certainly working better
now and my init is much smaller.

What I found was that a lot of what was in my init file was simply no
longer required as similar (often superior) functionality has crept into
the main Emacs distribution - all I needed to do was remove my code and
turn the feature on.

The two big benefits from the clean up have been much faster start up
(something which never really bothered me as I run emacs for weeks
without re-starting anyway) and far more predictable behaviour when I
try out or add a new mode (I often found my custom tweaks would not
always work well with new modes etc).

Org is extremely useful in this process. Create an org file and put all
your existing init in there as source blocks so that you can reproduce
your setup using tangle. Then create a new-init.org file and just add
the stuff you must have i.e. email config, essential modes etc. Then you
can switch between old and new setups using tangle to generate new
init.el file. When you have time, start with the new-init version and
start adding/tweaking to get the behaviour you want. Rather than just
copy across your old setup, check to see what is available in core - if
your like me, you will find lots of we use to tweak in code is now part
of core emacs and all you need to do is turn it on. At some point, you
will find you stay in your new init file and no longer need to revert to
the old version. You will likely find lots of stuff never gets
migrated. 

It really is worth the time and effort.

Tim

-- 
Tim Cross