portia VS dotfiles

For the record, I wrote portia[0], based on funnelweb and which accept a (mostly) compatible syntax, in a literate style. Its source/doc can be browsed [1].

I still use it from time to time, especially for small, well defined projects, because I find it useful to have to argue with myself when designing a software. It's not so much about producing a nice documentation or a proper exposition of some idea, than it is about having to formulate all the reasoning, the alternatives, and the choices.

[0]: https://github.com/rixed/portia

Heh, I recently did a "clean sweep" of my .emacs files (inspired by the new support for `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/config/emacs/init.el` in 27.1) and something like 90% of it was workarounds (some dating back to the late 1990s, for example a "vertical-motion-fix" for something that was fixed in emacs 19.29)

I definitely recommend doing some form of "dotfile bankruptcy" every 20 years or so :-)

(I also ended up doing a crude "load-file-literate" so that now most of my elisp is actually markdown, inspired by https://github.com/skx/dotfiles )

I keep meaning to explore using org-mode for this. At the moment I have a trivial init.el which loads a literate markdown file init.md.

I keep meaning to experiment with bable/tangle in Emacs.

I setup a simple literate configuration of my init file via markdown, which worked out really well, but doing it "properly" in org-mode would be a nice evolution.

With markdown I just search for code-blocks, write them all sequentially to a temporary buffer and evaluate once done. So it is very simplistic, but also being able to write and group things is useful:

https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.md

~/.emacs.d/init.el the helper, which loads/executes it.