dotfiles VS spiralweb

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.

Literate Programming is one of those ideas I keep coming to. There is an idea there that touches on something I find to be true about software development, namely that the communication of an idea to other humans is the most critical piece. There is a similar idea in Naur's paper "Programming as Theory Building."

That said, I've never loved the LaTeX-centric nature of most tools. I don't like heavier markup systems while I am writing prose, which is why I wrote SpiralWeb (https://github.com/michaeljmcd/spiralweb) as a Pandoc/Markdown centric tool.