unpackaged.el VS emacs-config

The question is almost like asking a fish to describe water. It's the sudden lack of it that produces a really clear example. :)

Anyway, here's a random example that comes to mind: I have some sexps in a Lisp file and I want to sort them alphabetically. Each sexp (usually a top-level form, but not necessarily) usually spans multiple lines, so line-sorting won't do it. Since they may be top-level forms, there may be comments between them that would lose their context if their position relative to sexps were lost, so comments need to "stick to" sexps they're above.

How would you solve this in a random text editor?

In Emacs, I would develop a command that does what I need. At each stage of the development process, I evaluate the command's definition, and it's instantly available to be used and tested. I could even test the function on its own definition, if I wanted to be silly (undoing the sorting after testing, of course).

When I'm done, I save the command definition to my configuration, and it's now a permanent tool in my toolbox. I didn't have to recompile the editor and start a new process, nor did I have to submit a patch to an upstream and ask for it to be merged. Similarly to a carpenter (forgive me if it sounds silly), my editor is my workbench, and as wood is malleable, so is my editor.

So, here's the command I came up with (maybe not the prettiest implementation, but maybe not the worst): https://github.com/alphapapa/unpackaged.el#sort-sexps And using Emacs and Org mode, I publish it into this "unpackaged" package, which I then install into my configuration as a package, and other users can then easily install it into theirs, too.

I don't know of any other editor that can do all of this, certainly not so easily.

Here's the code in my Emacs config. I'll probably add these functions to unpackaged.el (the Org sorting function there is more primitive than these).

Sorting. This is handled within Org, see org-sort. However, you may find this function helpful for sorting recursively and with multiple methods (e.g. first by priority, then alphabetically): https://github.com/alphapapa/unpackaged.el#sort-tree-by-multiple-methods-at-once

The customize buffers can be used with the keyboard. You can tab between fields, and C-c C-c to set values. See also https://github.com/alphapapa/unpackaged.el#set-value-of-customization-option-at-point

block-undo. Have keyboard macros undo in a single step (something vi gets right!).

Installing that Embark key series implementation I mentioned above, to get extra actions for key series such binding them to a key or turning them into named keyboard macros.

Generally I recommend to maintain all personal code in the form of tiny but proper Elisp libraries. The config just glues everything together using use-package/setup/your-self-baked-macro. See also /u/oantolin's config which uses this style: https://github.com/oantolin/emacs-config. I cannot recommend this enough!

I have 3720 lines in my configuration. I try to write as much of it as tiny packages that I configure with use-package, just like I do for external packages. (I highly recommend this form of organization) Many of these are only useful to me, but some would be very reasonable to steal, like:

I have a slightly different take on this in my configuration, file shr-heading.el. In addition to imenu support I wanted next and previous heading navigation commands. It turns out you then get imenu support for free, since one way you can specify imenu entries is by providing a "goto previous imenu entry" function.

I wrote a small drag-region package once. You mark a region, turn on drag-region-mode and then your normal motion commands will drag the region along until you turn the minor mode off again. I never tested it with evil.

I'm very happy with ecomplete now, I mostly just need the completion and automatic storing of addresses I write to, as configured in your post. But occasionally I want to remove an address or manually add one, so I wrote a couple of commands to do that which I bind in embark-email-map to + (for adding) and \ (for removing). I don't think I've used these commands directly, always as Embark actions. When I want to add an email to ecomplete I usually have it written in some buffer already. And the command to remove an email I've only ever used from the ecomplete completion interface or from a message buffer after mistakenly having inserted it and realized that's an old address I'll never use again.

I keep some packages in a subdirectory my personal configuration and don't create a separate repo for them. (Also, not every file there is really a package that could be released: some don't follow proper naming conventions, or depend on details of my configuration).