dotfiles VS emacs.d

Felt (still am, actually) this problem too. Started with the same approach (Vanilla Emacs) a few years back in order to really learn the ins-and-outs after giving DOOM and others a shot and feeling like I didn't have the faintest what was really going on with all the magic. I somehow did end up falling in love with Emacs again[^1].

Won't lie... there was a fair amount of cursing involved and, despite the love, I wouldn't recommend many to venture down this road[^2].

Now I have gone the literate config way in my dotfiles https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/tree/main/emacs and I jump between Cursor (vscode-based), Neovim and Emacs for different tasks on a daily. I also found dustinlyons/nixos-config (https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/module...) just a few days ago and figured that could be a fun resource when you're building yours up.

Take it as a hobby. There are a bunch of nice things that I picked up from Emacs (a. literate configs, b. comfort around working with LISPs, c. bigger appreciation for parts of the GNU ecosystem, d. more in-depth understanding of how my editor works which helps me debug issues in Neovim or vscode when I see them) but I still think that I'm cursed by wanting to go down this road so badly. Wish I could just vscode my way through live and build dope stuff, unencumbered.

1: Used Emacs heavily in college over 12 years ago when I would boot the Windows + Novell groupware school computers into my own Ubuntu config with my Emacs and embedded dev toolchain from my pendrive.

2: The single-threaded-ness and related ocassional unresponsiveness/hangups still grind my gears.

Word! I believe I'm in the literate config stage atm https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/blob/main/emacs/README.org but still have a fair amount of stuff in the WIP state or COMMENT-ed out because I broke stuff somehow. Which reminds me a bit of picture 1. 🙊🙈

TL;DR: I recently started refactoring up my home-manager nix config https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/tree/reorg-for-lit-prog and my Emacs config https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/tree/reorg-for-lit-prog/emacs into literate programs to aid my future self's understanding of whatever I'm cooking up so, feel free to sneek a peek how they end up looking. I also keep the output code in the same repo.

An alternative is to write a Nix wrapper for Emacs with the dependencies in PATH: https://github.com/akirak/emacs.d/blob/maint/flake.nix. Then I use nix run to start Emacs. I don't think this is recommended in this community, but it works for me.