.emacs Refinancing (or creating the base of an Emacs config)

Whether to Declare Bankruptcy or to Refinance

In the Emacs community, there is something called .emacs bankruptcy, which is when your init file gets too large and cumbersome that you need start over from scratch. As someone who tends to love messing with config files a little too much, I knew that I would eventually run into this if I started really using Emacs. That is why, when I really started to use Emacs, started with a literate config file in org-mode and used use-package for configuration.

It works really well, but after several years, I started to realize it was beginning to fill with cruft, my startup time seemed to be increasing, and I was running into some random issues. I have also learned a bit more about Emacs since I started, so I figured it was time to take another look at things and see what I could improve.

I didn’t want to declare “bankruptcy”, as there are still many things I want to keep, but there were some parts I knew that I needed to clean up. So I decided to “refinance” – instead of starting over, I wanted to keep the core of what I had, and repay some of the “technical debt” I had built up. I started a new org file and copied over some of my “base” settings and packages. I also decided to start only with basic Emacs stuff, no language setup. I went through the documentation of everything, removed things I thought were unnecessary, put everything I could into use-package, and then wrote what it does and why I was using it.

basemacs

After working on it for a while and seeing some posts on r/emacs asking how to build your own config like doom or spacemacs, I figured someone could get some use out of this besides me. Thus, basemacs was born.

I’ve tried to keep it as unopinionated as possible, it sets some sane defaults and uses a minimal set of (but what I would consider essential) packages like magit, company, flycheck, and which-key. It’s still a work in progress: I should probably add some better documentation/description for things, I am considering adding modules, and there are probably some other things I could include and improve. But there it is, maybe someone will find it useful.