Emacs Hacks

I used to use Emacs for everything. My Emacs configuration was so large and took so long to load that I wrote a package called desire.el to help manage it. Over time my configuration grew to about 100 files, about 3000 lines and over 700KB.

At some point my mailer of choice, VM, stopped reading MIME messages properly. When I checked for updates I found it had become unmaintained, acquired a new maintainer but still had problems. I decided to make a change and switched to Claws Mail. It is very good and after 18 months I'm about as productive as I used to be in VM. Yes, I'm a traitor... but I can still edit messages in Emacs... :-)

After some time I looked through my Emacs configuration. Although I had many third-party extensions installed, some were now included in Emacs and, of the others, I only used 1 or 2. So I removed the extensions I no longer use. Then I cut my configuration down to less than 200 lines, all contained in a single .emacs file.

One thing to note is that I no longer use any of the hacks below. Some of them I had never used. For example, the Eiffel mode was something I hacked from existing code for use at a university where I worked. I continued to maintain it for a few years.

Feel free to use this stuff... although you should note that it is all unmaintained. I could delete it but much of it is linked to from various places and there might still be people who use it...