Chris's Wiki :: blog/programming/EmacsBankruptcyInevitable
Recently I read Avoiding Emacs bankruptcy, with good financial habits (via). To badly summarize the article, it suggests avoiding third party packages and minimizing the amount of customization you do. As it happens, I have experience with more or less this approach, and in the end it didn't help. Because I built my old Emacs environment in the days before third party Emacs package management, it didn't include third party packages (although it may have had a few functions I'd gotten from other people). And by modern standards it wasn't all that customized, because I didn't go wildly rebinding keys or the like. Instead, I mostly did basic things like set indentation styles. But over the time from Emacs 18 to 2012, even that stuff stopped working. The whole experience has left me feeling that Emacs bankruptcy is inevitable over the longer term.
The elements pushing towards Emacs bankruptcy are relatively straightforward. First, Emacs wants personal customization in practice, so you will build up a .emacs for your current version of Emacs even if you don't use third party packages. Second, Emacs itself changes over time, or if you prefer the standard, built-in packages change over time to do things like handle indentation and mail reading better. This means that your customizations of them will need updating periodically. Third, the Emacs community changes over time in terms of what people support, talk about, recommend, and so on. If you use the community at all for help, guidance, and the like, what it will be able to help you with and what it will suggest will change over time, and thus so will what you want in your Emacs environment to go with it. Finally, both your options for third party packages and the third party packages themselves will change over time, again forcing you to make changes in your Emacs environment to compensate.
