Re: Moving my init.el to Org

[Thorsten Jolitz <tjolitz@gmail.com>]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl> writes:

> so the time has come.  Either I'll declare .emacs bankruptcy soon, or
> I'll use Org-mode to structure it.
>
> I googled for a while, but couldn't find what I'm looking for: a list
> of options with hints (or links to hints) about how to get started, and
> possibly their pros and cons.
>
> I know that I could use org-babel-load-file, or outshine.  What are
> other possibilities?  What are the caveats (and advantages) of both
> (other?) ways?

I'm obviously very biased (as outshine author), but the reason outshine
exists is that I became frustrated with my init.org. It was a definite
improvement over my former .emacs though, without any Org like
structure, but with a strong tendency towards chaos and anarchy ... ;)

With outshine I have many of Org-mode's advantages (and using outorg I
can turn my elisp file into an org file in a second and have all of
them), but its still just about a source-file in emacs-lisp-mode, and
thats what makes things convenient, fast and dynamic.

This is a typical use-case where the source-code is (much) more
important than the text - I almost never go to my init.el to read my
comments in there, I always go there to find and modify elisp code, and
that should be as quick and easy as possible, with no intermediate steps
like calling special-edit-buffers or tangling, and no possible confusion
and out-of-sync problems between .el and .org versions of the same file.

OTOH, when you consider your init-file as a kind of complex publication
to be shared with others, like e.g. Bernt Hansen's famous tutorial, then
the text becomes more important and it will feel more natural to keep
your configurations in a text-mode like org-mode.

Just my 2c

-- 
cheers,
Thorsten