When I was configuring Emacs over the summer and into last academic
year, a process that I completed long ago and haven’t gone back to aside
from the occasional snippet documented on this blog, I always did it
manually, downloading elisp into my ~/.emacs.d/
folder. There is an
Emacs package management system, yup an elisp version of apt-get
, that
is actually going to come with Emacs 24 with an official GNU
repository
which sounds great because it’s no longer as transitory as the
independently-run system seemed. The main advantage is that it would
actually keep my packages up to date rather than being miles behind as
my code currently is.
When Emacs 24 finally comes out it might be worth switching to this (as
well as el-get
which generalises the approach, according to comments
on the blog post I just linked to) but I don’t know if it will be worth
the effort. My Emacs setup works perfectly for what I use it for, and I
don’t use most of the packages I have installed very often anyway and
should probably have a clear out, but again, this would require a lot of
time and I’m not sure it’s worth it at all. It works fine and so I
probably shouldn’t mess with anything.