Published 2024-11-01
tag(s): #emacs #replies
Via the Emacs subreddit, I found this post by James Cherti that contains a list of "Essential packages" for Emacs. The first word in the title caught my eye, but James' list of essentials is pretty big for my current inclinations.
This isn't the first time I tackle the topic of amount of external packages in the blog. I also have a bit of an ongoing saga[1] about moving away from completion frameworks and using Emacs' "vanilla" completion. It was a difficult change at first, but after re-framing the why and how to approach it, I find it is paying off.
Reading that post yesterday reminded me of some code I ran once to list the packages you have
installed. Back then, the biggest discovery for me was that I still had installed a bunch of
packages I had stopped using quite some time ago (or replaced with alternatives).
This time though, I was curious, how few third parties am I really using?
I found the original post by the excellent Manuel Uberti and ran the code again, here are the results:
Total packages: 15
• melpa (11): dired-narrow, markdown-mode, modus-themes, restclient,
sly, sly-quicklisp, use-package, ws-butler, json-snatcher,
json-mode, package-lint
• gnu (4): csv-mode, debbugs, org, vundo
So I guess I really am using more built-ins and less dependencies. Also I have no idea
what json-snatcher is, probably a dependency for another package?
One thing to note, I have a purgatory.el file that contains config blocks for
languages and features might use again, but don't need to now. For example, I have C# and Go
configs from previous jobs. Or a PlantUML setup.
If I kept those in the init file, my config would be a tad bigger and use more packages.
There is no conclusion. Reading the post yesterday made me curious about how many packages I use, and here we are :)