Vim Emacs Vimacs
Scott Rippee @ 11:27 pm September 30th, 2006I’m a big fan of being able to walk up to a random computer pull up vim and know what I’m going to get. I am not a fan of loading up emacs on a box to finding that half of the keybindings that I am use to are not setup, indentation that I would have never conceived as useful being used, and a color scheme in place that could make me become sick. Now I’m minutes away from a useful environment with the config hacking and inet seraches for the name of that option that needs to be changed.
All of that… emacs can wash the dishes and… emacs will water the lawn and… emacs will scratch your back becomes worthless when your configuration is whiped or you on a different machine running a vanilla emacs setup and don’t have time to download and load the back scratcher module.
Want emacs to be usefull at all times on all computers? Consider an emacs that interacts with a web service to determin your config settings, language packs, what extensions you use and their settings, what elisp code needs to be imported, and if emacs its self needs to be updated. Imagine this web service has an account for you where you constructed or uploaded your emacs configuration and selected from a mix of options and extensions that you want in your emacs environment. Imagine that you sit at a random box and emacs M-x load-config user@mail.com and it connects to this web service and configures itself based on the configuration and packages you have set up on the web site. Maybe you have no web access but you’ve exported to a usb key and now emacs is building your custom environment based on the data its finding on that key.
I believe this may be worth creating, but there are many things to consider. I belive we are going to see more and more applications that set / retore their settings and behavior based on central configuration net services.
More on this stuff later…