Spring Cleaning

I am a person who loves having everything around him structured and minimal. Any sort of clutter makes me unable to concentrate and nervous.
For example:

I use a table in the children's room to work, when the kids are not there. If the bed is not made in that room … makes me itchy.
Every time I get a new phone or computer, the first thing I do is to delete and deinstall everything that I do not use (almost) daily.
Everything in my backpack has a place 🤭.

You get the picture, right?

Emacs users constantly pick up code snippets and ideas from other people. You try them, they look great at that moment and you take them over. Or you have a "problem", so you sit down and write some Elisp yourself. You all know it … So your configuration grows and grows and grows … until you yourself do not know why you have that code in there at all 🤪.

Other people declutter their houses, garages, gardens in spring … we Emacs users should clean our configurations to prevent bankruptcy.

I propose following rules for #EmacsSpringCleaning:

Have a good critical look at your Emacs configuration.
You see packages and configurations you used actively in the last week?
- Keep them. This is the important stuff that keeps your workflow going.
You have packages you didn't use the past month?
- Move them out to a separate archive file. If you use org to create your literate config, you can use the available archive mechanism.
- So it's not deleting, you are not loosing this. It's safely stored and if you ever need it in the future, you can move it back into the active configuration.

I intentionally left that time range between one week for (2) and one month for (3). Adjust your time range how it suites you, but in my case if I do not use something for a month … I usually do not need it.

The last couple of days I went thru my config and moved some packages (denote-menu, ytdl, plantuml etc.) out of my active configuration into a separate config.org_archive. These are all great packages, but if I do not actively use them … my minimalist mind want's them out of the way.
Have a lot at my config and join me in trying to make the rabbit hole shallower 😜.