I spent a bit of time switching my spacemacs config in to a Literate configuration style.
Why?
I use spacemacsa lot. For coding, for writing, for work, for organisation, for my personal knowledge management. It’s central to to most of my day-to-day activities on my computer. I’ve been using for maybe 4 years now, and have built up quite a mess of a configuration file with various tweaks over the years.
Given how much I use it, it seems sensible to give a bit of TLC to this configuration. I’ve tried to comment it as I’ve tweaked it, but it still has gotten messy. I’ve learned and copied a lot from other people’s configs, so endeavouring to make my own readable to others seems like a good thing to do.
I’m also just keen to try out org-babel for some literate coding, and this is an easy way in to doing that.
What I did
Here’s what I’ve done to get started on this.
File reorganisation
First off, I put my existing .spacemacs file into a folder structure where you can split it up into multiple files.
Again, check that everything still works fine afterwards.
Move config into an org file and set up tangling on it
The section on Converting your existing config files in Literature Configuration was really helpful for this. It recommends a great path for moving things incrementally to the literate configuration. Essentially you start off with one huge source block, and gradually split that up in to smaller blocks with org-babel-demarcate-block.
I did that, putting each new source block in to a logical org heading, and adding a bit of description and narrative around them. Each time I split out a new bit, I ran org-babel-tangle to check things were still working.
I have the following config properties at the top of the file:
which says for all the elisp source blocks in this file, combine them together in to user-config.el when I tangle the file. And also include my narrative as comments.
So my user-config is now literally all in My Spacemacs User Config here in my wiki. As in, that is the file that I use to generate my .spacemacs/user-config.el that spacemacs runs. (The source is here.)
I like it, and think it works pretty well for config files. I’m going to try it on my org-roam config next.
Spiderwiki: "Spiders appear to offload cognitive tasks to their webs, making them one of a number of species with a mind that isn’t fully confined within the head."
I’m slowly rambling towards a regular writing practice of some kind. Thinking about a regular digital gardening practice and going to try and follow along with the Collector to Creator course.
Taken together, these two historical moments can help us imagine new ways to organize information that threaten the capitalist status quo— above all, by facilitating the wide circulation of the ideas of the oppressed.
In Capital is Dead, really liked reading Wark say how that to understand the current informatics-based forces of production, comrades with technical knowledge are needed to collaborate with those with the theoretical knowledge. I feel like I sit in the space between theoretical and technical where I could have something useful to contribute here.
I kind of see something like Ton’s public sharing of the details of his PKM as part of a body of artifacts for the Hacker class. That perhaps sounds a bit grandiose, but hey if Vectoralism is about appropriation of knowledge work and commodification of information, then open descriptions and sharing of how we do knowledge work without Vectoralist class tools is a small counter to that.
