May I recommend declaring bankruptcy from time to time

Configuration bankruptcy is someting of a meme in the Emacs community, to the point where there is a dedicated wiki page describing the phenomenon. As a fully-programmable text editor, Emacs configuration tends toward spaghetti over time, at least for many users (including myself). And for many of us, the only remedy for an unintelligible, slow, and tangled Emacs configuration is wiping the whole file and starting again. I admit that I can be a perfectionist in some things. I also, for some reason, enjoy configuring Emacs, so I tend to tinker with it in my spare time. As a result, I’ve declared .emacs bankruptcy somewhat more than the average bear: when I finally stopped counting, I’d made it up to 12 or 13. A few years ago—either because I got busier with work, got less interested in perfecting my setup, had a child, or whatever—my Emacs configuration more-or-less calcified. I had a custom macro for installing packages and grouping their configuration; I had plenty of custom…