Emacs Config Gems - Part 3

My actual configs start with pretty usual stuff you’d see across many other Emacs configs. As I was going through these however, I started to wonder how things work and why they ended up the way we have them today. In turn, that led to reading about the intention behind those, which led to more options I didn’t think about. Also, it’s kind of fun. I’ve made two more passes for this part alone in the last couple of weeks, and I could probably go for a third. When reading this post, if you want the good stuff (in my opinion), get lost in the footnotes as I did. There’s a lot to explore. I just scratched the surface. Load Melpa Melpa is where many Emacs packages live. The story behind it (from what I can tell) revolves around one of Emacs’ maintainers, Bozhidar Batsov, who pointed to Melpa at some point in 2012, when Emacs’s then go-to third-party package repository went offline. He is not its creator — Melpa has been around before this post — but this seems to be the turning point where…