A discussion the other night suggested that I’m quite unusual among geeks in doing vanishingly little customisation of my system – most of my systems have something very close to their default configuration, individual programs are usually at most a very few tweaks away from their upstream settings.
For Emacs all I tend to do is install revbufs, set Linux mode by default for C and turn on syntax highlighting and line number mode (sometimes the last two only get done when I start Emacs). For vim it’s just configuring a 72 column word wrap if my main use for vi on the system will be writing e-mail. For GNOME it’s putting a terminal launcher in one of the panels and setting focus follows mouse. All very trivial stuff done in five minutes.
The theory here is partly that I just can’t be bothered to spend more time on tweaking things (and the subsequent carrying around of those tweaks) and partly that it ensures that I’m not confused when I end up using a new system or someone else’s for whatever reason. I find it somewhat odd that this would be something you’d want to spend any time on.
Over the years I’ve been trying to minimize the delta of my config from the defaults. Focus follows mouse, terminal launcher on the gnome panel, keyboard shortcut to launch new terminals, reduced keyboard repeat delay to 250ms — trivial stuff. Plus several subversion repositories storing assorted scripts in ~/bin, some dotfiles, and my vim config. Not so trivial, I guess.
Why not use (global-auto-revert-mode 1) instead of revbufs?
Mostly because revbufs predates that, I think, though I’ll need to check it out – there may be some other negatives.