Post #1377857

2026-04-18 14:36 UTC

Reading tecosaur's lovely 317-page Emacs config PDF at https://tecosaur.github.io/emacs-config/config.pdf gave me a case of literate config envy, so I spent the morning wrangling my #Emacs configuration into a slightly prettier PDF. It is 736 pages long and 12 MB in size. My table of contents takes up 15 pages. I still want to add lots of commentary, implement more LaTeX exports for my custom link types, and tweak the design some more, but at least it's there now. =) https://sachachua.com/dotemacs/index.pdf (although for some reason it doesn't like to load in Firefox...)

Replies (6)

@tusharhero@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-18 14:50

@sacha Publish it as a book!

Open ##1704841
@hmelman@mastodon.social 2026-04-18 15:30

@sacha If it works for you great, but a 700 page pdf is the last way I want to read code, particularly elisp. I want all the tools that emacs gives me, isearch, grep, xref, symbol-overlay, describe-variable/function, etc. Not having them feels crippling. And who wants pagination breaking up long blocks? My config is ~20 .el files, by topic, with plenty of comments, I find it more readable and certainly more... usable.

Open ##1704842
@trevdev@fosstodon.org 2026-04-18 15:47

@sacha I can't even tell you exactly what's in my init and its only a handful of package requires. A 12Mb init sounds gargantuan. Is the story of your whole life in there?

Open ##1704843
@mstempl@mastodon.social 2026-04-18 20:11

@sacha I can't open the link on my mobile (not that I plan to read it there) not sure why both firefox and chrome complain about a damaged pdf

Open ##1704844
@djm62@beige.party 2026-04-18 21:36

@sacha my init.org renders to a 25 page PDF, and I love that that makes me simultaneously irredeemably geeky and also at least one factor of ten away from the Real Ones

Open ##1704845
@donald_brady@mastodon.social 2026-04-19 04:37

@sacha OMG! Going to have to go through this for things I don’t know. Seriously impressive.

Open ##1704846