mebubo

Config files. Encapsulation of knowledge.

I am a control freak. I like control. I like automation. That’s why I try as much as possible to use software with human-editable config files. I store those files in a git repository. Thanks to it, I’m able to keep my settings in sync across all the machines I use. And the time it takes to setup a new machine is minutes, not hours.

I suppose you could call this approach — human-editable config files, scripts that automate tasks — an encapsulation of knowledge.

You are faced with a software-configuration-related problem: how do I make some piece of software behave the way I want? It might take you hours of googling and reading manuals, but once you’ve figured it out, you should be done. Provided that you were able to formalize your solution in a form of a config file or a script, you will never have to revisit the same problem, ever! All the knowledge you need sits right there in a file in your git repository.

And as long as the configuration is in a human-editable format, you will be able to extend it in the future, but you’ll never have to remember how to do exactly the same thing if you already did it once.

That is of course almost impossible with GUI-based configuration tools. There, you just have to go through the pain again, again and again. Eclipse IDE is a good example, that’s why I hate its approach to configuration with passion.

Some software like the Chromium browser tries to solve this problem by auto-synchronization of the (GUI-configured) settings across all instances of the application, but that is clearly not enough. I want a common system that works for everything that I use, not some special mechanism for every piece of software. And I want more control and flexibility! Chromium for example does not allow me to have slightly different settings for home and work. For software such as Emacs I can easily achieve that using a condition on the hostname in my config file or using git branches and merging to maintain several slightly different versions.

That is why the only piece of my Chromium configuration I feel confident about (the only one that is in a configuration file that I myself put there) is the user style sheet to display Gmail in monospace font. Everything else is handled by Chromium; it is not in the repo, it is out of my control, so I might have to repeat it one day.

The opposite of that is my Emacs configuration. It is all there, always ready to be extended, but never — to be repeated.