As I start to add more packages and customizations to my emacs configuration, it would be a good idea to have a plan for organizing things to keep it manageable. Funnily enough, there is a package called use-package that seems like it will be useful in this endeavor, so let’s use it.

First, you can read more about use-package at its Github repository, this reddit thread, or this blog post. The main advantages of use-package for my purposes are:

• the :ensure keyword automatically installs packages (replaces my ensure-package function)
• it helps centralize configuration related to each package
• it can defer executing code for packages which are only needed in certain modes

The last two are not such a concern yet, but will be useful in the future.

I have refactored the init.el file from before. You can see the new contents below (with comments), or just download the raw file.

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;; setup for requiring and installing packages

(require 'cl)
(require 'package)

;; add extra ELPA archives
(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("melpa" . "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/") t)

;; initialize package system
(package-initialize)

;; get list of packages if not present
(unless package-archive-contents
  (package-refresh-contents))

;; make sure use-package is installed (we'll use it to install other packages)
(unless (package-installed-p 'use-package)
  (package-install 'use-package))

;; make use-package available
(require 'use-package)


;; set up individual packages

;; evil-mode
(use-package evil
  :ensure evil
  :config
  (progn (evil-mode 1)))

;; monokai theme
(use-package monokai-theme
  :ensure monokai-theme
  :config
  (progn (load-theme 'monokai t)))


;; set up interface customizations

;; keybindings:

(define-key key-translation-map [?\C-h] [?\C-?])
(global-set-key (kbd "M-h") 'help-command)

;; GUI settings:

(tool-bar-mode -1)
(menu-bar-mode -1)

I got rid of ensure-package and made some changes based on the Stack Overflow question here. It makes sense to me for updating packages to be manually invoked, so we can think of our process as: for a new system with no packages (and no package-archive-contents), we first fetch the list of packages, install use-package, and use use-package to install and configure our other packages; in normal use, our packages are already installed and use-package configures them. When we want to add a package, just add (use-package <package> ...) to our config file and let use-package install it for us.

For upgrading packages, it may make sense to have a function to do everything necessary (I haven’t looking into what that would be) that I can invoke in one step. Alternatively, I could just nuke ~/.emacs.d/elpa/ — (not-so-)instant upgrade!