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Comment by ParetoOptimal | Hacker News Reader

> Dont. Emacs is there to be tinkered with, and your cat will break it by simply looking at your keyboard.

Then you simply roll back to the working git commit of your emacs configuration or NixOS generation!

When I got cachix set up in Github CI with my custom emacs package that pre-builds and compiles my configuration including packges, I was as giddy as when I started programming. It's over-the-top, unnecessary, overkill, and an absolute blast. Stuff like this is the reason why I've gotten into this whole thing.

(Also, I think overengineering stuff like this is almost an outlet, which helps me stay pragmatic and goal-oriented at work)

I'm good enough at remembering to test my changes that I only need to resort to my backup of my emacs customizations 4 or 5 times a year.

(I test by starting a second emacs, so I can used the still-running first instance of emacs to fix the regressions.)

Same(-ish) here. Between git and emacs auto-save, I don't recall the last time my init file failed to load without being able to revert to a previous working version almost immediately.

Your Emacs configuration, embedded in your Nix configuration, is obviously tested by CI before being committed.

(mine certainly is, and I've also been using EXWM for 6-7 years or so, with few problems)

Cool. Can you show how you start an Emacs (i.e., what flags you use) to test whether init.el would load successfully next time an Emacs is started the normal way?

>or NixOS generation

Yes! NixOS is perfect for the author's situation. But maybe his setup is so simple that a little bash script could work just fine.

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