They say that being an academic (and especially a PhD student) makes it more likely for people to become occasionally depressed. I guess it’s true: the phantom of the thesis, the research that isn’t going anywhere, and colleagues that are always smarter – there’s always something. I had one of those terrible days today. I came back home planning to pack my things, drop out and leave this dark and rainy country, but then I thought: let me play a little bit with my Emacs config and we’ll see if it makes me feel any better.

As a matter of fact it only made things worse. My .emacs and .emacs.d were in terrible shape. Lots of chaotically placed files and elisp functions that I amassed during the years made me feel so sad that I even tried a trial of TextMate. Though initially impressed, I quickly realized how bad¹ TextMate is in comparison with The Editor, and I started looking for a way to easily tweak my .emacs.d and not kill anyone while doing it.

What I found is an Emacs Starter Kit by Kieran Healy. Apparently there are many other starter kits out there, but I started cloning this particular one and found it very nice. All the config files are actually org documents (sic!) which makes reading the configuration a pleasure. The kit comes bundled with many useful modes that I didn’t know before, like YASnippet or Pandoc, and is very easy to customize because of perfect documentation². I backed up my old configuration, copied only the most important keyboard shortcuts and minor tweaks – to my big surprise there were only a few of those – and had a brand new, well documented and ordered Emacs configuration in a breeze.

So if you ever feel depressed and want to give up on that whole PhD thing, try changing your Emacs configuration first.

Update: After trying to find how to change some behavior of certain modes, I reverted to my old configuration. Still, spending some time with Emacs is a good way to impreove one’s mood.