---
title: Emacs Sharing
url: https://www.grahambrooks.com/post/2013-07-25-emacs-sharing/
date: 2013-07-25T00:00:00+00:00
author: Graham Brooks
tags:
- developer-tools
---

# Emacs Sharing

I like Emacs. Some people like VI(M) but emacs has been in my toolbox for a long time and I feel very at home working with it.

Updating the editor has become easier over the years and installing an update is a simple matter of drag and on my Mac. But I use several computers and keeping each in sync with my current favorite settings was becoming a problem.

I recently came up with the idea of using Dropbox to share a single configuration file set for all the computers I use. 

My current setup has all my configuration in an emacs Dropbox folder named emacs. The Dropbox client runs in the background syncing file changes. First I moved my local personal settings into the shared folder

	ls -la ~/Dropbox/emacs
	total 8
	drwxr-xr-x   6 graham  staff   204 Jul 24 15:24 .
	drwx------@ 79 graham  staff  2686 Jul 25 19:38 ..
	-rw-r--r--   1 graham  staff  2974 Jul 23 23:11 .emacs
	drwxr-xr-x  22 graham  staff   748 Jul 24 15:24 .emacs.d
    drwxr-xr-x   9 graham  staff   306 Jul 24 09:51 .xemacs

Next I created symbolic links from my home folder to these new files.

	➜~  ls -la
	...
	lrwxr-xr-x    1 graham  staff      34 Jul 24 21:30 .emacs -> /Users/graham/Dropbox/emacs/.emacs
	lrwxr-xr-x    1 graham  staff      36 Jul 24 21:31 .emacs.d -> /Users/graham/Dropbox/emacs/.emacs.d
	-rwlrwxr-xr-x 1 graham  staff      35 Jul 24 21:30 .xemacs -> /Users/graham/Dropbox/emacs/.xemacs


Once this change has been made on each computer that I use or on a new
machine I get a consistent emacs experience. When I get bored with a
particular UI theme and make a change that change gets replicated so I
have the same settings everywhere.