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.