Alright, so I’ve been messing around with my dotfiles setup again, specifically trying to decide between Purcell and Bublik for managing my Emacs packages. It’s been a bit of a journey, so I figured I’d share my experience.
I started with Purcell. I liked the idea of having a simple, declarative configuration. I followed the instructions, and copied and pasted some of the example configurations. And I had a new configuration in my `*` file.
Installed all the packages I usually use, that was easy, just added them to the `*` file with their configurations, and when Emacs started, automatically installed those packages.
But, after everything was set up, and I’m actually writing code, I noticed a bit of lag, sometimes Emacs freeze a bit, and my fans go brrrrrr, and that was strange. The CPU was highly used by Emacs, and I was not liking that.
So, I did some digging online and found some folks talking about Bublik. The main selling point seemed to be its focus on performance, which sounded pretty good after my Purcell experience.
I decided to give Bublik a shot. The setup was a little different, I downloaded the project with `git clone`, and copied some of the configurations from the examples folder, they had a nice structure.
It felt a little more involved than Purcell, but not overly complicated. I basically went through the same process of listing out my packages and their configurations, just in a slightly different format within Bublik’s structure.
Once I had everything set up, the difference was noticeable. Emacs felt snappier, for sure. I didn’t experience those weird hangs and slowdowns I was getting before. Opening files, switching buffers, even just typing – everything felt smoother.
So, yeah, I’m sticking with Bublik for now. While Purcell was appealing for its initial simplicity, Bublik’s performance improvements are just too good to ignore. It’s made my Emacs experience much more enjoyable, and I can actually focus on coding instead of wrestling with my editor.
