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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T18:58:52+00:00

el-get goes a long way in helping achieve a portable emacs configuration setup. The

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el-get goes a long way in helping achieve a portable emacs configuration setup. The idea is to declare the packages you want in the emacs config file, push that file to a repo, and pull it on all the computers where you want an identical emacs configuration. This is how the code might look in elisp: 

(setq my-packages (append '(el-get switch-window yasnippet ...)
    (mapcar 'el-get-source-name el-get-sources)))                  
(el-get 'sync my-packages)

el-get will make sure that the packages get automatically installed and properly initialized. However, my understanding is that when you dereference a package, it doesn’t get uninstalled. And if you uninstall it manually, you’ll have to do it across all the computers, also manually. In other words, el-get goes only half the way in achieving a truly portable solution. My question is if anybody has written elisp code that will uninstall the packages just by dereferencing them in init.el? Or whether I should look elsewhere for a fully portable declarative dependency management solution for emacs?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You should use el-get in conjunction with some form of version control. That provides the portability, so that when you remove a package and commit the result to your repository, the package will also be uninstalled for the other instances once they have pulled those changes.

    If you are leaving the package files to el-get to manage, then those files may still exist on the other copies after the package is removed from one instance but, provided that el-get’s status and autoload files are in your repo, I think the state of each package should be correct.

    Personally, I recommend committing all files to your repository after installing a package. That way when you remove a package, commit the changes, and pull those changes from another instance, both copies are in the same state.

    Moreover, I would never trust the availability, consistency, or permanence of a remote source when it comes to setting up a new instance of my Emacs configuration — the act of cloning my repository is all that should be required to obtain a working system.

    So: use el-get for installing and updating packages, and use version control to make it portable.

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