I don't really understand your comment.

What are you doing with emacs.d that requires a burdensome level of effort to keep it "up to date"? What does that even mean? I've been using Emacs almost 10 years, and I very infrequently modify my emacs.d, and I don't know many people who do. Sure, I could spend a lot of time tweaking it and messing around with it, but it'd be an entirely self inflicted thing, and not the fault of Emacs. I could spend all day fiddling with .vimrc, or the Visual Studio settings, too.

I also don't understand the what you mean by "the level of effort required for each project" in the context of Emacs. What "project"s are you talking about?

How much effort do you have to put in to keep your .emacs.d up to date ?

I only started using emacs in emacs 22, so I haven't had to keep things working for 5-10 major releases like I'm sure some people have, but my init.el and .emacs.d have been pretty static the whole time.

Do you follow @melpa_emacs on twitter? Packages are not static by a loooooong shot. I am mainly interested in using emacs for Python, Org-mode, JS, HTML. In terms of years of use, I am on year three or so... but I like to keep my shit on lock. My biggest mistake was trying Pycharm. Now I constantly compare Emacs to Pycharm... and it just doesn't compare.

I build my emacs from trunk every ~1-3 months for No Good Reason (tm), and I scarcely ever have anything in my own configuration (init.el, custom.el, various random things I've installed in ~/.emacs.d) break.

(I also edit python in emacs regularly, not sure what's changed in the last N years)

if you don't need the features or bug fixes don't upgrade. You simply have status anxiety

I just use emacs-live (https://github.com/overtone/emacs-live) with a few tweaks (https://github.com/jamii/emacs-live-packs) so most of the work is done by someone else.

Same with vim, if you add every fantastic and absolutely necessary tweak you read on the blogs, you get somethin much slower than eclipse in a week.

> Same with vim, if you add every fantastic and absolutely necessary tweak you read on the blogs, you get somethin much slower than eclipse in a week.

I am not sure what you mean by "every tweak" but fwiw:

    $ ls ~/.vim/bundle | wc -l 
    45

    $ wc -l ~/.vimrc 
    401 /home/rahul/.vimrc


    $ vim --startuptime vim.log

    $ ruby -ne 'print if 2..7 or $. == 151' vim.log

    times in msec
    clock   self+sourced   self:  sourced script
    clock   elapsed:              other lines

    000.810  000.810: --- VIM STARTING ---
    217.536  000.003: --- VIM STARTED ---

> you get somethin much slower than eclipse in a week.

In a week? 6 years and counting.

I just use Elpa, cross my fingers, and try not to tweak or memorize too many things. I am rather happy like that.