I was thinking the same thing. I use spacemacs and have moved to about 5 laptops over the last five years. Just bring along the .spacemacs files and any supporting tools like ripgrep etc and I am up and running.
I've probably spent less than 50 hours total over 20 years on my emacs configuration. But it wasn't all at once. And now I just copy the .emacs file between systems. Tweaking it is maybe minutes a year now. If I want to do something with, say, Go, I just download the appropriate mode. The longest time spent was when I had a few bespoke languages at work that had no text editor support in any editor. I wrote some minor modes to support them, that was probably 10 hours total with most of the time on the first minor mode, and the rest flowing quickly thanks to the prior experience.
EDIT: For comparison, I've probably spent 100x that (if not more) on Linux configurations.
I don't know about you, but my toolkit, which I'm perfecting, is programming language paradigms, design patterns, algorithms, programming language SDKs, popular libraries and frameworks, etc.
And there isn't enough time in the world to become as proficient as I'd like for those, let alone if I'd waste time to optimize tools to get 99.999% efficiency with them.
At some point your hammer is good enough and your saw is sharp enough.
> I don't know about you, but my toolkit, which I'm perfecting, is programming language paradigms, design patterns, algorithms, programming language SDKs, popular libraries and frameworks, etc.
Well that's great but none of that gets anything done. You need to be able to write programs effectively.
> At some point your hammer is good enough and your saw is sharp enough.
Yeah. I don't regularly invest many hours into emacs. You asked how many hours went into it. Over the past 15 years it's countless hours. Over the past year, not many at all.
> Well that's great but none of that gets anything done. You need to be able to write programs effectively.
:-)) Of course it does. Most of my time isn't spent in actually writing the programs. It's in reading and understanding what they do, how to best modify them, debugging issues, etc.
I'd guess I spend about 10% of my time, at most, actually editing characters.
Not the OP but yeah, it's definitely up there for me.
BUT the big difference is that the decades old portions of my .emacs are still very relevant and in use every day while basically all the work I've sunk into configuring some long forgotten GUI junk has rotted away long ago and has to be redone over and over again.
We all spend an enormous amount of time tinkering with things but unlike Emacs most of it is so ephemeral that it's forgotten the next day.
my setup is 200 line long. on a new machine I just scp it over. many years ago they dropped support for automatically decoding files with a 'Z' extension, so I had to change that sometime in the 90s.
total time invested over 40 years - less than 4 hours.