178 lines of crap accumulated over about 20 years. I think I only use an indent variable setting, one key binding, and a handful of language autoloads.
One of the things I started doing lately is not moving any dotfiles automatically when I get a new machine. After 3 days of moaning, I go and dig out just the stuff that I have noticed I am missing. (I do the same for firefox plugins and so on). It has definitely helped with the historical crud.
Yeah it really forces you to look into those dotfiles you haven't read in two years, or that hack script you banged out in 5 minutes, and give them all a bit of thought. That "Just get it into my PATH so I can try it out!" impulse has definitely gotten the better of me a number of times.
ditto. I recall spending many late nights optimizing my dot emacs file and it accumulated tons of cruft. Now it is very abbreviated, wait no that was a dream - Just looked at it, still tons of junk that I don't use. Most of what I use is buffer saving (desktop), hot-keys, turn off scrollbars, and mapping odd file extension to modes. Guess I should go through and clean house again.
delete-delete-delete save-buffer Much better.