> I found that maintaining my .init.el in git helped me to learn enough elisp to be useful/dangerous. The snippets you gave of your init.el are really basic b

> I found that maintaining my .init.el in git helped me to learn enough elisp to be useful/dangerous. The snippets you gave of your init.el are really basic but I do agree with you: working on init.el (and using Git to revert SNAFUs) helped me learn enough elisp to be dangerous too. The elisp I write is certainly not idiomatic but it gets the job done. I have some functions I wrote more than a decade ago and they still "Just Work [TM]"!