For several months, I've been converting a few of my dotfiles into OrgMode files and using tangling to generate the config file and the same file generates HTML documentation. The point was to always publish them – and I finally have. See the HTML version or the github project. Note that the Org files are rendered in Github because Github is smart like that – it treats them the same way that it does with Markdown.

I stole, er, borrowed the system from Toon Claes. And, yes, I have had to edit a Makefile to do this.

I found this documentation on my files to be more useful than I thought. Besides just the documentation of "why is this here" but it also helps in "why am I adding this?". Because the ultimate source is an Org file, I can do a better job documenting why I did something in the file then in the comments of the file. I can (and really should) link my config file to my OrgMode-powered knowledge base about what each thing does. That doesn't give the Internet reader much help, though. But is this documentation more for me for them? That I'm uncertain about.

So why call this "literate"? It's not my word – it's Donald Knuth's. Basically it's keeping the documentation and the code together. Wikipedia has a good overview on it.

I already repeated a lot of links from the Readme of this project. Hopefully these files are helpful to someone.