I’m quite fond of use-package and I’ve organized my personal Emacs setup around it for a while now. One thing that I don’t like very much is that by default almost I have to add :ensure t to almost every use-package block, as I want all external packages to be installed if they are not present. That’s quite handy when I’m setting up Emacs on a new computer.1 Think something like:

(use-package zenburn-theme
  :ensure t
  :config
  (load-theme 'zenburn t))

Not a big deal for a few packages, but kind of annoying if you have 50+ packages in your init.el. There’s a pretty simple solution to this problem, though. Just add the following bit of configuration to your Emacs setup:

(setq use-package-always-ensure t)

Now instead of specifying :ensure t you can specify :ensure nil for the packages you don’t want to install automatically. Note that for built-packages (e.g. dired) it doesn’t really matter if a package is using :ensure t or :ensure nil.2

Which approach do you prefer? Are you the type of person who ensures every package is installed when absent or not? Why do you prefer one approach over the other?

  1. I know that a lot of people object to this approach, as you’re not sure what versions of the packages you’d get as package.el is a bit primitive compared to something like Ruby’s Bundler or Node’s npm, but in practice I’ve rarely had issues with my approach and it has saved me a great deal of time. ↩

  2. package-installed-p will return t for those. ↩