I love emacs, I really do. It is really hard to share customizations with git for emacs in my experience. Right now I'm using prelude + some customizations. I can keep my fork of the prelude repo on my account, and add stuff to /personal . But other than cherry-picks, which would probably get difficult, I really don't know how to contribute back to prelude. pulling the latest version of prelude (or any other preset emacs customization set) requires me to restart emacs, which I normally only do once every other week or so. How do others handle this?