Init.m considerations and good practices

Question

As I never found (or perhaps I never search for it enough) a good article about how to manage the init.m files, I ended up developing my own \"standard\", but I wonder how bad I

Answer 1

My Kernel/init.m looks like this:

AppendTo[$Path, Environment["MMA_LIB"]]
Needs["WRUtil`"]

WRUtil contains all of my little utilities and performs other initialization that takes into account the platform and Mathematica version. MMA_LIB is an environment variable that points to a directory full of Mathematica packages. That directory is kept under version control and can be shared by multiple Mathematica instances. I like to keep init.m short so that moving into a new Mathematica installation is as simple as typing two lines that I have committed to memory -- it is surprising how often I seem to have to do this.