It's a really good question...

I started on an HP700, it created the .emacs file and I was always confused about what I had written myself and what emacs was doing. Then I started on an Sun Workstation and there they had installed XEmacs. It was there where i stumbled across the .emacs.d/custom.el file and I found the idea cool. I investigated a bit and adopted loading the custom file. <mea culpa>I never investigated how customisation where added to .emacs </mea culpa>

I don't know how common my way of working is but I try out things using Custom and then, if I adopt them, they become a part of my permanent config.

Maybe Custom wlll need to check and eventually remove customisations from .emacs if custom-file is defined... would that be feasible? IT isn't something you do 10 times a second, right?

Best, /PA

On Tue, 4 Jan 2022 at 16:17, Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> wrote:

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> What would that mean for users that currently save their
> customizations through Custom in .emacs? Would it mean that the next
> time they save customizations, they will be written to another file
> and removed from .emacs?

Good question.

I imagine that we would just leave things in place for such users. It
would be slightly jarring to have things moved around behind the users
back.

But maybe it would be a good idea to provide a migration command to
conveniently move things.

Or we could prompt the user about moving it. To avoid being annoying,
we could record the answer, and not prompt again if the question was
already asked.