Hi,

I know that dropping .emacs altogether might be radical. I was trying to tease in order to start a discussion.

However, my point is that currently, if you want to have a separate custom file, all you have do is to set and load the custom-file in your init.el

I have this at the end of my init-el (as I think many have)

;;
;; Customisations
;;
(setq custom-file (locate-user-emacs-file "custom.el"))
(load custom-file 'noerror)

What I propose is to agree on a default value for custom-file that could potentially be changed by the user in init.el or .emacs

and do the (load custom-file 'noerror) after loading the init file as a default behaviour for Emacs

Having a separate customisation file by default can ease debugging, resetting customisations, bookkeeping, etc. etc.

/PA

On Mon, 3 Jan 2022 at 15:47, Robert Pluim <rpluim@gmail.com> wrote:

>>>>> On Mon, 3 Jan 2022 07:13:22 +0100, Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez <paaguti@gmail.com> said:

>> Message: 1
>> Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2022 20:03:13 +0800
>> From: Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>
>> To: xenodasein--- via "Emacs development discussions."
Pedro> <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
>> Cc: xenodasein@tutanota.de
>> Subject: Re: Propose to add setup-wizard.el to ELPA
>> Message-ID: <87v8z2jqf2.fsf@yahoo.com>

Pedro> If the default custom file has always been the init file, maybe the
Pedro> idea could be to create the custom file separately in a default
Pedro> location instead and keep init and custom files separated. I don't
Pedro> remember when I started using <emacs_dir>/custom.el as my custom
Pedro> file. Maybe something like that could be made the new default custom
Pedro> file and <emacs_dir>/init.el the default init file instead of ~/.emacs

The latter is already kind of the case: if <emacs_dir>/init.el exists
and ~/.emacs doesnʼt, init.el is used. If youʼre proposing swapping
that so that init.el is used even if .emacs exists, then thatʼs never
going to fly, but I for one would have no objections to customize
saving stuff to init.el if the user has no config at all. But Iʼd let
someone else write and test the code :-)

Robert
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