Re: default startup mode

[Kevin Rodgers <ihs_4664@yahoo.com>]

Baloff wrote:
 > I went looking for info about startup and found
 >
 > Initial Options
 > ===============
 >
 > ...
 >    Some initial options affect the loading of init files.  The normal
 > actions of Emacs are to first load `site-start.el' if it exists, then
 > your own init file `~/.emacs' if it exists, and finally `default.el' if
 > it exists; certain options prevent loading of some of these files or
 > substitute other files for them.
 >
 >
 > how do I find out if "in my case" all 3 files started up or any did
 > not.

If you look at the code in startup.el, you can see that user-init-file
is set to nil if ~/.emacs was not loaded, otherwise it should be the
full path to the file.  Emacs respects the inhibit-default-init file,
unless it it's non-nil the default library should have been loaded.
Similarly, unless site-run-file is nil the site-start library should
have been loaded.

However it is possible that any of those files was partially loaded,
then aborted due to errors.  I don't know if it's possible to detect
those cases after the fact, but if you're concerned you should start
emacs with the --debug-init option.

-- 
Kevin Rodgers