Re: Change .emacs directory in Ubuntu

[Joost Kremers <joostkremers@yahoo.com>]

kishore.r.318@gmail.com wrote:
>
> Currently my .emacs file is found in /home So is my .emacs.d folder
> and I suppose some other files like diary, notes etc will be created
> in this folder.

I assume that when you write /home, you actually mean your home
directory, also abbreviated with a tilde in Unix/Linux, right? /home is
an actual directory in a Linux file system, it's *not* your home
directory. (That is a subdirectory of /home, like /home/joost in my
case.)

> I find this really messy and I want all my emacs related
> files(including the .emacs) and folders in a single folder, say
> /home/EmacsHome

Well, normally Emacs should keep everything in ~/.emacs.d, including its
init file, unless it finds a file ~/.emacs. So I'd suggest moving
~/.emacs to ~/.emacs.d/init.el (that's what the file should be called),
then most everything should be kept there.

Of course, Emacs is more than an editor, its basically a Lisp VM, and
programs running in Emacs may decide to put their config files outside
of ~/.emacs.d (at least some do, IME). It's usually possible to
configure them to put their config files in ~/.emacs.d as well, though,
you'll just have to find out how.

> How do I do that in Ubuntu 12.04? In windows I did this by setting an
> environment variable HOME to the path of EmacsHome. But, in Ubuntu,
> the HOME variable will be used for several other programs as well, so
> I dont want to change that.

Looking through the Emacs manual there doesn't seem to be a way to do
that. What you *could* do, is set HOME to a different value just for
Emacs, but I wouldn't recommend that, because it could mess up external
programs that Emacs calls.


-- 
Joost Kremers                                   joostkremers@fastmail.fm
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht
EN:SiS(9)