Re: Default emacs init file location confusion

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

On January 8, 2020 7:33:20 AM GMT+02:00, "Elias Mårtenson" <lokedhs@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Given the large number of people who seem to have run into the same
> issue,
> most of which are users who have years if not decades of Emacs
> experience
> shows that something should be done before the release of 27.
> 
> Having thought about it some more, I came up with this proposal: Emacs
> could check if both directories exist, and if so, provide an
> interactive
> choice for the user to pick which one to use. If the user don't want
> to
> have to answer this question every time Emacs starts up, they can
> delete
> one of the directories.

Here's my proposal:

  . If neither the old nor the new (XDG compliant) directory exists, default to ~/.emacs.d (it will be created, as we did before)
  . If both the old and the new directory exist, use ~/.emacs.d
  . Otherwise use the XDG compliant directory

This will make the new XDG compliant directory an opt-in feature: users who want that will have to create ~/.config/emacs,  move there the contents of ~/.emacs.d, and then delete the latter, in order to have Emacs use the XDG convention.

I don't like to pop up questions at startup, brcause users don't expect such questions, and because people who would like to keep their existing ~/.emacs.d and yet use ~/.config for other programs will need to respond to this prompt every time they start Emacs.