Can I recover my .emacs?

Can I recover my .emacs?

[Fritz Wuehler]

Hi,

I lost my .emacs (and some other files) due to disk failure. I have my
.emacs.elc so thankfully I can continue my work.

Is there any way to recover the .emacs from the .emacs.elc? I tried saving
options in Emacs and it does get many but not all of the settings I had. I
had some loadpaths and other statements and I can't remember them all. And
I'm not any good with Emacs Lisp or any Lisp so I can't figure how to get
everything back the way it was.

Thanks if anyone can help.

Re: Can I recover my .emacs?

[Stefan Monnier]

> Is there any way to recover the .emacs from the .emacs.elc?

The two are "equivalent" in the sense that Emacs understands them just
as well, but maybe not humans.  So the comments your had in .emacs
aren't carried over in the .emacs.elc, but a lot of the rest is.

> I tried saving options in Emacs and it does get many but not all of
> the settings I had. I had some loadpaths and other statements and
> I can't remember them all. And I'm not any good with Emacs Lisp or any
> Lisp so I can't figure how to get everything back the way it was.

I recommend you open the .emacs.elc file in Emacs and look at it.
You'll probably see a lot of "garbage" (like \NNN chars), but you should
also see lots of variable names (all the variable names you had in
.emacs should appear in .emacs.elc and all the values as well as
most/all of the functions you called there).  So the main work will be
for you to try and figure out what value corresponds to which variable
and things like that.  If you have trouble understanding what you see,
post some samples here for people to decode it for you.

Note also that a lot of what's in the .emacs.elc can be placed in the
.emacs as well.


        Stefan

Re: Can I recover my .emacs?

[Nomen Nescio]

> The two are "equivalent" in the sense that Emacs understands them just
> as well, but maybe not humans.  So the comments your had in .emacs
> aren't carried over in the .emacs.elc, but a lot of the rest is.

I know but I wanted the source in case I need to change it. I got most of it
back but I don't know for sure. It seems to be working ok except for one
thing but I won't know until I know. It took me ages to create it in the
first place since i suck at lisp and emacs.

> I recommend you open the .emacs.elc file in Emacs and look at it.
> You'll probably see a lot of "garbage" (like \NNN chars), but you should
> also see lots of variable names (all the variable names you had in
> .emacs should appear in .emacs.elc and all the values as well as
> most/all of the functions you called there).  So the main work will be
> for you to try and figure out what value corresponds to which variable
> and things like that.  If you have trouble understanding what you see,
> post some samples here for people to decode it for you.

Thanks I did that and everything *looks* ok but I really don't know. One
thing that's wrong is my linum.el program I downloaded to put line numbers
on the left side works fine in X session but when I go into emacs -nw the
numbers don't have any space between them and the text and it didn't work
like that before I lost my .emacs and now after trying to make a new .emacs
from looking at my old .emacs.elc I can't see the difference. Or maybe the
line numbers didn't show up in emacs -nw mode at all. Have you any idea how
to fix it? 

> Note also that a lot of what's in the .emacs.elc can be placed in the
> .emacs as well.

That makes sense since my .emacs.elc was created from my .emacs. Thanks.

Re: Can I recover my .emacs?

[Nomen Nescio]

I was able to fix the linum problem with 

(setq linum-format "%d ")


thank you.

Re: Can I recover my .emacs?

[Kulin Remailer]

Thank you. Luckily I found an old copy of my .emacs on a CD. I haven't
changed it much for a few years.

Re: Can I recover my .emacs?

[Gary]

Fritz Wuehler wrote:

> I lost my .emacs (and some other files) due to disk failure. I have my
> .emacs.elc so thankfully I can continue my work.
>
> Is there any way to recover the .emacs

$ svn co .emacs.el

;)

I'm glad you found it in a backup somewhere, anyway.

-- 
Gary        Please do NOT send me 'courtesy' replies off-list.
GNU Emacs 23.2.1
emacsclient 23.2

Re: Can I recover my .emacs?

[Eric S Fraga]

Gary <help-gnu-emacs@garydjones.name> writes:

> Fritz Wuehler wrote:
>
>> I lost my .emacs (and some other files) due to disk failure. I have my
>> .emacs.elc so thankfully I can continue my work.
>>
>> Is there any way to recover the .emacs
>
> $ svn co .emacs.el
>
> ;)
>
> I'm glad you found it in a backup somewhere, anyway.

But he only recovered his compiled version.  For the OP, maybe check out 

http://www.mail-archive.com/help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org/msg00470.html

specifically referring to the disassemble function.

-- 
Eric S Fraga (GnuPG: 0xC89193D8FFFCF67D)

Re: Can I recover my .emacs?

[Gary]

Eric S Fraga wrote:
> Gary writes:

>> I'm glad you found it in a backup somewhere, anyway.
>
> But he only recovered his compiled version.

"Thank you. Luckily I found an old copy of my .emacs on a CD. I haven't
changed it much for a few years." (s/he used a different final remailer
for that message).

-- 
Gary        Please do NOT send me 'courtesy' replies off-list.
GNU Emacs 23.2.1
emacsclient 23.2

Re: Can I recover my .emacs?

[Stefan Monnier]

> One thing that's wrong is my linum.el program I downloaded to put line
> numbers on the left side works fine in X session but when I go into
> emacs -nw the numbers don't have any space between them and the text
> and it didn't work like that before I lost my .emacs and now after
> trying to make a new .emacs from looking at my old .emacs.elc I can't
> see the difference. Or maybe the line numbers didn't show up in
> emacs -nw mode at all. Have you any idea how to fix it?

Emacs comes bundled with linum.el, so maybe the fix is to get rid of the
version you downloaded?


        Stefan

Re: Can I recover my .emacs?

[Dave U. Random]

> "Thank you. Luckily I found an old copy of my .emacs on a CD. I haven't
> changed it much for a few years." (s/he used a different final remailer
> for that message).

Yes, that's correct. I found the original source and all's well.

Thank to the person who gave me the link to the decompiler thread. I will
look at that later. It sounds like what I wanted but no longer need
urgently.

Thanks guys :-)