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Monday, January 11, 2010

Debugging your init file for Newbies

If you're starting to learn Emacs, you'd probably would have grabbed bits and pieces of elisp code from different places on the web and plugged into your .emacs.  Mostly, it would have worked without any issues.  But as you keep using Emacs, you tend to forget all that you initially copied and keep adding new ones.

Soon, you have a lot of cruft in your .emacs and one day when you upgrade,make some change or add more elisp code, Emacs errors out on the .emacs code.

How do you fix it?

Well, it's unlikely that you'd have learnt to program in elisp by now but here's a good suggestion by Tim on the gnu.emacs.help newsgroup on how to debug it.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Rather than Google Groups links, why not use Gmane links ?

Google requires you to sign in to see the post and seems unnecessary for a public archive.

sivaram said...

weird! Does Google require you to sign in to read the groups post? I generally am not logged into Google at all when search or post links.

And I could do that in the future, as I use Gnus and the Gmane news server to read the posts. I thought it would be easier for people to search for the thread in Google.

sivaram