Info Catalog emacs: Terminal Init emacs: Init File emacs: Init Non-ASCII

emacs: Find Init

 
 51.4.4 How Emacs Finds Your Init File
 -------------------------------------
 
 Normally Emacs uses the environment variable ‘HOME’ (HOME General
 Variables.) to find ‘.emacs’; that’s what ‘~’ means in a file name.  If
 ‘.emacs’ is not found inside ‘~/’ (nor ‘.emacs.el’), Emacs looks for
 ‘~/.emacs.d/init.el’ (which, like ‘~/.emacs.el’, can be byte-compiled).
 
    However, if you run Emacs from a shell started by ‘su’, Emacs tries
 to find your own ‘.emacs’, not that of the user you are currently
 pretending to be.  The idea is that you should get your own editor
 customizations even if you are running as the super user.
 
    More precisely, Emacs first determines which user’s init file to use.
 It gets your user name from the environment variables ‘LOGNAME’ and
 ‘USER’; if neither of those exists, it uses effective user-ID.  If that
 user name matches the real user-ID, then Emacs uses ‘HOME’; otherwise,
 it looks up the home directory corresponding to that user name in the
 system’s data base of users.
 

Info Catalog emacs: Terminal Init emacs: Init File emacs: Init Non-ASCII