Chapter 10. Customizing Emacs

As you have probably noticed throughout this book, Emacs is very powerful and very flexible. You can take advantage of that power and flexibility to configure Emacs to match your work style and preferences. We'll look at several of the most common customization tasks and also look at a few resources for more in-depth coverage than we can provide here.

You can customize Emacs in three ways: using Custom, the interactive interface; using the Options menu, which is really a backdoor to Custom; and directly by adding lines of Lisp to your .emacs file. This chapter covers all three of these methods.

No matter what method you use, though, the .emacs startup file is modified. Custom modifies it for you when you save settings through that interface. The Options menu invokes Custom behind the scenes; when you choose Save Options, Custom again modifies .emacs. Throughout the book, we have been providing lines for you to add to .emacs directly so you could adjust Emacs to your preferences.

Before we get started, we should say that the very easiest way to customize Emacs is by selecting an option from the Options menu and choosing Save Options. This menu is designed to provide easy access to changing frequently used options. For example, you may not like the Toolbar and its icons, feeling that such graphical codswallop is beneath an Emacs user. You can hide the toolbar through the Show/Hide option on the Options menu. Choosing Save Options modifies .emacs so the toolbar is hidden every time you start Emacs. And if you miss the toolbar someday, you can get it back the very same way.

After describing customization methods, this chapter goes on to discuss several generic issues relating to customization, including how to change fonts and colors, modify your key bindings, set Emacs variables, find Lisp packages to load, start modes automatically based on file suffixes, and inhibit any global customization files that may be interfering with your own .emacs settings.