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16 Your .emacs File

“You don’t have to like Emacs to like it”—this seemingly paradoxical statement is the secret of GNU Emacs. The plain, out-of-the-box Emacs is a generic tool. Most people who use it customize it to suit themselves.

GNU Emacs is mostly written in Emacs Lisp; this means that by writing expressions in Emacs Lisp you can change or extend Emacs.

• Emacs’s Default Configuration
• Site-wide Initialization Files
• Specifying Variables using defcustom
• Beginning a .emacs File
• Text and Auto Fill Mode
• Mail Aliases
• Indent Tabs Mode
• Some Key Bindings
• Keymaps
• Loading Files
• Autoloading
• A Simple Extension: line-to-top-of-window
• X11 Colors
• Miscellaneous Settings for a .emacs File
• A Modified Mode Line