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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.