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Location of emacs config

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After a fresh emacs installation, I always spent a few minutes why emacs wouldn't pick up my config from ~/.config/emacs/init.el.

I prefer to keep user configuration inside the standard XDG_CONFIG_HOME, which typically points to ~/.config/. Emacs also supports XDG_CONFIG_HOME, but as the last entry in its list of preferred locations, where it looks for init.el.

The list goes in the order: ~/.emacs.el, ~/.emacs, or ~/.emacs.d/init.el, and then ~/.config/emacs/init.el.

Emacs manual also says the following:

Note also that if neither the XDG location nor ~/.emacs.d exist, then Emacs will create ~/.emacs.d (and therefore use it during subsequent invocations).

Now, the XDG location, i.e., ~/.config/emacs/ wouldn't typically exist in a system by default. So emacs would always end up defaulting to ~/.emacs.d/. In order to make it read the XDG location, I always had to manually delete ~/.emacs.d/ first.

So much hassle on every new system or after a fresh emacs installation. So I now just stow my emacs dotfiles to ~/.emacs.d.

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