Comments on 2019-11-04 Starting Emacs with custom configuration directory

Hello,
perhaps I did not understand what you are trying to do but why do not use .emacs.d as a link whose destination you could change according the init process you need ?
Regards
Michel

– Anonymous 2019-11-06 07:50 UTC


That’s a nice idea, but what about a situation when you want to have two Emacs instances running at the same time: one “workhorse”, normal one and another, with a custom configuration directory?

Also, an environment variable has another advantage: you don’t have to remember to set it back to the normal setting.

– Marcin Borkowski 2019-11-06 17:21 UTC


Hi Marcin,

With a bit of scripting, it’s easy to set the user-emacs-directory at runtime, before any packages are loaded, which avoids having to set HOME. I used the example of the MELPA repo’s Makefile to make this script, which makes it easy to do:

https://github.com/alphapapa/alpha-org/blob/master/emacs-sandbox.sh

alphapapa 2019-11-30 20:24 UTC


Wow, thanks! I’ll definitely look into this!

– Marcin Borkowski 2019-12-01 21:58 UTC