Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: setq instead of custom-set-variables

[TC]

On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 07:56, address@hidden wrote:
> I customised Emacs into writing its customisation file somewhere
> else, and load that file from ~/.emacs.  That way, customize has
> its own playground, but doesn't touch ~/.emacs.  Doing that made
> me feel much safer (after an early customize version once erased
> half of ~/.emacs).

That sounds good, and much better than having .emacs get squished.  

But I still share Sacha's liking for modularisation.  I like to be able
to hand a fellow worker a more or less self contained blob of lisp if
they ask me "how do I do that thing you do?"  The problem with the
customize-group thing is that it seems to want to shove all
customization into one place - .emacs or, in your case, another file.

That said, I still use it to help me understand *what* customizations
are available, and to give me examples of lisp syntax. Not being a lisp
programmer, I'm prone to throwing random sets of parens around lists and
strings until I get something to work.  The output of customize-group at
least gives me some examples.  (That said, even there I needed help to
translate c-g's output to a setq form :-) I *really* should just learn
lisp...)

tc