Re: Moving from 24.5 to the most recent in git, 27.0.50

[Barry Fishman]

On 2018-08-02 16:26:01 -04, jonetsu wrote:
> But there are two problems so far.  I have put the color-theme.el file
> in its site-lisp directory in :
>
> /usr/local/share/emacs/27.0.50/site-lisp/
>
> And do not know if I should move my current .emacs from the home
> ~/.emacs directory - I think not because when emacs 27 starts for a
> very brief moment the colors I'm used to flashes by and then it's all
> white.  Moreover, trying to use Tools -> Color Themes yields a totally
> empty white screen where the cursor cannot move, eg. truly empty.

You don't give the name of your distribution.  Debian Squeeze seems to
have 24.5 as its default, although makes 25.1 optional.  Both seem to
support Emacs themes in the same way as emacs-27.0.50.

I know at some point I transitioned from using a custom color-theme.el
file and moved to the Emacs built in themes setup.

The default themes are in the $prefix/share/emacs/27.0.50/etc/themes
directory, and selected from the menu via:
    Options -> Customize Emacs -> Custom Themes

If you want your own theme you should probably start with an existing
file in that directory and create one with you own tailoring, such as
"own-theme.el".

You can put your file in the theme directory, or if you want to use it
for multiple version of Emacs, from your own directory, with .emacs file
code like:

(push (expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/themes/") custom-theme-load-path)
(load-theme 'own-theme :no-confirm t)
(enable-theme 'own-theme)

Or just do it within customize, by setting 'custom-theme-directory' to
your theme directory and selecting it from the check list.

> How to fix that and have my original .emacs file take effect ?  And,
> should I continue with 27, or should I perhaps go with what would be a
> stable version eg. one of the current 26 series ?

I've been using Emacs trunk for some time.  I usually rebuild it every
couple of weeks and use the results of 'make check' to determine if I
should switch to it.  I configure it with something like:

  configure --prefix=/usr/local/pkgs/emacs-trunk

and later create soft links under /usr/local/bin/ and
/usr/local/share/man/man1/ to make it active.  In this way I can simply
move it out of the way when I install a new version and not have any
issues with leaving behind files from the previous install, scattered
around /usr/local/*, other than broken links that are easy to find and
remove.

If you don't wish to put in the effort of following the development
closely, you are probably best to just install the latest release.

--
Barry Fishman