Re: .emacs startup file

["Gary Hennigan" <glhenni@sandia.gov>]

"Dale L . Morris" <dlm@well.com> writes:
> My apologies if I'm not posting this to the right list, I've already
> tried the gnu emacs help newsgroup, with no success. I'm thinking it's
> a specific debian configuration problem..
> 
> I'm having trouble getting emacs to startup with parameters specified
> in .emacs. Specifically, I want it to start in text mode, with word
> wrap turned on. I have the following lines in my .emacs file:
> :;;Emacs configuration file
> 
> (setq initial-major-mode 'text-mode)
> (add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill)
> 
> (custom-set-variables
>  '(make-backup-files nil))
> (custom-set-faces)
> 
> Should do what it takes right? but, it's not working. Any suggestions?

Dale,

What exactly IS happening? Does the scratch buffer still come up in
"Lisp Interaction" mode? Is it in auto-fill minor mode?

I assume you're using GNU Emacs and not XEmacs? Certainly I've used a
slight variation of what you have above in XEmacs and it works
perfectly. Here's mine:

(setq initial-major-mode 'text-mode)
(setq text-mode-hook
      '(lambda ()
	 (turn-on-auto-fill)))

My hook's a bit different but there's nothing syntactically wrong with
yours. Mine is just a left over from a time before the "add-hook"
function was available.

I'm not sure if GNU Emacs has it, but in XEmacs you can look at any
recent messages via the "C-h l" (or view-lossage) command. Anything
there to help you find the problem?

Gary