Subject: bug#8220: 24.0.50; (On Windows XP) "c:\_emacs" isn't found during startup

From: Juanma Barranquero <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2011 03:35:59 +0100

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 21:40, Dani Moncayo <[email-masked]> wrote:

> According to [1], Emacs should be able to find (and execute) the init file
> created in #2, i.e., the statup screen should NOT be shown. But in fact
> it is, i.e., Emacs could not find the file.

The wording is a bit ambiguous, because it only says

  [...] the Windows port of Emacs supports an alternative name `_emacs'
  as a fallback, if such a file exists in the home directory, whereas
  `.emacs' does not.

and the paragraphs before that one aren't 100% specific about whether
in this case "the home directory" means the directory pointed by the
HOME environment variable, or all searched ones. I'd say the former,
but the comment

  Whatever the final place is, Emacs sets the value of the `HOME'
  environment variable to point to it,

makes this less than clear-cut, and in fact, the order in which
[._]emacs is searched (I'm ignoring ~/.emacs.d/init.el) is

  %HOME%\.emacs
  %HOME%\_emacs
  C:\.emacs
  %APPDATA%\.emacs
  %APPDATA%\_emacs

so there *is* an inconsistency. That said, _emacs is an obsolete name
(on Windows, not MS-DOS), so it's not worth changing this IMO.

    Juanma