1

When I double-click on a file and open it with emacs-23, emacs ignores its first input. It comes up with a blank white screen window being the empty "*scratch*" buffer, instead of the expected file to edit. And it says "File exists: /home/myusername/.emacs.d/" in the message bar.

It also does this if I invoke 

emacs existing_filename

from the terminal.

Doesn't seem to be a permissions problem, these are all my files, with -rw-r--r-- on them. It's not even loading the file as a Buffer in the background. However, Open File then works on the file, so there's nothing fundamentally blocking it.

How do I configure emacs so it comes up with its first argument file for editing?

New install, emacs 45.0 metapackage, emacs23 .4+1-4ubuntu2, 32-bit Ubuntu 13.10.

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

I just fixed this by deleting ~/.emacs.d. Apparently if the first time you use emacs on a new machine you are running with sudo, the initialization folder gets created with root permissions so it can't be opened by your non-root user account, and that throws off things like opening the file you asked for.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .