Re: Can I recover my .emacs?

[Stefan Monnier]

> Is there any way to recover the .emacs from the .emacs.elc?

The two are "equivalent" in the sense that Emacs understands them just
as well, but maybe not humans.  So the comments your had in .emacs
aren't carried over in the .emacs.elc, but a lot of the rest is.

> I tried saving options in Emacs and it does get many but not all of
> the settings I had. I had some loadpaths and other statements and
> I can't remember them all. And I'm not any good with Emacs Lisp or any
> Lisp so I can't figure how to get everything back the way it was.

I recommend you open the .emacs.elc file in Emacs and look at it.
You'll probably see a lot of "garbage" (like \NNN chars), but you should
also see lots of variable names (all the variable names you had in
.emacs should appear in .emacs.elc and all the values as well as
most/all of the functions you called there).  So the main work will be
for you to try and figure out what value corresponds to which variable
and things like that.  If you have trouble understanding what you see,
post some samples here for people to decode it for you.

Note also that a lot of what's in the .emacs.elc can be placed in the
.emacs as well.


        Stefan