Re: Customising .init.el for root user

[J. David Boyd]

Johnny <yggdrasil@gmx.co.uk> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Starting emacs as my normal user running a root terminal (via su), I want
> emacs to start with some specific parameters that does not apply when
> running as the normal user. Specifically, I want the color to be
> distinct so that it is obvious which emacs is the root session. 
>
> I understand that by default the users init file is used [1]. This
> never worked well for me, defaulting into basic settings, but after
> looking into it and replacing any "~" references with full paths, it
> works as intended.
> However, this gives /all/ the defaults in the user init file, such as
> the color-theme used. I already use the same init file for multiple
> (well, two anyhow) computers and use a check which machine I am on for
> some dedicated settings, e.g.
> ,----
> | (when (string= (system-name) "the other machine")
> |       ..run some customisations...
> |       )
> `----
> Is there any similar way to check whether the session was started with
> root privileges to set customisations? E.g. 
> ,---- 
> | (when (session-started-as-root)
> |         (load-theme 'wheatgrass)
> |         )
> `----
> with a 'session-started-as-root' function? Better methods??
>
> I found one way is to default to a root init file by defining an alias
> in the root .bashrc as
> ,----
> | alias emacs="emacs -u root"
> `----
> however it would be nice to have only one init file to keep track of as
> many tweaks are nice to have in all sessions.
>
> Any ideas / good practices?
>
> All the best 
>
> Johnny
>
>
> Footnotes: 
> [1]  (info "(emacs)Find Init")



How about something like this that I saw the basics of on stackoverflow?


(setq whoami-string
      (substring
       (shell-command-to-string "whoami")
      0 -1))



Then you could do

(when (string= (whoami-string) "root")
      ..run some customisations...
)


Dave