In working on the on-boarding for Scrim, I’ve recently had to consider the scenario of setting up a fresh install of GNU Emacs on macOS (as of this writing v30.1). A number of things struck me, particularly on the user experience (or lack thereof) for new users of Emacs, nearly all of whom will be unfamiliar to Emacs commands and keybindings.

1. There is no dedicated command to load the Emacs initialization file (in this case ~/.emacs, which has yet to be created).
2. Using the menu bar (File › Open File…) will open a macOS File Browser dialog window, but does not show hidden files (like .emacs) by default.
3. The customize-variable command only works on variables that have been loaded.

On point 1, it’s striking to me that this hasn’t been done already like… decades ago. New users won’t know a priori what the Emacs initialization file is (sidestepping the inside baseball of .emacs vs init.el) much less that such a file is not immediately created at the first launch of Emacs but the ~/.emacs.d/ directory is.

Further exacerbating this is point 2, where the menu bar action File › Open File… will open a native macOS file dialog instead of running find-file. However this dialog is not configured to show hidden files. When the dialog is raised, the user can use the macOS key-binding Command + Shift + . to show hidden files, but this is hardly a discoverable feature.

On point 3, while I’ve long been an advocate for using customize-variable, it fails for variables that are not autoloaded (in this case server-use-tcp). A partial work-around is to run the command describe-variable which should implicitly load the package containing a non-autoloaded variable in order to describe it (although I would not be surprised if there are cases where you really have to load the package via require). Once the variable is described, a link is provided to customize it. Arguably, such details should never be surfaced to a new user.

Going back the lack of a dedicated command to load the Emacs initialization file, here’s some Elisp that implements it. Note that the variable user-init-file is already set to ~/.emacs for a fresh install.

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(defun find-user-init-file ()
  "Edit `user-init-file'."
  (interactive)
  (find-file user-init-file))

For most experienced Emacs users, this command has little value but it's not meant for them. It's meant for new users and should be built-in. First impressions matter!

emacs