57. Customization

This chapter talks about various topics relevant to adapting the behavior of Emacs in ways we have anticipated. See Emacs Lisp: (elisp)Top section `Emacs Lisp' in The Emacs Lisp Reference Manual, for how to make more far-reaching and open-ended changes. See section X Options and Resources, for information on using X resources to customize Emacs.

Customization that you do within Emacs normally affects only the particular Emacs session that you do it in—it does not persist between sessions unless you save the customization in a file such as your init file (‘.emacs’) that will affect future sessions. (See section The Init File, ‘~/.emacs’.) When you tell the customization buffer to save customizations for future sessions, this actually works by editing ‘.emacs’ for you.

Another means of customization is the keyboard macro, which is a sequence of keystrokes to be replayed with a single command. See section Keyboard Macros, for full instruction how to record, manage, and replay sequences of keys.