Re: Configuration files vs customization

[Tassilo Horn]

Dr Rainer Woitok <rainer.woitok@gmail.com> writes:

Hi Rainer,

> in the course of my transition from XEmacs to Emacs I meanwhile have
> reached the point of getting Vm running under Emacs.  But my first at-
> tempt utterly failed.  After some experimenting and checking variable
> values with "C-h v" I came to the conclusion that at least in some
> vari- ables' descriptions the remark "You can customize this variable"
> really meant "You HAVE TO customize this variable".

As Drew already pointed out, defcustom has several properties like :set
which might do stuff when the variable is customized and which are not
executed when it's only set with `setq'.  In very recent Emacsen (29+),
there's `setopt' which has the syntax of `setq' but behaves more like
`custom-set-variables'.

Bye,
Tassilo