Question

A newbie question and probably very bingable (had to use that word once :-)), but as I gather thats both ok for SO : How can you get files to open automatically when starting emacs?

I guess it sth. like executing the find file command in your .emacs but the exact notation isn’t clear to me.

Answer 1

C-h b 

This opens the help showing the correspondence between key-bindings and elisp functions.
Look for

C-x C-f 

in it (you can do it by typing C-s C - x space C - f), you find find-file. Now, do

C-h f find-file

and it tells you, among other things, the syntax :

(find-file FILENAME &optional WILDCARDS)

So just try

(find-file "/path/to/your/file") 

in your .emacs