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Asked: 2026-05-15T13:09:18+00:00

I want to be able to make the changes to my .emacs file without

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I want to be able to make the changes to my .emacs file without having to reload Emacs.

I found three questions which sort of answer what I am asking (you can find them here, here and here), but the problem is that the change I have just made is to a toggle, and as the comments to two of the answers (a1, a2) to those questions explain, the solutions given there (such as M-x reload-file or M-x eval-buffer) don’t apply to toggles.

I imagine there is a way of toggling the variable again with a command, but if there is a way to reload the whole .emacs and have the all the toggles re-evaluated without having to specify them, I would prefer.

In any case, I would also appreciate if someone told me how to toggle the value of a variable so that if I just changed one toggle I can do it with a command rather than re-start Emacs just for that (I am new to Emacs). I don’t know how useful this information is, but the change I applied was the following (which I got from this answer to another question):

(setq skeleton-pair t)  
(setq skeleton-pair-on-word t)  
(global-set-key (kbd "[") 'skeleton-pair-insert-maybe)  
(global-set-key (kbd "(") 'skeleton-pair-insert-maybe)  
(global-set-key (kbd "{") 'skeleton-pair-insert-maybe)   
(global-set-key (kbd "<") 'skeleton-pair-insert-maybe)

Edit: I included the above in .emacs and reloaded Emacs, so that the changes took effect. Then I commented all of it out and tried M-x load-file. This doesn’t work. The suggestion below (C-x C-e by PP works if I am using it to evaluate the toggle first time, but not when I want to undo it). I would like something that would evaluate the commenting out, if such thing exists…

Thanks 🙂

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I included the above in .emacs and reloaded Emacs, so that the changes took effect. Then I commented all of it out and tried M-x load-file. This doesn’t work.

    It doesn’t work because when you started Emacs you set a few variables and keys. Reloading .emacs with these commands commented out does not undo them. You’ll have to overwrite the settings manually to undo them with

    (setq variable-name nil)

    and

    M-x global-unset-key enter followed by the key you want to unset.

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