CODEWITHSUNDEEP
emacsstartup
MadPhysicist
MadPhysicist

Reputation: 5831

Load Emacs File and Create Window Arrangement Upon Load

I am wondering if and how it is possible to do the following things in Emacs:

  1. Load a certain file whenever Emacs is opened. In particular, it is a .ORG file located in user's home directory.

  2. Create a certain arrangement of windows within that Emacs frame. The frame is open as a GUI, if that matters. For example, it could be two vertical windows with one of them in-turn split into three smaller windows.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 170

Answers (1)

D. Gillis
D. Gillis

Reputation: 670

This is a somewhat inelegant solution, but you could just have your init file run the exact same commands that you would use to manually achieve your setup (use C-h f to help look up any keyboard shortcuts whose command names you don't know).

To open a file, you can use the command find-file (the command run by C-x f). You can use split-window-right and split-window-below (C-x 2 and C-x 3, respectively) to split your window. (It should be noted that there is a more general split-window command, but I'm avoiding it here since I am just replicating what Emacs would do if we set everything up manually.) The command other-window (C-x o) changes windows within a frame - note that this function requires an input argument (the number of windows to go over) when not used interactively.

You could obtain a setup similar to what you were asking about (org file on left, 3 horizontal splits on right, all separate empty buffers) with the following:

(find-file "ABSOLUTE-PATH-TO-FILE.org")
(split-window-right)
(other-window 1)
(split-window-below)
(switch-to-buffer "Fresh-Buffer-1")
(other-window 1)
(split-window-below)
(switch-to-buffer "Fresh-Buffer-2")
(other-window 1)
(switch-to-buffer "Fresh-Buffer-3")
(balance-windows)
(other-window 1)

You may also want to use the functions set-frame-height and/or set-frame-width to give yourself an appropriately sized frame (example usage (set-frame-width (selected-frame) 120)). Additionally, I'd recommend putting this at the end of your init file so that the modes of the buffers you are creating can't interfere with any of your other init functions.

Upvotes: 2

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