Hello,

When I overwrite a character in a file containing blank characters
at the end my lines, Emacs takes them away on save! What can I do to
prevent the loss of the blank characters?

Thank you,
Chris

ChristopherL aol.com> writes:

Disable whatever stuff you put into your .emacs file in order to get
this behavior.

It is a good rule never to put anything into .emacs that you have not
understood, regardless what figure of authority suggested that it would
be a good idea to have.

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 5:21 PM, David Kastrup gnu.org> wrote:

When I started my recent job this hit me when my cvs diffs were huge.
For me it was a ruby-on-rails help package that did it. Took me
forever to find it, but it's gone now!

Definitely good advice!

it was a dark and stormy night when ChristopherL said,

'delete-trailing-whitespace' function has the effect you describe; check if
it's being hooked into something like 'before-save-hook in your .emacs file

I'm using Windows XP and can't seem to find my .emacs file!

First, on windows filenames can't begin with a dot.

I went around trying to look for what in the Unix world is called a
home directory and discovered that it's in "Application Data" some
where.

I have many of these, but they contained nothing resembling a .emacs
file.

What to do.

Thanks,
Chris

On Sep 11, 8:09 am, ChristopherL aol.com> wrote:

I was unable to find "_emacs" on my PC.

Chris

Changing the subject line when you're changing the subject will help
more people see your question.

On 11 Sep 2008, ChristopherL wrote:

On modern Windows, they usually can. I used to use .emacs (and now
~/.emacs.d/init.el) without problems. You can also use _emacs instead
of .emacs.

From the Emacs manual (which came with Emacs, hit C-h r to get there):

,----[ ]
| The Windows equivalent of the `HOME' directory is the "user-specific
| application data directory". The actual location depends on your
| Windows version and system...

On 11 Sep 2008, ChristopherL wrote:

You have to make it, or customize something (see the Options menu, for
example), for you to have one.

On Sep 11, 8:37 am, Charles Sebold gmail.com> wrote:

I do not want to make the _emacs file itself. Please see my first
post.

Thanks,
Chris

On 11 Sep 2008, ChristopherL wrote:

Oh, your very first post. I didn't follow all the way back to the
beginning of the thread; sorry. You didn't quote anything, I got lost,
my fault.

If you don't have a .emacs (or _emacs) file, then that's not the
problem.

Are you using the EmacsW32 distribution of Emacs?

What about any directories called site-lisp? Anything there that might
match what Bernardo was talking about?

Failing those, you could try typing this into the scratch buffer and
hitting C-x C-e at the end of it, and posting the result:

(insert (format "\n\n%%S" before-save-hook))

That would tell us if something is hooking in there, then maybe we could
begin to track down how.