How do I make Emacs start without so much fanfare?

Question

Every time I start Emacs I see a page of help text and a bunch of messages suggesting that I try the tutorial. How do I stop this from happening?

Answer 1

Put the following in your .emacs:

(setq inhibit-startup-message t)
(setq inhibit-startup-echo-area-message t)

Answer 2

Emacs has a couple of variables which inhibit these actions. If you edit your emacs control file (.emacs) and insert the following:

(setq inhibit-startup-echo-area-message t)
(setq inhibit-startup-message t)

that should solve your problem. They basically set the inhibit parameters to true to prevent the behavior you want to get rid of.

Answer 3

Put the following in your personal init file (ususally ~/.emacs.el):

(setq inhibit-startup-screen t)

You can also turn off the message "For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a." in the echo with the variable inhibit-startup-echo-area-message, but it is not enough to set it to t; you must set it to your username. See the documentation for inhibit-startup-echo-area-message.