Using two emacs (Cocoa emacs and Aquamacs) at the same time

Question

I happen to have two emacs on my Mac because of clojure setup.

The problem is that Cocoa emacs and Aquamacs uses the same ~/.emacs.d, but the ELPA of Cocoa emacs and that of Aquamacs are not compatible so that some files are overwritten and not usable for both of them.

Is there any way to tell Aquamacs not to use ~/.emacs.d for ELPA? I mean, can I change the default ELPA directory other than ~/.emacs.d ?

I use Aquamacs Starter Kt, but it seems that the ~/.emacs directory is used in init.el.

(unless (file-directory-p "~/.emacs.d/elpa")
        (make-directory "~/.emacs.d/elpa" t))

Answer 1

I am not familiar with ELPA, but if aquamacs and carbon emacs are using different copies of package.el, you could try changing the definition of package-user-dir in one of them. In general I have found that using two different emacses on one machine is a recipe for baldness.