57.2 Easy Customization Interface

Emacs has many settings which have values that you can specify in order to customize various commands. Many are documented in this manual. Most settings are user options—that is to say, Lisp variables (see Variables)—so their names appear in the Variable Index (see Variable Index). The other settings are faces and their attributes (see Faces).

You can browse interactively through settings and change them using M-x customize. This command creates a customization buffer, which offers commands to navigate through a logically organized structure of the Emacs settings; you can also use it to edit and set their values, and to save settings permanently in your ~/.emacs file (see Init File).

The appearance of the example buffers in this section is typically different under a window system, since faces are then used to indicate buttons and editable fields.

• Groups: How settings are classified in a structure.
• Browsing: Browsing and searching for settings.
• Changing a Variable: How to edit an option's value and set the option.
• Saving Customizations: Specifying the file for saving customizations.
• Face Customization: How to edit the attributes of a face.
• Specific Customization: Making a customization buffer for specific variables, faces, or groups.
• Custom Themes: How to define collections of customized options that can be loaded and unloaded together.