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

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

;; inhibit-startup-echo-area-message MUST be set to a hardcoded 
;; string of your login name 
(setq inhibit-startup-echo-area-message "USERNAME")
(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.