How can I reload .emacs after changing it?

Question

How can I get Emacs to reload all my definitions that I have updated in .emacs without restarting Emacs?

Answer 1

You can usually just re-evaluate the changed region. Mark the region of ~/.emacs that you've changed, and then use M-x eval-region RET. This is often safer than re-evaluating the entire file since it's easy to write a .emacs file that doesn't work quite right after being loaded twice.