How to set default working directory in Emacs - troubleshooting

Question

I know this has been posted many times, but the solutions are not working for me. I\'ve tried the following solutions from this post (Changing the default folder in Emacs):<

Answer 1

From what you write, it sounds like you are running windows. Have you verified that emacs is actually finding and loading .emacs from the directory C:\Users\Lucas? If it is, that means Windows understands your home directory is C:\Users\Lucas. You can check that by looking at the environment variable HOME. In emacs, try:

(getenv "HOME")

In your .emacs file, you could then put:

(setq default-directory "~/")