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

Put the following in your personal init file (ususally ~/.emacs.el):

(setq inhibit-startup-message t)

(Or (setq inhibit-startup-screen t) in with older Emacs versions.)

You can also turn off the message "For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a." in the echo with the variable inhibit-startup-echo-area-message, but it is not enough to set it to t; you must set it to your username. See the documentation for inhibit-startup-echo-area-message.