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

The problem for me was the Initial Start Up Screen of emacs.

It can be deactivated by:

;; no startup msg  
(setq inhibit-startup-message t)

It seems that the default welcome screen of emacs (with the tutorial links) forces you to start in your $HOME path.

---

After that you can either cd or setq default-directory like so:

(setq default-directory "~/")

or

(cd "~/")