How to open files automatically when starting emacs?

Question

A newbie question and probably very bingable (had to use that word once :-)), but as I gather thats both ok for SO : How can you get files to open automatically when st

Answer 1

Are you thinking of having it re-open files you've looked at before? The desktop package remembers files and re-opens them when you restart. Depending on your emacs version, you enable by simply adding this to your .emacs (for 22.1+ versions):

 (desktop-save-mode 1)

And after that, it's pretty much automatic. Whatever files you had open before will be re-opened (provided you start from the same directory, b/c that's where the desktop configuration file is saved) - unless you add a change that forces a single desktop for all sessions.

There are bunches of variants of that functionality, which are listed in the session management page.