My Linux desktop stopped syncing my Emacs files yesterday. I noticed this in the morning, realized what the issue was, and didn’t get a chance to fix it until the evening. Two human errors caused the issue:

  1. I changed the Syncthing folders to be under ~/Sync/ instead of the home folder in my emacs settings
  2. I deleted the .emacs.d folder from my home folder

I fixed the path for the settings file but introduced a typo. I typed emacs_setting.org instead of emacs_settings.org. I only noticed the typo in the evening.

As usual with my singular/plural typos, they are invisible to me. I can read the l line 5 times and not see that S is missing. It’s the same with my writing, where I’d publish a post without noticing these typos until I run it through a grammar check. I need a strategy to counter that.

I’m not sure why I removed emacs.d from the Linux desktop. It was a hectic morning with Nat trying to find a clinic that would see him, among several other things. For some reason, restoring the folder from the trash didn’t work. It seems it got stuck restoring some files that weren’t there; I guess it was a file corruption issue.

The .emacs.d folder mostly contains the Emacs packages I use, so the solution was to re-download those. Here I learned an important tip: to repeat a command in Emacs (which is M-x or Alt+M), press M-n or M-p after M-x. This is similar to pressing the up or down arrow in the terminal window.

On Linux, it’s easy to run another instance of Emacs. I used one instance to download packages as I kept opening new instances to read error messages that told me which package was missing. Launch, see the error, go to the other instance, M-x install-package, launch a new instance, and repeat. Within 2 minutes, Emacs was functional again.

What’s left now is to see about the bookmarks file. I still keep it in the home folder under .emacs.d since my connections to my servers change depending on which computer I’m on. This is another thing I need to fix.