13.1 Guidelines for Creating Startup Files

When designing startup files, keep the user in mind. If you’re the only user on a machine, you don’t have much to worry about, because any errors affect only you and they’re easy enough to fix. However, if you’re creating startup files meant to be the defaults for all new users on a machine or network, or if you think that someone might copy your files for use on a different machine, this process becomes considerably more critical. If you make an error in a startup file and distribute it to 10 users, you might end up fixing this error 10 times.

Keep two essential goals in mind when creating startup files for other users:

Simplicity Keep the number of startup files small, and keep the files as short and simple as possible so that they’re easy to modify but hard to break. Each item in a startup file is just one more thing that can break.

Readability Use extensive comments in files so that the users get a good picture of what each part of a file does.