User emacs has no home directory

Question

I am an emacs newbie running emacs doom on Linux. I am learning how to use traditional emacs in my free time and have an emacs config file that I want to test out.

I launch my traditional emacs by running:

emacs -u <path to my handmade emacs file> &

It starts up, doesn't load my configuration settings and gives me the error message:

Error (initialization): User emacs has no home directory

How can I load my custom files without destroying the existing doom configuration?

Answer 1

You should look at emacs --help.

The switch to use here should be "-l" instead.

Additionally, you also need "-q" so that Doom's init.el won't be loaded.