[unhammer]

The reason the backup-directory in emacs is an association list instead of a simple string is that some people might want some backups in some dirs and other backups other places. More powerful → more complex.

Turn on line numbers everywhere by putting this in ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

    (global-linum-mode)

(Yeah, EmacsWiki is a mess, but that's not emacs' fault.)

[MetaCosm]

When I spent a few weeks learning Emacs -- I had to filter out EmacsWiki because it lied to me so many times. :(