My copy of Emacs version 19.23 has 392 options that you can set with
the edit-options command. These `options' are no more than
variables such as we have seen earlier and defined using
defvar.
Emacs determines whether a variable is intended to be easily settable
by looking at the first character in its documentation string; if the
first character is an asterisk, `*', the variable is a
user-settable option.
(See section Initializing a Variable with defvar.)
The edit-options command lists all the variables in Emacs that
the people who wrote the Emacs Lisp libraries think ought to be
readily settable. It provides an easy-to-use interface for resetting
these variables.
On the other hand, options set using edit-options are set only
for the duration of your editing session. The new values are not
saved between sessions. Each time Emacs starts, it reads the original
defvar value in its source code. To carry a changed setting
from one session to the next, you need to use a setq expression
within a `.emacs' file or other file that you load every time you
start a session.
For me, the major use of the edit-options command is to suggest
variables I might want to set in my `.emacs' file. I urge you to
look through the list.
See section `Editing Variable Values' in The GNU Emacs Manual, for more information.
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