Emacs Initialization File

The most configuration you need to do is in the Emacs init file.

According to the GNU Emacs Manual, “Emacs looks for your init file using the filenames ~/.emacs, ~/.emacs.el, or ~/.emacs.d/init.el”. The last one is the recommended alternative because for that one creates a directory for Emacs in the user home and all the Emacs extensions are then also put into that directory. A sample of the ~/.emacs.d directory can be found on GitHub. If you set up your Emacs initialization properly you will be able to start the Lisp environment from inside your Emacs.

Alternatively, you can specify the filename of the init file you'd like Emacs to use as a command line argument in your bash. That is exactly what the roslisp_repl script is doing: it start Emacs with an alternative initialization file. So, if you prefer starting your Lisp environment using roslisp_repl, the configuration file you should edit is /opt/ros/your-distro/share/roslisp_repl/repl-config.el.