Disabling Prompts in Emacs

I find prompts in Emacs very annoying and in-my-face, so I have gone out of my way to remove or minimize any interaction I have with them.

Let’s start out by getting rid of the “yes or no” prompt and replace it with “y or n”:

(fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p)

Next up is the annoying confirmation if a file or buffer does not exist when you use C-x C-f or C-x b.

(setq confirm-nonexistent-file-or-buffer nil)

If you use ido-mode I recommend disabling the prompt that asks you if you want to create a new buffer if you enter a non-existent buffer in C-x b. You can replace always with never which does the opposite: disables new buffer creation in ido’s switch buffer routine. Setting it to never is an exceptionally bad idea as creating buffers on-the-fly is a very useful thing to do if you want a quick throw-away buffer.

(setq ido-create-new-buffer 'always)

You can also rid yourself of the splash screen and the echo area message:

(setq inhibit-startup-message t
      inhibit-startup-echo-area-message t)

And finally, the recently-added prompt in Emacs 23.2 that asks you if you want to kill a buffer with a live process attached to it:

(setq kill-buffer-query-functions
  (remq 'process-kill-buffer-query-function
         kill-buffer-query-functions))