 Recent versions of Emacs ("recent" in a 40-year-old program meaning roughly any version released since the mid-1990s) will also load ~/.emacs.el and ~/.emacs.d/init.el.Additionally, users may specify any file to load as a config file on the command line, or explicitly state that no config file is to be loaded.When the files are loaded, an interpreter component of the Emacs program reads and parses the functions and variables, storing them in memory.