When you start Emacs, it reads the file ~/.sxemacs/init.el in the .sxemacs/ subdirectory of your home directory. You can use this file to initialize and customize Emacs to your liking. This file should contain lisp-code. You can customize your init.el file to create new menus, disable menus, change key bindings, enable a minor mode, etc. Any kind of customization affects only a particular Emacs job that you do them in. If you want to save your customizations `permanently' i.e. for future use also, you have to put it in your ‘init.el’ file. After you make changes to your init.el file and save it, the changes will be effective only after you start Emacs again i.e. for a new Emacs process. To try out some of the examples in this section, highlight that region and evaluate the region by giving the command M-x eval-region. You will be able to see the results of your customizations in that Emacs session only (see Lisp Eval).