Shortcut to open a specific file in Emacs

Question

I want to be able to use a keyboard shortcut to edit my .emacs file instead of typing Ctrl-XCtrl-F.emacsEnter every time (here's an analogous question regarding Vim). There's probably an obvious way of doing this, but I can't find the Emacs Lisp command to open a file. I'd think it would be something beginning with "open" or "file" but typing M-x and those terms doesn't seem to bring up anything relevant. I tried

(global-set-key (kbd "<f6>") (find-file "~/.emacs"))

but that doesn't work.

Answer 1

According to the documentation

(global-set-key KEY COMMAND)

Give KEY a global binding as COMMAND. COMMAND is the command definition to use; usually it is a symbol naming an interactively-callable function.

So you have to use an interactively-callable function:

(global-set-key (kbd "<f6>") (lambda() (interactive)(find-file "~/.emacs")))

Personally I prefer to use emacs registers to store files which I use often. I would store '~/.emacs' in a register:

(set-register ?e (cons 'file "~/.emacs"))

and open it with C-x r j e

Answer 2

Bookmarking is an excellent solution for this purpose that is packaged with emacs. That way if it's ok for you to see the list of files that you want to open, you can easily browse them. There is also BookmarkPlus which offers variety of options.

M-x list-bookmarks