Emacs defaulting to emacs.d as a file No matter where I am or how I open emacs, I get this message: File exists: /home/{user}/.emacs.d/ I then have to `C-x C-f` to get to the file I was trying to edit. What is going on here, and how do I fix it? !enter image description here

You get this error if `~/.emacs.d` exists but is not a directory readable by your user. From the partial output of `ls -la ~/.emacs.d` you gave, it appears that you somehow managed to get a `.emacs.d` directory in your user's home directory that's owned by root and has no permission for your user.

You could try (as root)


chown -R user:yourgroup /home/user/.emacs.d


where `user` is your username and `yourgroup` is your user's primary group.