Troubleshoot Denote in a pristine environment

Sometimes we get reports on bugs that may not be actually caused by some error in the Denote code base. To help gain insight into what the problem is, we need to be able to reproduce the issue in a minimum viable system. Below is one way to achieve this.

1. Find where your ‘denote.el’ file is stored on your filesystem.
2. Assuming you have already installed the package, one way to do this is to invoke ‘M-x find-library’ and search for denote. It will take you to the source file. There do ‘M-x eval-expression’, which will bring up a minibuffer prompt. At the prompt evaluate:

(kill-new (expand-file-name (buffer-file-name)))

1. The above will save the full file system path to your kill ring.
2. In a terminal emulator or an ‘M-x shell’ buffer execute:

emacs -Q

1. This will open a new instance of Emacs in a pristine environment. Only the default settings are loaded.
2. In the ‘*scratch*’ buffer of ‘emacs -Q’, add your configurations like the following and try to reproduce the issue:

(require 'denote "/full/path/to/what/you/got/denote.el")

;; Your configurations here

Then try to see if your problem still occurs. If it does, then the fault is with Denote. Otherwise there is something external to it that we need to account for. Whatever the case, this exercise helps us get a better sense of the specifics.