Starting E from the command line
It's quite easy to start E17 from the command line. Just fire up your favorite text editor (like Vim, Emacs, Nano, whatever) and edit the file /home/<username>/.xinitrc. (notice the dot in the name of the file). Then write “enlightenment_start” or even better, full path to the enlightenment_start executable. It depends on your system, but we will give an example with the default settings. By default, when compiled Enlightenment is installed in /usr/local/. So your .xinitrc file should look like:
/usr/local/bin/enlightenment_start
However, if installed elsewhere, the path can be found with:
which enlightenment
This searches the locations defined by the environment variable PATH. To echo your path, run $PATH. If enlightenment_start is installed in a nonstandard location and not in $PATH, use your favorite file-search tool (ie slocate -i enlightenment_start, after creating a slocate database) to search for the binary. Once found, it might be a good idea to add the location to the path variable, to make calling e17 commands more convenient. For example, if enlightenment_start is located in /opt/e17/bin, it can be appended to the current instance of bash using
export PATH=/opt/e17/bin:$PATH
If you've a very good reason it's also possible to let E place its home directory somewhere else that ~/.e. This may be helpful while development if you're in fear to destroy your working desktop.
export E_HOME=$PATH/.e_experiment
