Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic(a)iskon.hr&gt; writes: I just tried in GNU Emacs 20.3.1 and it doesn't seem to default to nil there, it was set to ("/usr/local/lib/info/" "/usr/local/info/" "/usr/info/") after starting emacs with `emacs -q'. A slightly weird behaviour of XEmacs with respect to Info-directory-list is that it does use the value of environment variable INFOPATH, but appends it's contents to the end of Info-directory-list. Therefore, info-files in the .../lib/xemacs/xemacs-packages/info/ directory shadow info-files of the same names in directories from INFOPATH. Is this intentional? I didn't like that, because newer info-files installed somewhere in my HOME directory were shadowed by the older ones which came with XEmacs. I currently circumvent this by appending the contents of INFOPATH once more to the beginning of Info-directory-list in my .emacs: (if (getenv "INFOPATH") (let ((my-additional-info-directories (split-string (getenv "INFOPATH") ":"))) (if (string-match "XEmacs" emacs-version) (setq Info-directory-list (append my-additional-info-directories Info-directory-list)) ;; GNU Emacs (setq Info-default-directory-list (append my-additional-info-directories Info-default-directory-list))))) -- Mike Fabian <mike.fabian(a)gmx.de&gt; <mike(a)nozomi.rhein-neckar.de&gt;