How do you easily disable the default init file for a filetype?

[ftonneau]

Quoting from my response to:

Equivalent of vim ftplugin?

Hi all! vim’s ftplugin capability allows you to stick <filetype>.vim files in .vim/ftplugin and are called whenever a buffer’s filetype matches (e.g. .vim/ftplugin/sql.vim is loaded when a buffer’s filetype is set to sql). I know kakoune supports “doing stuff” only on certain filetypes (e.g. How to Run Terminal Command on the Active File on Write?) but do all these statements go into a single kakrc? To be explicit, I’m asking one and a half questions: is it idiomatic to have a single kakrc, if…

As explained in the FILES section of man kak, on startup Kakoune reads all of the *.kak files/scripts present in your autoload directory (or any subdirectory of it). If you have no custom autoload directory, then Kakoune falls back on the default, system-wise autoload directory, which you can probably find as /usr/share/kak/autoload on your system.

Judging from what you say, it seems you have no custom autoload directory, which would explain why the systemwise mail.kak file is loaded by default.

One way to get rid of this behavior is to create an autoload subdirectory in your HOME/.config/kak directory, and then to create a filetype folder in this custom autoload subdirectory. You can then populate this custom filetype folder with symlinks to all of the systemwise files that you want to use unmodified. For any file that you do want to modify (e.g., mail.kak), do not include a symlink to it; rather, copy the actual file to filetype, then modify this local copy as you wish.

I doubt you’ll find this solution “easy”, but it is recommended in the man page, as it gives you full control over what is vs. is not sourced when starting Kakoune.