Perhaps one of the most incredible aspects of Emacs is its capability of self documentation. You can literally discover and learn about any aspect of Emacs inside of Emacs itself. While not perfect, I believe M-x customize embodies that same spirit of discoverability when dealing with simple configuration changes.

Unfortunately, customize changes your init.el by default, turning your main configuration file into a disorganized mess rather quickly. Luckily, as with most things in Emacs, this behavior is configurable:

(setq custom-file "~/.emacs.d/custom.el")
(load custom-file 'missing-ok)

This bit of code first tells customize to store any customizations in ~/.emacs.d/custom.el and then loads the file. The 'missing-ok symbol is simply a descriptive non-nil value. It directs load to not complain if custom-file doesn’t exist. Placing this at the top of your ~/.emacs.d/init.el ensures your customizations will always be kept in custom.el.

https://github.com/artlogic/.emacs.d/commit/d87c91c65f26d782353dfab193c8590b19179f35