I would like to create my own startup.el, and it seems that loadup.el is what causes startup to do its thing -- i.e., (load "startup"). I see that an option for starting Emacs is -nl or --no-loadup; however, neither of those have any affect on OSX. Is loadup.el perhaps hard-coded into the executable such that a startup option to the contrary has no effect?
I have tried:
/absolute/path/to/Emacs -nl
and
/absolute/path/to/Emacs --no-loadup
I am using OSX, and have a very recent version of Emacs Trunk built from the master branch.