Newbie Question: How to add to my load path?
reddit / emacs

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TooflessSnek · 2022-02-07 05:44

I'm following the tutorial
[here](https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/beginners-guide-to-
emacs). It suggests I add lines to ~/.emacs.d/.emacs

>;; You can change the path here
>(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/")

I created that file and then restarted emacs, but my load path didn't
change. I'm using mac port.

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TooflessSnek · 2022-02-07 05:58

Ok I'll answer myself.  Evidently, one might need to expand the path:

(add-to-list 'load-path (**expand-file-name** "~/.emacs.d/"))

However, I don't know why various articles don't mention that.  Maybe
something changed since older articles were written?

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SlowValue · 2022-02-07 08:52

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/")

is working fine.

Maybe this is not working for you only because of that:

> I'm using mac port.

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[deleted] · 2022-02-07 09:59

[deleted]

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TheBB · 2022-02-07 10:03

> It suggests I add lines to ~/.emacs.d/.emacs

It should also either be ~/.emacs.d/init.el or ~/.emacs. I don't think
~/.emacs.d/.emacs is a thing, unless something changed recently.

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ftrx · 2022-02-07 10:09

A small addition: depending on what are you doing you might like
instead

    (use-package pkgname
    :load-path "~/.emacs.d/extrapkgs/pkgname"
    :ensure nil
    :config
    ;; ... anything there
    )

I mean in the case you manually add a package non in ELPA, MELPA, etc,
something "manually installed" a/some .el with a `(provide 'pkgname)`
somewhere.

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[deleted] · 2022-02-07 10:22

[deleted]

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flexibeast · 2022-02-07 10:23

Assuming use-package is already installed, which it won't be for
someone using stock Emacs rather than a distro.

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[deleted] · 2022-02-07 10:24

[deleted]

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four0nine · 2022-02-07 14:26

If you want to load a subdirectory in the emacs.d dir, I would
recommend you to use

```
(expand-file-name "dir" user-emacs-directory)
```
This would find ~/.emacs.d/dir.
By using user-emacs-directory it doesn't matter where the emacs.d is
located (since it could also be under ~/.config).

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[deleted] · 2022-02-07 17:04

Why do you want to add .emacs.d to your load path? There is no reason
to do this. You would only add a path if you were manually installing
sotware. Then you would add the path to that software, followed by
something like (require 'diredx) in your init file.

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TooflessSnek · 2022-02-07 23:09

Yes this is the conclusion I reached. Somehow I totally misread that
tutorial, and I just now happen to be fixing up my mess lol.  I'm
putting my emacs init file in my dropbox/config/emacs/init.el and
then creating a symlink to that at ~/.emacs.d/init.el

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ftrx · 2022-02-08 13:10

Well, true, but while I know there are reasons, I do not know, why
`use-package` hasn't yet been, and will not be, accepted in Emacs
upstream it's largely the most common way to easily configure Emacs
allowing to wrap in a single cut&paste-able sexp pretty anything.
`use-package` itself is trivial to setup so...

Well... I've pass few Emacs config bankruptcy, most due to config that
became unstable with unknown errors/unexpected behaviors and
essentially all strategies I tried but use-package does not work. el-
get at a certain point fail, borg the same, pure package.el fails with
autoloads issues, etc... That's became my default goto and I'm curious
why it's not accepted by some...