from the desk of stinkpot

fixing emacs “cannot open load file” errors

January 3rd, 2007 by Lawrence David

it’s been a bit of a hassle getting emacs to read python files in python-mode.  in spite of downloading a python-mode file and putting it in my boot path, emacs still refused to enter python mode.  i kept getting the error message:

file-error “Cannot open load file” “python-mode”

turns out the problem was that i needed to specify emacs’ own load-path, by inserting the following line into my .emacs file:

(add-to-list ‘load-path “/Users/user_name/bin/”)

where  “/Users/user_name/bin/” is the directory i’ve placed my python-mode.el file into.

Posted in Emacs | 9 Comments »

if that was helpful ...

check out the other tips and tricks i've compiled on these pages. you might learn something else interesting!

9 Responses to “fixing emacs “cannot open load file” errors”

1. on 20 Apr 2007 at 6:59 am   Isabelle

   Thanks for the tip .. I was using wrong syntax for my path (C:\Users\…)

2. on 02 Jul 2007 at 1:24 pm   Krishnan

   Great! It worked for me for setting up the matlab mode.

3. on 23 Aug 2007 at 10:09 am   Rob Stewart

   Here’s a shell script I use:

   #!/bin/bash

   usage()
   {
   echo >&2 “$0 [-d directory [directory ...]] file.el [file.el ...]

   where is added to the load-path during compilation.”
   [ $# -eq 0 ] || echo >&2 ”
   $@”
   exit 1
   }

   while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
   case $1 in
   –help|-h|-’?') usage;;
   -d)
   [ $# -gt 1 ] || usage “Missing directory argument for -d”
   DIRECTORIES=”$DIRECTORIES $2″; shift
   ;;
   *) break;;
   esac
   shift
   done

   for directory in $DIRECTORIES; do
   LOAD_PATH=”$LOAD_PATH –directory=$directory”
   done

   for file in “$@”; do
   cd $(dirname $file)
   emacs -batch -no-init-file $LOAD_PATH -f batch-byte-compile $file
   done

4. on 28 Nov 2010 at 1:44 pm   Tom

   Thanks for the tip, I thought (require ‘program) was all I needed.

5. on 12 Oct 2011 at 9:35 am   punya

   Thanks for the valuable information.
   It helped me to set matlab mode.

6. on 16 Jul 2012 at 3:52 am   Filippo

   Great!

7. on 25 Jul 2012 at 11:54 am   duan5

   Thanks for the tip.

   It helped me fix a “cannot open load file: gnuplot” error for emacs org-mode Org-babel-gnuplot on MacOS.

   I had to add to my .emacs :

   (add-to-list ‘load-path “/opt/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/”)

   despite this path is the native installation path of
   Emacs on MacOSX.
   Emacs version 24.1.0, org-mode version 7.8.11

8. on 05 Sep 2013 at 3:40 am   Nils

   THANKS!

   This worked for me. What not worked was symlinks from .emacs.d/ to the directory containing the *.el files.

9. on 23 Sep 2014 at 7:36 pm   Ahmed

   I thought I have to say thank you for sharing I have been trying to do so and with no success it was just frustrating .
   thanks again