3

I am having trouble telling Emacs to load and evaluate an additional .el file which only contains some lisp code to load an org file

;; keep my personal settings not in the .emacs file
;; http://www.mygooglest.com/fni/dot-emacs.html
;; load it if it exists
(let ((personal-settings "~/personal.el"))
 (when (file-exists-p personal-settings)
   (load-file personal-settings))
)

If I call the file personal.el interactively via load-file Emacs executes the code (which just contains some lisp code to load an org file).

If I run M-X eval-buffer on the .emacs manually, the personal.el is executed properly, the org file is loaded.

What do I need to do to make Emacs load the file if it exists during emacs start?

EDIT

I rephrased the question and ran additional tests: (expand-file-name) did not have any effect but more weird is that Emacs does not evaluate a hard-coded (find-file "~/Dropbox/orgmode.org") even if it is the only line in my .emacs file. And again it works if I load this file manually and run m-x eval-buffer on it.

Drew
  • 75,699
  • 9
  • 109
  • 225
Uwe Ziegenhagen
  • 176
  • 3
  • 8
  • 2
    You're missing a question: your description basically says that if you load the file it works. Great, so what's the problem? – Stefan Aug 05 '17 at 22:56
  • What @Stefan said. Also, you might want to consider putting the file in a directory in your `load-path` and using `require` or `load-library`. – Drew Aug 06 '17 at 01:04
  • Does it work if you call (expand-file-name) before calling load-file? The ~ may need to be substituted. – InHarmsWay Aug 06 '17 at 04:33

1 Answers1

2

Mystery solved, it's a bit embarrassing: Emacs is doing fine but just showing the startup-screen as first buffer. Disabling it via (setq inhibit-startup-screen t)? does the trick...

Uwe Ziegenhagen
  • 176
  • 3
  • 8