Customizing exec-path and load-path

Emacs has two main list of paths it uses to find files, the load-path and the exec-path. The load-path is a list of directories that should be used to look for load files. The exec-path is a list of directories that should be used to look for binary executables, the equivalent of the shell variable $PATH (and is initialized from it).

The exec-path is the one that usually doesn't require any modification. If it is modified, it makes sense to do so by customizing the variable, which puts it in custom.el, which I've already recommended be local-only, and not checked into git.

The load-path controls what directories are searched for load, load-library, and require. The directories in load-path are used in order of their appearance in that variable. So if there's two entries in load-path, ("~/foo" "~/bar"), and they both have a file baz.el, a (require 'baz) will load the one in ~/foo. Most people add to the load-path with the elisp add-to-list command, which will put the new entry in the front of the list, which will mean anything in that directory will override everything else. This is useful for using a more recent version of a library that comes bundled with emacs.

By default, the load-path contains with the list of emacs directories that is part of the emacs standard set of elisp, such as (on my mac) "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/lisp/cedet", and many other similar directories. This variable used to frequently need customization, and I've long had something in my initialization that adds everything under ~/.emacs.d to my load-path:

;; We don't really want to specify every single directory...
(let ((default-directory "~/.emacs.d"))
  (add-to-list 'load-path default-directory)
  (normal-top-level-add-subdirs-to-load-path))

This is the only way I've found to recursive add things to the load-path. When I added this, I felt it was necessary to avoid having to specify directories for every package I downloaded. Some packages, like org, needed two directories to be put in the load-path. It was annoying. But this is a heavy-handed solution to the problem. It adds a whopping 110 entries to my load-path. That can't be good.

Furthermore, ELPA already handles adding things to the load-path. I'm going to get rid of it under the theory that ELPA is handling everything I currently care about, and anything else can be dealt with as a special case. However, there is one directory I'd like to be on my load-path that isn't right now, and that's the ~/.emacs.d/ directory itself. I'd like to be able to add other .elisp files in this directory as well. The following elisp accomplishes that:

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

Today's lesson is a simple one: Using ELPA largely obviates the need for adding directories to load-path. But if you do have special directories you'd like to add, then use add-to-list to add them.