I'm loading code that I wrote, because I don't maintain my emacs
configuration as a single big pile of elisp used on every system (I grew up
in a very heterogenous environment at MIT). The code is safe to load
multiple times; I avoid doing so to avoid the overhead, and because in a
more complicated past there were include-loops to avoid. At some point in
the middle, I built myself a pair of functions enable-quiet/disable-quiet
to handle this sort of thing; it sounds like maybe I should dust that off
again. FWIW, I wonder if anyone here would recommend building it around
load-file or require, and why.

Thanks!
~Chad

On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 1:57 PM Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
wrote:

> > I long ago adopted the use of require in my .emacs file as a well-worn
> > shorthand for "load this unless it's already loaded". Is there an
> > alternative that I should be using instead?
>
> If what you want is "load this unless it's already loaded", then
> `require` is the answer.  But the code in ~/.emacs should not about
> about "loading" it should be about enabling/disabling: loading a file
> (other than the init file, that is) should never noticeably affect
> Emacs's behavior, so "loading" should be of no concern when writing your
> config file (unless you're concerned about pre-loading a package for
> performance reasons, maybe).
>
>
>         Stefan
>
>