Re: how to get this file to work? (another newbie question)

["Rupert" <rswarbrick@googlemail.com>]

ocelot1970@gmail.com wrote:
> Everyone was so helpful for my last question!
>
> Here is another: I found a file keywiz.el, at this location:
> http://whome.phys.au.dk/~harder/
>
> What the file is is a game where the player tries to guess the right
> key-binding.
>
> What I want to know is just how to make it work. The instructions for
> the file say to press M-x and then keywiz. When I do that what happens
> is I get a '[no match]' error.
>
> The problem is, I don't know where to store this file to make this
> work. I tried my home folder, and also  the "play" folder within "usr."
> They don't work and this is probably a really basis question, but where
> do I put files like this I get from external sources?

Hi! I feel I should help - the other answers you got are correct, but
you might be looking for something a little more targeted.

When emacs loads, it reads through a load of .el files containing elisp
code. A large proportion of emacs is in fact written in elisp rather
than C, the core programming language. However, emacs needs to know
what files to read, which is controlled by two things:

- It maintains a list of directories in a variable called load-path. To
see this, probably it's easiest to run C-h v load-path (help,about
variable,load-path).
- There is a function called load, which finds a file in one of the
directories in load-path and then reads everything in it.
- Files loaded by emacs have lots of invocations of load, which then
load a sort of tree of dependent files.

The easiest thing for now is to add a "load" invocation in your .emacs
file and put the file you want to load in your site-lisp directory.
Eventually, things will get very slow unless you factor them out with
autoloading etc., but maybe that's for when you're a little more
confident with elisp in general.

Hope this is of some use,

Rupert