emacs cannot load file highlight-current-line file-error

Question

Emacs version : GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.1.7601) of 2013-03-18 on MARVIN

Copied the code for highlight-current-line from here. Created a text-file in .emacs.d, pasted the entire text on page in the text-file and saved it as highlight-current-line.el in the same folder.

Added the following lines to .emacs :

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/")
(require 'highlight-current-line)   
(global-hl-line-mode t)
(set-face-background 'hl-line "white")
(setq highlight-current-line-globally t)

Restarted emacs and got this message :

Warning (initialization): An error occurred while loading `c:/Users/Owner/AppData/Roaming/.emacs':

File error: Cannot open load file, highlight-current-line

To ensure normal operation, you should investigate and remove the cause of the error in your initialization file. Start Emacs with the `--debug-init' option to view a complete error backtrace.

Started emacs in debug mode and got this error in backtrace:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (file-error "Cannot open load file" "highlight-current-line") require(highlight-current-line)
eval-buffer(# nil "c:/Users/Owner/AppData/Roaming/.emacs" nil t) ; Reading at buffer position 1209
load-with-code-conversion("c:/Users/Owner/AppData/Roaming/.emacs" "c:/Users/Owner/AppData/Roaming/.emacs" t t) load("~/.emacs" t t)

My system : Windows 7 32bit

Chris Chris · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-06T22:14:11

Once upon a time it made sense to copy snippets from EmacsWiki into your configuration, but between new high-quality built-in features and third-party package repositories like MELPA that is rarely the case anymore.

Your version of Emacs should be new enough to include hl-line.el, which contains a some useful functions:

To make the cursor even more visible, you can use HL Line mode, a minor mode that highlights the line containing point. Use M-x hl-line-mode to enable or disable it in the current buffer. M-x global-hl-line-mode enables or disables the same mode globally.

To enable highlighting of the current line globally, simply add

(global-hl-line-mode)

to your init file.

Edit: Upon re-reading your question, I see that you are already using hl-line.el, though this is interspersed with things relating to highlight-current-line.el. I recommend removing the following lines from your configuration:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/") ;; Unless you need it for another reason
(require 'highlight-current-line)   
(setq highlight-current-line-globally t)

You can additionally remove the t from you call to (global-hl-line-mode), since this function turns the feature on when called from lisp.

emacs cannot load file highlight-current-line file-error

2 Answers