Newbie Question: How to add to my load path?

I'm following the tutorial [here](https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/beginners-guide-to-emacs). It suggests I add lines to ~/.emacs.d/.emacs >;; You can change the path here >(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/") I created that file and then restarted emacs, but my load path didn't change. I'm using mac port.

Ok I'll answer myself. Evidently, one might need to expand the path: (add-to-list 'load-path (**expand-file-name** "~/.emacs.d/")) However, I don't know why various articles don't mention that. Maybe something changed since older articles were written?

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/") is working fine. Maybe this is not working for you only because of that: > I'm using mac port.

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> It suggests I add lines to ~/.emacs.d/.emacs It should also either be ~/.emacs.d/init.el or ~/.emacs. I don't think ~/.emacs.d/.emacs is a thing, unless something changed recently.

A small addition: depending on what are you doing you might like instead (use-package pkgname :load-path "~/.emacs.d/extrapkgs/pkgname" :ensure nil :config ;; ... anything there ) I mean in the case you manually add a package non in ELPA, MELPA, etc, something "manually installed" a/some .el with a `(provide 'pkgname)` somewhere.

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Assuming use-package is already installed, which it won't be for someone using stock Emacs rather than a distro.

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If you want to load a subdirectory in the emacs.d dir, I would recommend you to use ``` (expand-file-name "dir" user-emacs-directory) ``` This would find ~/.emacs.d/dir. By using user-emacs-directory it doesn't matter where the emacs.d is located (since it could also be under ~/.config).

Why do you want to add .emacs.d to your load path? There is no reason to do this. You would only add a path if you were manually installing sotware. Then you would add the path to that software, followed by something like (require 'diredx) in your init file.

Yes this is the conclusion I reached. Somehow I totally misread that tutorial, and I just now happen to be fixing up my mess lol. I'm putting my emacs init file in my dropbox/config/emacs/init.el and then creating a symlink to that at ~/.emacs.d/init.el

Well, true, but while I know there are reasons, I do not know, why `use-package` hasn't yet been, and will not be, accepted in Emacs upstream it's largely the most common way to easily configure Emacs allowing to wrap in a single cut&paste-able sexp pretty anything. `use-package` itself is trivial to setup so... Well... I've pass few Emacs config bankruptcy, most due to config that became unstable with unknown errors/unexpected behaviors and essentially all strategies I tried but use-package does not work. el-get at a certain point fail, borg the same, pure package.el fails with autoloads issues, etc... That's became my default goto and I'm curious why it's not accepted by some...