Emacs 24.3 cannot find package (key-chord) during startup

Question

I have Emacs 24.3 running on Raspbian. I'm kind of enjoying running Emacs on Linux - seems to be a beter fit than on Windows. I installed the very useful key-chord package using the usual package functions. This results in a directory in ~\\.emacs.d\\elpa\\key-chord-20080915.2156 .

Then I inserted the following in my init file:

(require 'key-chord)
(key-chord-mode 1)

This kicks out the following error:

File error: Cannot open load file, key-chord

However, if I hit Mx I can find all the key-chord functions and run key-chord mode and associated bits and pieces. What am I doing wrong...?

Answer 1

Emacs loads the installed packages after evaluating your init file. If you need your packages in your init file, you can use (package-initialize) to manually initialize the packages.

The reason you see some or all key-chord functions is that these functions are "autoloaded". You don't need a require to use these functions; in fact, the package is automatically loaded when you use such a function.