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I installed the flx-ido package from MELPA, and added the following two lines of code to my .emacs file.

(require 'flx-ido) (flx-ido-mode 1)

Emacs startup fails with the following error:

File error: Cannot open load file, no such file or directory, flx-ido

Yet, after I see the error, I can type M-x flx-ido-mode and the flx-ido-mode operations start to work fine. So the flx-ido files must have been loaded.

I don't understand how this behavior is possible. Does anyone have some ideas that I might try to solve the problem?

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Emacs initializes the package system after loading .emacs, not before. (See Startup Summary and Packaging Basisc.) I think the reason is to allow you to configure (or even disable) the package loading process from .emacs.

You can add flx-ido-mode to after-init-hook. Or you can follow the officious advice which is to call package-initialize from your init file. After that point, you can load packages. flx-ido-mode should be autoloaded, there's no need to load the package explicitly.

(package-initialize)
…
(flx-ido-mode 1)
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  • Gilles, thank you so much for explaining the order of package-initialize. Sure enough, it was located AFTER flx-ido-mode in the load sequence. I have moved the package-initialize (and melpa paths, etc) earlier in my load sequence, and now everything works fine. Excellent answer! – Kevin May 12 '16 at 14:34

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